Language and Music

What is music – as a cognitive ability?

• The musical intuitions, conscious and

unconscious, of a listener who is
experienced in a musical idiom.
• Ability to organize and make coherent
the surface patterns of music (pitch,
duration, intensity, timbre etc.)
 Questions to ask
• To what extent is our knowledge about
music and knowledge about language
similar or different?
• To what extent do music and language
engage the same processing mechanisms?
• Are they genuinely distinct from other
human activities?
 Music is like language - Uniquely
human
–Although many animals have
communication systems, no non-humans
have either language or music in the human
sense, and in particular there are no obvious
evolutionary precursors for either in
nonhuman primates.
 Uniquely human

• Language and music both involve sound

production (although language also
exists in the signed modality and music
does not).
 Uniquely Human…
Birdsong – specific time of the year, male birds,
specific purposes (mating), triggered by hormonal
and neural changes, limited innovation. Humans –
song is not similarly restricted, serves a variety of
functions (lullabies), very innovative, very long
history
 Music is like language -Cultural
universal
• Every culture has a local variant of language, and every
culture has a local variant of music. The differences
among local variants are moreover quite striking; this
contrasts with other species, whose communication
systems show very limited variation at best. (Again,
birdsong dialects)
• In every culture, language and music can be combined
in song.
 Music is like language

• Perceptually discrete elements

organised hierarchically into structured
sequences on syntactic principles.
 Other musical universals
• Much of the complexity of musical intuition is not
learned.
• Babies respond to music while still in the womb.
• At 4 months, dissonant tones will cause babies to
squirm and turn away.
•Nazzi, Bertoncini, and Mehler (1998): “That infants
have an ability to capture rhythmic information
from birth might explain that they will acquire the
rhythmic regularities of their native language very
early in life.”
 Hierarchy
• Hierachy of tension and
relaxation.
• Metrical structure: the
intuition that the events of the
piece are related to a regular
alternation of strong and weak
beats at a number of
hierarchical levels.
 Grammar of music
• While no two people hear a piece of music
in the same way, there is considerable
agreement as to what constitutes
“grammatical” music.
• These shared intuitions form a plausible
hypothesis for a universal “musical
competence”.
 Productivity
• If you’re familiar with a musical idiom,
you’ll easily recognize a novel instance
of that idiom and are able to judge its
‘well-formedness’ – knowledge of the
‘rules’ of the musical system.
 How music differs from language
• No analogue of grammatical categories in music
(noun, verb,etc.).
• No analogue of grammatical function in music
(subject, object, etc.).
• Syntactic predictions made in language much
stricter than in music. For example, a displaced
phrase must be followed by a trace.
 Aphasia - Amusia
–Inability to tell one melody from another
–Recognize national anthem
–Hearing is fine
–Different aspects of music are affected
• Melody perception/production
• Rhythm perception/production
• Emotional response
–Diverse areas in the brain: auditory cortex, but
also parietal regions and frontal lobe
 Pure word deafness
• Is the inability to comprehend speech.
• Individuals with this disorder lose the ability to
understand language, repeat words, and write
from dictation. However, spontaneous
speaking, reading, and writing are preserved.
Individuals who exhibit pure word deafness are
also still able to recognize non-verbal sounds.
Processing of music in many places in
the brain
 Music, language and the brain
• No animal models
• Both music and language build complex and meaningful sequences by
combining basic units in a rule-governed way (both have a grammar)
• Does brain use the same circuits for both functions?
– Double dissociation between amusia and aphasia? (V. Shebalin,
Russian composer, two strokes, which impaired most of his
language capabilities, but he completed his fifth symphony,
described by Shostakovich as "a brilliant creative work, filled with
highest emotions, optimistic and full of life.")
– Many of these examples are old and of professional musicians
– No work on amusia in aphasics
 Aphasia without amusia
• Professional musicians
• Normal folk?
– Testing Broca’s aphasics with the anomalous
sentences and correct ones, and anomalous
chords
– Broca’s aphasics did worse with both tasks
– Severity of grammar and musical deficit are
correlated
 Language and music - imaging
Anomalous sentences
The woman paid the baker and take the bread
home (ungrammatical)
The woman paid the baker and took the zebra
home (real world mismatch)
• Brain responses are different – P600 and
N400 brain waves (EEG)- that denote the
particular ‘anomaly’
Syntactic Integration difficulty
• Musicians response to musical
ungrammaticalities yielded
the same P600 response
• Many other studies have
shown that musical ‘syntactic’
processing activates language
areas of the brain (harmonic
processing and Broca’s area)
 Musical conversations
• The brains of jazz musicians who are
engaged with other musicians in
spontaneous improvisation show robust
activation in the same brain areas
traditionally associated with spoken
language and syntax. In other words,
improvisational jazz conversations take
root in the brain as a language.
 Tone language speakers
• Finer absolute pitch distinctions and sensitivity
to intervals when learning music – so language
enables music
• But, when pitch changes contributed to
meaning discrimination in the languages,
performance was degraded for downward
pitch changes - interference from language
• Congenital amusia interfered with pitch
perception in language.
 Rhythm and movement
• Periodic temporal patterns
• In performance – temporal coordination
possible with beats
• In every culture, rhythm is co-ordinated
with movement (dance) – involuntary
• Only humans move thus
 Moving to a beat
•Anticipatory (tapping to a metronome)
•Flexible (different response – multiple time scales)
•Robust
•Cross-modal (hear – move)
•Auditory (deaf and vibrations)
–Flashes of light vs. auditory patterns. Subjects
asked to tap to the beat, cannot do it with visual
cues
 Brain region implicated in beats
• Superior Temporal Gyrus
• Left Inferior Frontal Lobe
• Putamen (Basal Ganglia)
– Interval timing
– Controlling sequencing
of movement
 Vocal learning
• Vocal learning
– Birds: songbirds, hummingbirds, parrots
– Mammals: humans, cetaceans, bats, seals
• Same circulits – basal ganglia
• Evolutionary modification to yield vocal
learning – necessitates feedback – link
between hearing and motor output