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

Music has attracted longstanding debate surrounding its capacity to communicate without words, but little empirical work has addressed the topic. Here, 534 participants in the US and a remote region of China participated in two experiments using a novel paradigm to investigate narrative perceptions as a semantic dimension of music. Participants listened to wordless musical excerpts and determined which of two presented stories was the correct match. Correct matches were stories previously imagined by individuals from the US or China in response to each of the excerpts, while foils were correct matches to one of the other tested excerpts. Results revealed that listeners from Arkansas and Michigan had no difficulty matching the music with stories generated by Arkansas listeners. Wordless music, then, far from an abstract stimulus, seems to engender shared, concrete narrative perceptions in listeners. These perceptions are stable and robust for within-culture participants, even at geographically distinct locales (e.g. Arkansas and Michigan). This finding refutes the notion that music is an asemantic medium. In contrast, participants in both the US and China had more difficulty determining correct story-music matches for stories generated by participants from another culture, suggesting that a sufficiently shared pool of experiences must exist for strong intersubjectivity to arise.

The neural basis for understanding imitation-induced musical meaning: The role of the human mirror system.

Music can convey meanings by imitating phenomena of the extramusical world, and these imitation-induced musical meanings can be understood by listeners. Although the human mirror system (HMS) is implicated in imitation, little is known about the HMS's role in making sense of meaning that derives from musical imitation. To answer this question, we used fMRI to examine listeners' brain activities during the processing of imitation-induced musical meaning with a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm. Eleven normal individuals and 11 individuals with congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical processing, participated in the experiment. Target pictures with either an upward or downward movement were primed by semantically congruent or incongruent melodic sequences characterized by the direction of pitch change (upward or downward). When contrasting the incongruent with the congruent condition between the two groups, we found greater activations in the left supramarginal gyrus/inferior parietal lobule and inferior frontal gyrus in normals but not in amusics. The implications of these findings in terms of the role of the HMS in understanding imitation-induced musical meaning are discussed.

Neural differences between the processing of musical meaning conveyed by direction of pitch change and natural music in congenital amusia.

Music is a unique communication system for human beings. Iconic musical meaning is one dimension of musical meaning, which emerges from musical information resembling sounds of objects, qualities of objects, or qualities of abstract concepts. The present study investigated whether congenital amusia, a disorder of musical pitch perception, impacts the processing of iconic musical meaning. With a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, target images were primed by semantically congruent or incongruent musical excerpts, which were characterized by direction (upward or downward) of pitch change (Experiment 1), or were selected from natural music (Experiment 2). Twelve Mandarin-speaking amusics and 12 controls performed a recognition (implicit) and a semantic congruency judgment (explicit) task while their EEG waveforms were recorded. Unlike controls, amusics failed to elicit an N400 effect when musical meaning was represented by direction of pitch change, regardless of the nature of the tasks (implicit versus explicit). However, the N400 effect in response to musical meaning in natural musical excerpts was observed for both the groups in both types of tasks. These results indicate that amusics are able to process iconic musical meaning through multiple acoustic cues in natural musical excerpts, but not through the direction of pitch change. This is the first study to investigate the processing of musical meaning in congenital amusia, providing evidence in support of the "melodic contour deafness hypothesis" with regard to iconic musical meaning processing in this disorder.

Gender and the performance of music.

This study evaluates propositions that have appeared in the literature that music phenomena are gendered. Were they present in the musical "message," gendered qualities might be imparted at any of three stages of the music-communication interchange: the process of composition, its realization into sound by the performer, or imposed by the listener in the process of perception. The research was designed to obtain empirical evidence to enable evaluation of claims of the presence of gendering at these three stages. Three research hypotheses were identified and relevant literature of music behaviors and perception reviewed. New instruments of measurement were constructed to test the three hypotheses: (i) two listening sequences each containing 35 extracts from published recordings of compositions of the classical music repertoire, (ii) four "music characteristics" scales, with polarities defined by verbal descriptors designed to assess the dynamic and emotional valence of the musical extracts featured in the listening sequences. 69 musically-trained listeners listened to the two sequences and were asked to identify the sex of the performing artist of each musical extract; a second group of 23 listeners evaluated the extracts applying the four music characteristics scales. Results did not support claims that music structures are inherently gendered, nor proposals that performers impart their own-sex-specific qualities to the music. It is concluded that gendered properties are imposed subjectively by the listener, and these are primarily related to the tempo of the music.

Spatial conceptual associations between music and pictures as revealed by N400 effect.

The processing of extramusical meaning can be reflected in N400 effects of the ERP. However, how conceptual representations can be activated in music still needs to be specified. We investigated the activation of iconic meaningful representations in music by using a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm with an implicit task. Pictures of spatial scenes were semantically congruent or incongruent to preceding music in three stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions. The results revealed that the semantically incongruent target pictures elicited larger N400 amplitude than the congruent target pictures. Moreover, the semantic priming effect was modulated by the SOAs. The N400 effect was observed in the 200-ms and 800-ms SOA conditions, but not in the 1,200-ms SOA condition. These results suggest that extramusical meaning purely due to iconic sign quality can be activated, and that the conceptual activation in music can be rapid and automatic.

Vivências em contextos coletivos e singulares onde a música entre em ressonância com as emoções / Experience in singular and coletive contexts where music resounds with emotions

Este trabalho de pesquisa objetivou estudar os significados e sentidos expressos nas narrativas que os jovens constroem sobre sua história de relação com a música. Foram entrevistados três jovens com idade entre 20 e 23 anos, estudantes do primeiro ano do curso de graduação em Musicoterapia - que o iniciaram em 2004 - da Faculdade de Artes do Paraná, na cidade de Curitiba. Trabalhou-se com a Entrevista Narrativa (Schütze, 1977) focada na Memória Musical e Autobiografia Musical (Ruud, 1998). O foco principal esteve sob as narrativas tecidas pelos participantes acerca das experiências musicais vivenciadas e dos significados e sentidos que elaboram sobre estes eventos e seus contextos, ao longo de suas vidas. Num duplo movimento entre teoria e dados empíricos foram-se construindo as categorias emergentes das próprias narrativas, que permitiram visualizar os momentos da história de relação com a música entremeada aos contextos coletivos e singulares. Percebeu-se que das vivências em situações concretas permeadas pela dimensão afetiva, os jovens encontraram e vivenciaram a utilização viva da música. Situações estas que deram margem para a construção dos significados da mesma, em toda esta trama. Significados estes que são, principalmente, constituídos e construídos pelos sentidos envoltos as emoções, sentimentos, desejos, vontades, interesses, motivações de sujeitos em constantes relações com o contexto sócio-cultural. Significados/sentidos que demonstram a utilização viva da música e a constante movimentação de sujeitos implicados com a atividade musical, que constituem esta atividade enquanto ela também é constituinte deles.

his research work is objective to study the meanings and senses expressed in the narratives which the youngpeople build up about their history of relation with the music. Three youngsters, with ages between 20 and23, students of the first year of the Music Therapy graduation course of the Faculdade de Artes do Parana,in Curitiba, were interviewed. The Narrative Interview (Schütze,1977) focused in the Musical Memory andMusical Autobiography (Ruud, 1998) . The main focus was under the narratives made up by the participantsabout the musical experiences they lived and the meanings and senses they elaborate regarding these eventsand their contexts, along their lives. In a double movement between theory and empirical data the emergingcategories of their own narratives, which allowed visualizing the moments of the history of the relation withthe music interposed with the singular and collective contexts, were built up. It was perceived that from theliving with concrete situations permeated by affective dimension, the youngsters found and lived the livinguse of the music. Those situations allowed the construction of the meanings of the music, in all this plot. Thesemeanings are, mainly, constituted and constructed by the senses involved by emotions, feelings, desires,wishes, interests and motivations of people in constant relations with the social-cultural context. Meanings/senses show the living use of the music and the constant movement of people implied with the musicalactivities that make up this activity while it is also made up of them