Previous studies suggest that musical training in children can positively affect various aspects of development. However, it remains unknown as to how early in development musical experience can have an effect, the nature of any such effects, and whether different types of music experience affect development differently. We found that random assignment to 6 months of active participatory musical experience beginning at 6 months of age accelerates acquisition of culture-specific knowledge of Western tonality in comparison to a similar amount of passive exposure to music. Furthermore, infants assigned to the active musical experience showed superior development of prelinguistic communicative gestures and social behaviour compared to infants assigned to the passive musical experience. These results indicate that (1) infants can engage in meaningful musical training when appropriate pedagogical approaches are used, (2) active musical participation in infancy enhances culture-specific musical acquisition, and (3) active musical participation in infancy impacts social and communication development.
Musical enculturation is a complex, multifaceted process that includes the development of perceptual processing specialized for the pitch and rhythmic structures of the musical system in the culture, understanding of esthetic and expressive norms, and learning the pragmatic uses of music in different social situations. Here, we summarize the results of a study in which 6-month-old Western infants were randomly assigned to 6 months of either an active participatory music class or a class in which they experienced music passively while playing. Active music participation resulted in earlier enculturation to Western tonal pitch structure, larger and/or earlier brain responses to musical tones, and a more positive social trajectory. Furthermore, the data suggest that early exposure to cultural norms of musical expression leads to early preferences for those norms. We conclude that musical enculturation begins in infancy and that active participatory music making in a positive social setting accelerates enculturation.
In a series of studies we have shown that movement (or vestibular stimulation) that is synchronized to every second or every third beat of a metrically ambiguous rhythm pattern biases people to perceive the meter as a march or as a waltz, respectively. Riggle (this volume) claims that we postulate an "innate", "specialized brain unit" for beat perception that is "directly" influenced by vestibular input. In fact, to the contrary, we argue that experience likely plays a large role in the development of rhythmic auditory-movement interactions, and that rhythmic processing in the brain is widely distributed and includes subcortical and cortical areas involved in sound processing and movement. Further, we argue that vestibular and auditory information are integrated at various subcortical and cortical levels along with input from other sensory modalities, and it is not clear which levels are most important for rhythm processing or, indeed, what a "direct" influence of vestibular input would mean. Finally, we argue that vestibular input to sound location mechanisms may be involved, but likely cannot explain the influence of vestibular input on the perception of auditory rhythm. This remains an empirical question for future research. KEYWORDS: rhythm, meter, vestibular, experience-dependent, multisensory, sound location IN his paper "A simpler explanation for vestibular influence on beat perception: No specialized unit needed", Riggle (this volume) misinterprets our papers (Phillips-Silver & Trainor, 2005, 2007Trainor et al., 2009) on movement-auditory interactions, and then presents evidence that he claims contradicts our findings. However, nothing in his paper actually argues against any of our findings. Because questions related to the mechanisms of auditory-vestibular interaction -and their phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins -are of fundamental importance in understanding both auditory perception and musical behaviour, in this reply we will engage in a constructive discussion of the critical question concerning whether auditory-vestibular interactions for rhythm are explained by auditory-vestibular interactions for locating sounds in space. But first it is necessary to set the record straight with respect to our experimental findings and our interpretation of the results.In the series of studies cited above, we have shown that when played a metrically ambiguous auditory rhythm (i.e., one with no physical accents), both adults and infants can be biased to perceive it as a march (with perceived accents every second beat) or as a waltz (with perceived accents every third beat) by engaging them in rhythmic movement synchronized to every second or every third beat of the ambiguous auditory rhythm, respectively. Furthermore, we have shown that stimulation of the vestibular nerve in such a way as to give rise to the sensation of head movement synchronized to every second or to every third beat of the metrically ambiguous rhythm (in the absence of actual movement) also biases metrical interpretation for a marc...
Unrau interrogates notions of “perfect” and “relative” pitch. She establishes which of these two processing methods is more useful across different listening conditions, why relative pitch seems to “win out” for most people as their primary method of processing music, and how the two processes could possibly interact or affect each other.
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