Near and far transfer: Is music special?

Far transfer rarely occurs, and a recent meta-analysis suggests that music is no exception. The overall effect of musical training on cognition was claimed to be null when considering studies with active control groups or implemented randomization procedures (Sala & Gobet, Memory & Cognition, 48: 1429-1441, 2020). Using the authors' data file and program ( https://osf.io/rquye ), we did not confirm the effect of randomization, and we demonstrated that their conclusion is based in part on the failure to differentiate near and far transfer, with near transfer effect sizes being selectively excluded for the musical training group studies, but not for the active control group studies. Reanalyzing their data file resulted in a significant effect size (g = .234), and also provided new evidence that far-transfer effects of musical training can challenge near-transfer effects of linguistic training. Music is a recreational activity that may be special in allowing for small but statistically significant far-transfer effects.

The role of expectation in music: from the score to emotions and the brain.

Like discourse, music is a dynamic process that occurs over time. Listeners usually expect some events or structures of events to occur in the prolongation of a given context. Part of the musical emotional experience would depend upon how composers (improvisers) fulfill these expectancies. Musical expectations are a core phenomenon of music cognition, and the present article provides an overview of its foundation in the score as well as in listeners' behavior and brain, and how it can be simulated by artificial neural networks. We highlight parallels to language processing and include the attentional and emotional dimensions of musical expectations. Studying musical expectations is thus valuable not only for our understanding of music perception and production but also for more general brain functioning. Some open and challenging issues are summarized in this article. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:105-113. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1262 CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors have no conflict of interest to declare. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Multidimensional scaling of emotional responses to music in patients with temporal lobe resection.

The present study investigated emotional responses to music by using multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis in patients with right or left medial temporal lobe (MTL) lesions and matched normal controls (NC). Participants were required to evaluate emotional dissimilarities of nine musical excerpts that were selected to express graduated changes along the valence and arousal dimensions. For this purpose, they rated dissimilarity between pairs of stimuli on an eight-point scale and the resulting matrices were submitted to an MDS analysis. The results showed that patients did not differ from NC participants in evaluating emotional feelings induced by the musical excerpts, suggesting that all participants were able to distinguish refined emotions. We concluded that the ability to detect and use emotional valence and arousal when making dissimilarity judgments was not strongly impaired by a right or left MTL lesion. This finding has important clinical implications and is discussed in light of current neuropsychological studies on emotion. It suggests that emotional responses to music can be at least partially preserved at a non-verbal level in patients with unilateral temporal lobe damage including the amygdala.

Manipulating Greek musical modes and tempo affects perceived musical emotion in musicians and nonmusicians

The combined influence of tempo and mode on emotional responses to music was studied by crossing 7 changes in mode with 3 changes in tempo. Twenty-four musicians aged 19 to 25 years (12 males and 12 females) and 24 nonmusicians aged 17 to 25 years (12 males and 12 females) were required to perform two tasks: 1) listening to different musical excerpts, and 2) associating an emotion to them such as happiness, serenity, fear, anger, or sadness. ANOVA showed that increasing the tempo strongly affected the arousal (F(2,116) = 268.62, mean square error (MSE) = 0.6676, P < 0.001) and, to a lesser extent, the valence of emotional responses (F(6,348) = 8.71, MSE = 0.6196, P < 0.001). Changes in modes modulated the affective valence of the perceived emotions (F(6,348) = 4.24, MSE = 0.6764, P < 0.001). Some interactive effects were found between tempo and mode (F (1,58) = 115.6, MSE = 0.6428, P < 0.001), but, in most cases, the two parameters had additive effects. This finding demonstrates that small changes in the pitch structures of modes modulate the emotions associated with the pieces, confirming the cognitive foundation of emotional responses to music.

Manipulating Greek musical modes and tempo affects perceived musical emotion in musicians and nonmusicians.

The combined influence of tempo and mode on emotional responses to music was studied by crossing 7 changes in mode with 3 changes in tempo. Twenty-four musicians aged 19 to 25 years (12 males and 12 females) and 24 nonmusicians aged 17 to 25 years (12 males and 12 females) were required to perform two tasks: 1) listening to different musical excerpts, and 2) associating an emotion to them such as happiness, serenity, fear, anger, or sadness. ANOVA showed that increasing the tempo strongly affected the arousal (F(2,116) = 268.62, mean square error (MSE) = 0.6676, P < 0.001) and, to a lesser extent, the valence of emotional responses (F(6,348) = 8.71, MSE = 0.6196, P < 0.001). Changes in modes modulated the affective valence of the perceived emotions (F(6,348) = 4.24, MSE = 0.6764, P < 0.001). Some interactive effects were found between tempo and mode (F (1,58) = 115.6, MSE = 0.6428, P < 0.001), but, in most cases, the two parameters had additive effects. This finding demonstrates that small changes in the pitch structures of modes modulate the emotions associated with the pieces, confirming the cognitive foundation of emotional responses to music.

Cognitive priming in sung and instrumental music: activation of inferior frontal cortex.

Neural correlates of the processing of musical syntax-like structures have been investigated via expectancy violation due to musically unrelated (i.e., unexpected) events in musical contexts. Previous studies reported the implication of inferior frontal cortex in musical structure processing. However - due to the strong musical manipulations - activations might be explained by sensory deviance detection or repetition priming. Our present study investigated neural correlates of musical structure processing with subtle musical violations in a musical priming paradigm. Instrumental and sung sequences ended on related and less-related musical targets. The material controlled sensory priming components, and differences in target processing required listeners' knowledge on musical structures. Participants were scanned with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) while performing speeded phoneme and timbre identification judgments on the targets. Behavioral results acquired in the scanner replicated the facilitation effect of related over less-related targets. The blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal linked to target processing revealed activation of right inferior frontal areas (i.e., inferior frontal gyrus, frontal operculum, anterior insula) that was stronger for less-related than for related targets, and this was independent of the material carrying the musical structures. This outcome points to the implication of inferior frontal cortex in the processing of syntactic relations also for musical material and to its role in the processing and integration of sequential information over time. In addition to inferior frontal activation, increased activation was observed in orbital gyrus, temporal areas (anterior superior temporal gyrus, posterior superior temporal gyrus and sulcus, posterior middle temporal gyrus) and supramarginal gyrus.

Are we "experienced listeners"? A review of the musical capacities that do not depend on formal musical training.

The present paper reviews a set of studies designed to investigate different aspects of the capacity for processing Western music. This includes perceiving the relationships between a theme and its variations, perceiving musical tensions and relaxations, generating musical expectancies, integrating local structures in large-scale structures, learning new compositional systems and responding to music in an emotional (affective) way. The main focus of these studies was to evaluate the influence of intensive musical training on these capacities. The overall set of data highlights that some musical capacities are acquired through exposure to music without the help of explicit training. These capacities reach such a degree of sophistication that they enable untrained listeners to respond to music as "musically experienced listeners" do.

Music in the moment? Revisiting the effect of large scale structures.

The psychological relevance of large-scale musical structures has been a matter of debate in the music community. This issue was investigated with a method that allows assessing listeners' detection of musical incoherencies in normal and scrambled versions of popular and contemporary music pieces. Musical excerpts were segmented into 28 or 29 chunks. In the scrambled version, the temporal order of these chunks was altered with the constraint that the transitions between two chunks never created local acoustical and musical disruptions. Participants were required (1) to detect on-line incoherent linking of chunks, (2) to rate aesthetic quality of pieces, and (3) to evaluate their overall coherence. The findings indicate a moderate sensitivity to large-scale musical structures for popular and contemporary music in both musically trained and untrained listeners. These data are discussed in light of current models of music cognition.

Repetition priming: Is music special?

Using short and long contexts, the present study investigated musical priming effects that are based on chord repetition and harmonic relatedness. A musical target (a chord) was preceded by either an identical prime or a different but harmonically related prime. In contrast to words, pictures, and environmental sounds, chord processing was not facilitated by repetition. Experiments 1 and 2 using single-chord primes showed either no significant difference between chord repetition and harmonic relatedness or facilitated processing for harmonically related targets. Experiment 3 using longer prime contexts showed that musical priming depended more on the musical function of the target in the preceding context than on target repetition. The effect of musical function was decreased, but not qualitatively changed, by chord repetition. The outcome of this study challenges predictions of sensory approaches and supports a cognitive approach of musical priming.

Further investigation of harmonic priming in long contexts using musical timbre as surface marker to control for temporal effects.

Harmonic priming studies have reported facilitated processing for chords that are harmonically related to the prime context. Responses to the target (the last chord of an 8-chord sequence) were faster and more accurate when the target was strongly related, i.e., a tonic chord, to the preceding prime context than when it was less related, i.e., a subdominant chord. Results have been interpreted in terms of musical expectations and processing speed: the prime allows listeners to develop expectations for future events which lead to facilitated processing of the most strongly expected event. The present experiment investigated an alternative hypothesis suggesting that the harmonic structure of the prime context might create an ambiguity about "when" to respond that is stronger in contexts ending on less related targets than in contexts ending on strongly related targets. A change of musical timbre was used as surface marker indicating without ambiguity the temporal occurrence of the target. Participants made speeded intonation judgments of the target, i.e., judging whether targets are acoustically consonant or dissonant. The findings replicate the previously reported priming effect and rule out that processing differences are solely due to ambiguities about when in time the target will occur.

Global context effect in normal and scrambled musical sequences.

The processing of chords is facilitated when they are harmonically related to the context in which they appear. The purpose of this study was to assess whether this harmonic priming effect depends on the version (normal vs. scrambled) of the context chord sequences. Normal sequences were scrambled by permuting chords two-by-two (Experiment 1) or four-by-four (Experiments 2 and 3). Normal chord sequences were judged less coherent than scrambled sequences. However, normal chord sequences showed facilitation for harmonically related rather than for unrelated targets, and this effect of relatedness did not diminish for scrambled sequences (Experiments 1-3). The data of musicians and nonmusicians were interpreted with Bharucha's (1987) spreading activation framework. Simulations suggested that harmonic priming results from activation that spreads via schematic knowledge of Western harmony and accumulates in short-term memory over the course of the chord sequence.

The effect of harmonic context on phoneme monitoring in vocal music.

The processing of a target chord depends on the previous musical context in which it has appeared. This harmonic priming effect occurs for fine syntactic-like changes in context and is observed irrespective of the extent of participants' musical expertise (Bigand & Pineau, Perception and Psychophysics, 59 (1997) 1098). The present study investigates how the harmonic context influences the processing of phonemes in vocal music. Eight-chord sequences were presented to participants. The four notes of each chord were played with synthetic phonemes and participants were required to quickly decide whether the last chord (the target) was sung on a syllable containing the phoneme /i/ or /u/. The musical relationship of the target chord to the previous context was manipulated so that the target chord acted as a referential tonic chord or as a congruent but less structurally important subdominant chord. Phoneme monitoring was faster for the tonic chord than for the subdominant chord. This finding has several implications for music cognition and speech perception. It also suggests that musical and phonemic processing interact at some stage of processing.

Different brain mechanisms mediate sensitivity to sensory consonance and harmonic context: evidence from auditory event-related brain potentials.

The goal of this study was to analyze the time-course of sensory (bottom-up) and cognitive (top-down) processes that govern musical harmonic expectancy. Eight-chord sequences were presented to 12 musicians and 12 nonmusicians. Expectations for the last chord were manipulated both at the sensory level (i.e., the last chord was sensory consonant or dissonant) and at the cognitive level (the harmonic function of the target was varied by manipulating the harmonic context built up by the first six chords of the sequence). Changes in the harmonic function of the target chord mainly modulate the amplitude of a positive component peaking around 300 msec (P3) after target onset, reflecting top-down influences on the perceptual stages of processing. In contrast, changes in the acoustic structure of the target chord (sensory consonance) mainly modulate the amplitude of a late positive component that develops between 300 and 800 msec after target onset. Most importantly, the effects of sensory consonance and harmonic context on the event-related brain potentials associated with the target chords were found to be independent, thus suggesting that two separate processors contribute to the building up of musical expectancy.

Implicit learning of tonality: a self-organizing approach.

Tonal music is a highly structured system that is ubiquitous in our cultural environment. We demonstrate the acquisition of implicit knowledge of tonal structure through neural self-organization resulting from mere exposure to simultaneous and sequential combinations of tones. In the process of learning, a network with fundamental neural constraints comes to internalize the essential correlational structure of tonal music. After learning, the network was run through a range of experiments from the literature. The model provides a parsimonious account of a variety of empirical findings dealing with the processing of tone, chord, and key relationships, including relatedness judgments, memory judgments, and expectancies. It also illustrates the plausibility of activation being a unifying mechanism underlying a range of cognitive tasks.

Perceiving musical tension in long chord sequences.

We attempted to predict perceived musical tension in longer chord sequences by hierarchic and sequential models based on Lerdahl and Jackendoff's and Lerdahl's cognitive theories and on Parncutt's sensory-psychoacoustical theory. Musicians and nonmusicians were asked to rate the perceived tension of chords which were drawn either from a piece composed for the study (Exp. 1) or from a Chopin Prelude (Exps. 2-4). In Exps. 3 and 4, several experimental manipulations were made to emphasize either the global or the local structure of the piece and to verify how these manipultions would affect the respective contribution of the models in the ratings. In all experiments, musical tension was only weakly influenced by global harmonic structure. Instead, it mainly seemed to be determined locally, by harmonic cadences. The hierarchic model of Lerdahl and Jackendoff provided the best fit to tension ratings, not because it accounted for global hierarchic effects, but because it captured the local effect of cadences. By reacting to these local structures, tension ratings fit quite well with a hierarchic model, even though the participants were relatively insensitive to the global structure of the pieces. As a main outcome, it is argued that musical events were perceived through a short perceptual window sliding from cadence to cadence along a sequence.

Global context effects on musical expectancy.

The effects of global harmonic contexts on expectancy formation were studied in a set of three experiments. Eight-chord sequences were presented to subjects. Expectations for the last chord were varied by manipulating the harmonic context created by the first six: in one context, the last chord was part of an authentic cadence (V-I), whereas in the other, it was a fourth harmonic degree following a full cadence (I-IV). Given this change in harmonic function, the last chord was assumed to be more expected in the former context, all the other local parameters being held constant. The effect of global context on expectancy formation was supported by the fact that subjects reported a lower degree of completion for sequences ending on an unexpected chord (Experiment 1), took longer to decide whether the last chord belonged to the sequence when the last chord was unexpected (Experiment 2), and took longer to decide whether the last chord was consonant or dissonant when it was unexpected (Experiment 3). These results are discussed with reference to current models of tonal cognition.

Perceiving musical stability: the effect of tonal structure, rhythm, and musical expertise.

The goal of this study was to investigate several factors that determine musical stability in unaccompanied tonal melodies. Following M. R. Jones's (1987) theory of dynamic attending, the author assumed that strongly accented tones act as stable melodic reference points. Three main results were observed: (a) tonal structure, rhythm, and melodic factors (i.e., pitch skips or change in melodic contour) all contributed to defining the stability experienced on the melodic tones; (b) a linear combination of 5 melodic and rhythmic features provided a good fit to the stability ratings; and (c) some of these features contributed differently, depending on the extent of musical expertise of the participants. The results are interpreted within C. L. Krumhansl's (1990) model of tonal perception and Jones's theory of dynamic attending.

Perception of musical tension in short chord sequences: the influence of harmonic function, sensory dissonance, horizontal motion, and musical training.

This study investigates the effect of four variables (tonal hierarchies, sensory chordal consonance, horizontal motion, and musical training) on perceived musical tension. Participants were asked to evaluate the tension created by a chord X in sequences of three chords [C major-->X-->C major] in a C major context key. The X chords could be major or minor triads major-minor seventh, or minor seventh chords built on the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. The data were compared with Krumhansl's (1990) harmonic hierarchy and with predictions of Lerdahl's (1988) cognitive theory, Hutchinson and Knopoff's (1978) and Parncutt's (1989) sensory-psychoacoustical theories, and the model of horizontal motion defined in the paper. As a main outcome, it appears that judgments of tension arose from a convergence of several cognitive and psychoacoustics influences, whose relative importance varies, depending on musical training.