What the music said: narrative listening across cultures

Abstract

Instrumental music can seem to tell engrossing stories without the use of words, but it is unclear what leads to this narrativization. Although past work has investigated narrative responses to abstract moving shapes, very little work has studied the emergence of narrative perceptions in response to nonlinguistic sound. We measured narrative responses to wordless Western and Chinese music in participants in the US and in a cluster of villages in a rural part of China using a Narrative Engagement (NE) scale developed specifically for this project. Despite profound differences in media exposure, musical habits, and narrative traditions, narrative listening was employed by many participants and associated with enjoyment in both groups; however, the excerpts that unleashed this response were culturespecific. We show that wordless sound is capable of triggering perceived narratives in two groups of listeners with highly distinct patterns of cultural exposure, reinforcing the notion that narrativization itself is a readily available mode of experiencing music. The particular sounds that trigger narrativization, however, rely on enculturation processes, as demonstrated by the within-culture consistency, but between-culture divergence in the specific excerpts that led to narrative engagement. Narratives can emerge in multiple modalities, including wordless sound, but association patterns specific to individual cultures critically shape how apparently abstract sound patterns come to acquire deep meaning and significance to people.

Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition

“…One of the major challenges for cross-cultural music cognition research is to map this variation in a way that is both comparable and meaningful across cultures. Such an endeavor could take various forms, from doing musical ethnography including participant observation and interviews in diverse musical cultures (e.g., Feld, 1982;Seeger, 1987) to synthesizing the vast body of existing musical ethnographies in anthropological, encyclopedic, or quantitative perspectives (Blacking, 1973;Mehr et al, 2019;Nettl, Stone, Porter, & Rice, 1998) to performing controlled experiments cross-culturally (Fritz et al, 2009;Hannon & Trehub, 2005;Jacoby & McDermott, 2017, Jacoby et al, 2020Margulis, Wong, Simchy-Gross, & McAuley, 2019;Mehr, Singh, York, Glowacki, & Krasnow, 2018;Perlman & Krumhansl, 1996, Polak et al, 2018Ullal, Hannon, & Snyder, 2014) including full factorial combinations of cultural materials and listeners (e.g., Curtis & Bharucha, 2009;Czedik-Eysenberg, Reuter, & Wald-Fuhrmann, 2020;Eerola, Himberg, Toiviainen, & Louhivuori, 2006;Laukka, Eerola, Thingujam, Yamasaki, & Beller, 2013;Stevens, Keller, & Tyler, 2013;Wald-Fuhrmann, Klein, & Lehmann, 2020; see discussion in Patel & Demorest, 2013).…”

Visual and auditory brain areas share a representational structure that supports emotion perception

“…The link between music and movement is present from early in development, with infants as young as 7 months using movement to resolve ambiguities in musical rhythm (Phillips-silver & Trainor, 2005). Further, communication of emotion through music and movement occurs across a range of dissimilar cultures (Fritz et al, 2009; Sievers, Polansky, Casey, & Wheatley, 2013; Trehub et al, 2015), although there are also many important cross-cultural differences in emotion expression, perception, and conceptualization (Gendron, Roberson, Vyver, & Barrett, 2014; Jack, Caldara, & Schyns, 2012; Jack, Sun, Delis, Garrod, & Schyns, 2016; Jackson et al, 2019; Margulis, Wong, Simchy-Gross, & McAuley, 2019; Yuki, Maddux, & Masuda, 2007). Here, we suggest that the link between music and movement may result from fundamental similarities in how music and movement are structured, perceived, and represented in the brain.…”

“…For example, people often communicate emotion using only body language and tone of voice, and actively seek out instrumental music and abstract visual art that communicates emotion only through variation in pitch, volume, shape, brightness, and so on. And although there are many cross-cultural differences in emotion experience, expression, and perception (Gendron et al, 2014; Jack et al, 2012, 2016; Jackson et al, 2019; Margulis et al, 2019; Yuki et al, 2007), preliminary evidence suggests the use of shared stimulus features to express emotion can generalize across dissimilar cultures (Sievers et al, 2013; Trehub et al, 2015). Despite its ubiquity and importance, the neural mechanisms supporting emotion perception from stimulus features remain poorly understood.…”

From Music to Animacy: Causal Reasoning Links Animate Agents with Musical Sounds

“…We hypothesize that causal reasoning occurs during real-world music listening, though perhaps not automatically, and not in all cases. It may particularly occur when deeply engaging with music, as in active or creative music listening (Dunn, 1997;Kratus, 2017;Peterson, 2006); or during mental imagery or mental narrative related to musical content (Margulis et al, 2019).…”