This chapter draws on ethnomusicological, cognitive and neuroscientific evidence in proposing that music is a communicative medium with features that are optimised for the management of situations of social uncertainty, and that music and language constitute complementary components of the human communicative toolkit. It presents a theory of meaning in music, and compares its implications with those of a recent theory of prosodic features of language.
Language and music constitute two parallel domains of human achievement which share fundamental cognitive and neural resources. Such is the hypothesis of Patel's book Music, Language, and the Brain, a scientific tour de force which examines the intersection between these two domains. As the Ester J. Burnham Senior Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, and a pioneer in the field of music and neuroscience, Patel brings considerable expertise to this complex interdisciplinary enterprise.Monumental in scope and in proportion, the value of this volume as an academic resource is immense. A vast amount of research is packed into its 513 pages and Patel demonstrates perspicacity and clarity of expression throughout. The book divides into seven chapters, each of which focuses on a single topic. The first, a brief introduction, is followed by a discussion of sound elements, rhythm, melody, syntax, meaning, and evolution in subsequent chapters. Each starts with a comprehensive review of music and language relevant to its topic before focusing on some aspect of the shared resource hypothesis. Although each chapter stands independently, the book as a whole could benefit from more dialogue between chapters: It is possible that music and language are not carved at the joints as neatly as this book suggests.Whilst the notion of overlap in cognitive processing is somewhat controversiallanguage and music have traditionally been thought to occupy left and right brain hemispheres respectively -Patel is anything but polemic in this discourse. He carefully considers both sides of the argument and is cautious not to overstate his case. Patel also extends the discussion of music and language well beyond the estab lished areas of syntax and meaning into less familiar areas such as pragmatics, phonology, and timbre. What follows is a brief review and critique of selected points from the six main chapters.The second chapter, 'Sound Elements', explores the acoustic, psychoacoustic, and cognitive processes which shape the auditory representation of music and language. The principal argument is that, whilst pitch and timbre are the central auditory features of music and language respectively, they are both processed categorically, and it is on this basis that the two domains overlap. For instance, music which is organized around a tonal system will employ a fixed set of pitches, and pitches which deviate in frequency from this set are heard as less exemplary, not unique, members. Similarly with language, phonemes which deviate from a prototype within a given language are heard as less exemplary members. Furthermore, evidence suggests that sound categories in music and language are acquired, rather
We review the paper by Andrew Clay McGraw, noting that it represents an interesting and valuable contribution to the study of music in cognition in its informed exploration of non-western musical perceptions. We raise a number of concerns about the methods used, and make suggestions as to how the issues that were empirically addressed in the paper might have been tackled in ways that would have enhanced the interpretability of its findings. KEYWORDS: experimental method, non-western music, collaborative research THIS fascinating paper takes as its starting point the idea that time in music and time in general, may be bound by culture in our conceptions, in particular, by processes of cross-domain mapping of the types that have been postulated as operational by ethnomusicologists, music theorists, and music psychologists. It explores by means of three experiments Becker's hypothesis that Balinese gamelan music reflects and perhaps embodies emic conceptions of time. The first uses an experimental paradigm known as the Implicit Association Test to investigate, by means of response times, the strengths of associations between musical and/or dance terms, music and/or instrument terms, and time and/or position terms, among Balinese musicians. It found evidence for a slight tendency for time-in music to be 'implicitly iconic' of time-in-general, though noted that the results showed high variability. The second experiment explored Balinese musicians' abilities to identify objective durations while listening to gamelan music; it found that subjects tended to rate examples as somewhat shorter than they actually were, a finding that contrasts with the results of a limited study of American musicians unfamiliar with gamelan who judged examples as rather longer than their actual durations. A final experiment investigates Balinese musicians' judgments concerning tempo transformations (rallentandi), finding that these listeners' preferences were equally for patterns of tempo change that previous literature suggested should be regarded as complex or 'unnatural.' These findings are discussed in the light of measurements of Balinese gamelan rallentandi that illustrate the complex, 'terraced' nature of closural tempo change that appears to predominate in this music.We must say at the outset that this is precisely the type of research that requires to be done; it takes empirical methods that have been shown to have value in elucidating the dynamics of mind in western laboratory contexts and employs (and adapts) these to explore 'cognition in the wild' in a non-western cultural context. It poses questions about relationships between emic and etic conceptions of time and music, and about the real-time experience of temporal structures in music among Balinese musicians, from what appears to be a background of real understanding of, and engagement with, the musical culture that is being explored. The provisional nature of the results, and many of the limitations of the experimental design employed, are acknowledged. The respo...
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