Do you hear what I hear? Perceived narrative constitutes a semantic dimension for music

McAuley, J. Devin; Wong, Patrick C. M.; Mamidipaka, Anusha; Phillips, Natalie A.; Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104712

Cited by 25 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Future research could explore whether this extends to music-induced imagination, by exploring whether thematic analysis identifies similarities in the themes within different participants’ imagined journeys when listening to the same musical pieces. However, the same study 61 shows that between, rather than within, cultural contexts, agreement about prosaic narratives associated with musical excerpts is much less consistent. All stimuli in the present study were drawn from the Western music tradition, and the vast majority of participants lived in Western countries.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…Where the present study focused on a semantic analysis of the descriptions, the therapeutic potential could be further explored in the future with an in-depth thematic analysis of the descriptions provided by the participants 60 . Such an endeavour is supported by some recent research showing that within a given cultural context, there is some agreement about the prosaic narratives associated with musical excerpts 61 . Future research could explore whether this extends to music-induced imagination, by exploring whether thematic analysis identifies similarities in the themes within different participants’ imagined journeys when listening to the same musical pieces.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

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Music influences vividness and content of imagined journeys in a directed visual imagery task

Herff

Cecchetti

Taruffi

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Directed, intentional imagination is pivotal for self-regulation in the form of escapism and therapies for a wide variety of mental health conditions, such anxiety and stress disorders, as well as phobias. Clinical application in particular benefits from increasing our understanding of imagination, as well as non-invasive means of influencing it. To investigate imagination, this study draws from the prior observation that music can influence the imagined content during non-directed mind-wandering, as well as the finding that relative orientation within time and space is retained in imagination. One hundred participants performed a directed imagination task that required watching a video of a figure travelling towards a barely visible landmark, and then closing their eyes and imagining a continuation of the journey. During each imagined journey, participants either listened to music or silence. After the imagined journeys, participants reported vividness, the imagined time passed and distance travelled, as well as the imagined content. Bayesian mixed effects models reveal strong evidence that vividness, sentiment, as well imagined time passed and distances travelled, are influenced by the music, and show that aspects of these effects can be modelled through features such as tempo. The results highlight music’s potential to support therapies such as Exposure Therapy and Imagery Rescripting, which deploy directed imagination as a clinical tool.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Music influences vividness and content of imagined journeys in a directed visual imagery task

Herff

Cecchetti

Taruffi

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…While changes in each of the individual acoustic feature types were significantly related to the occurrence of annotated boundaries, none of these features came close to fully predicting the annotated boundaries; and while the majority of annotated boundaries occurred at time points where two or more acoustic features changed, some annotated boundaries did not correspond to changes in any of the acoustic features that we tracked. This adds further support to the possibility that boundaries marking the shift between large-scale segments within the DMN and auditory areas could be driven by a complex shift in a combination of the acoustic properties and/or possibly emotional (Daly et al, 2015) or narrative (McAuley et al, 2021;Margulis et al, 2019;Margulis et al, 2021) changes within the excerpts, rather than a change in a single feature.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 67%

“…Indeed, some evidence already exists for shared neural resources for processing music and language (Jantzen et al, 2016;Koelsch, 2011;Koelsch et al, 2002;Lee et al, 2019;Patel, 2011;Tallal & Gaab, 2006;Asano et al, 2021, Fedorenko et al, 2009Peretz et al, 2015;Tillmann, 2012). This connection between music and language is also supported by recent behavioral studies showing that instrumental music has the capacity to drive shared narrative engagement across people (Margulis et al, 2019, Margulis et al, 2021, McAuley et al, 2021. In the current work, we test the hypothesis that default mode network (DMN) regions, which represent high-level event structure in narratives, also play a critical role in representing high-level event structure in music.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 68%

High-order areas and auditory cortex both represent the high-level event structure of music

Williams

Margulis

Nastase

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Recent fMRI studies of event segmentation have found that default mode regions represent high-level event structure during movie watching. In these regions, neural patterns are relatively stable during events and shift at event boundaries. Music, like narratives, contains hierarchical event structure (e.g., sections are composed of phrases). Here, we tested the hypothesis that brain activity patterns in default mode regions reflect the high-level event structure of music. We used fMRI to record brain activity from 25 participants (male and female) as they listened to a continuous playlist of 16 musical excerpts, and additionally collected annotations for these excerpts by asking a separate group of participants to mark when meaningful changes occurred in each one. We then identified temporal boundaries between stable patterns of brain activity using a hidden Markov model and compared the location of the model boundaries to the location of the human annotations. We identified multiple brain regions with significant matches to the observer-identified boundaries, including auditory cortex, mPFC, parietal cortex, and angular gyrus. From these results, we conclude that both higher-order and sensory areas contain information relating to the high-level event structure of music. Moreover, the higher-order areas in this study overlap with areas found in previous studies of event perception in movies and audio narratives, including regions in the default mode network.Significance StatementListening to music requires the brain to track dynamics at multiple hierarchical timescales. In our study, we had fMRI participants listen to real-world music (classical and jazz pieces) and then used an unsupervised learning algorithm (a hidden Markov model) to model the high-level event structure of music within participants’ brain data. This approach revealed that default mode brain regions involved in representing the high-level event structure of narratives are also involved in representing the high-level event structure of music. These findings provide converging support for the hypothesis that these regions play a domain-general role in processing stimuli with long-timescale dependencies.

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“…Koelsch and colleagues showed how even listening to short musical excerpts conveys semantic information to listeners (Koelsch et al, 2004;Painter & Koelsch, 2011;. More recently, Margulis and colleagues (Margulis, 2017;Margulis et al, 2019;McAuley et al, 2021) have shown that listeners easily create narratives while listening to instrumental music pieces, and match pre-existing narratives to them. Moreover, their results indicate that the content of the narratives evoked by the music is relative to the cultural background of the participants, but there are high levels of inter-rater agreement within cultures.…”

Section: Conceptual Processes I: Associative Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Constructionist Approach to Emotional Experiences with Music

Cespedes-Guevara¹

2021

Preprint

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Listening to music can arouse a variety of affective responses. The study of this phenomenon has flourished during the last two decades, particularly thanks to the contribution of the BRECVEMA theory and the Multifactorial Process Model. Nevertheless, these theoretical frameworks have neglected the symbolic dimension of music, and the effect of situational factors. The first aim of this article is to overcome these shortcomings by proposing a model based on contemporary constructionist theories of emotion. This novel approach proposes that listening to music activates automatic perceptual mechanisms that produce fluctuations of affect, and that the activation of associative and appraisal mechanisms transform the fluctuations of affect into a variety of emotional and nonemotional responses. The main proposal is that adopting this constructionist model constitutes a fruitful approach, as it provides a holistic heuristic framework that produces new hypotheses for future investigation of affective experiences with music.

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Do you hear what I hear? Perceived narrative constitutes a semantic dimension for music

Cited by 25 publications

References 11 publications

Music influences vividness and content of imagined journeys in a directed visual imagery task

Music influences vividness and content of imagined journeys in a directed visual imagery task

High-order areas and auditory cortex both represent the high-level event structure of music

A Constructionist Approach to Emotional Experiences with Music

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