Tin Ear Test

Henkjan Honing directs us to an online test for amusia, the inability to consciously perceive musical pitches and/or rhythms. The test was developed by Isabelle Peretz, well-known in music cognition circles.

Syntax vs. Semantics

In the comments to a previous post, Fred Himebaugh asked me to explain the difference between syntax and semantics in music. First, I will give a general definition of the terms. "Syntax" is the description of proper construction following rules of grammar. Thus in language, syntax describes the proper order of words following the grammatical rules of that language. "Semantics" is the description of meaning assigned to a statement (or to symbols if we are going to be very general).

In tonal music, syntax is easy to describe as the expected order of harmonic progressions, melodic pitches and rhythms, both at local levels and in hierarchical systems. The expected order is based upon rules that have been (slowly) developed by observing the behavior of tonal music composed between about 1600 and 1880. Stefan Koelsch calls these rules "certain regularities." There is debate as to whether this syntax is learned by exposure to music of that culture or if this syntax is hardwired. This same debate exists in linguistics. But regardless of the means of development, there is no debate that music has a syntax.

Musical semantics is a different story. Some say that musical semantics are identical to musical syntax, that any meaning gleaned is only a perception of structure. But others say that music can communicate a variety of meanings. Koelsch describes four different aspects of meaning: 1) analogies to similar sounding objects or to qualities of objects, such as imitating birdsong; 2) emotional meaning, such as happy or sad; 3) extramusical associations, such as literary references or conventional uses of a particular musical work (anthem, folk song); and 4) perception of syntactical structure.

The question that Koelsch's team has been investigating is if our brains process musical semantics separately from musical syntax, and if these neurocognitive processes are similar to the processes of language syntax and semantics. Previous research has identified two electrical signal changes (called event related potentials) associated with harmonic expectancy. When a harmonic expectancy is violated, the ERAN and the N500 peaks are affected. By playing musical excerpts coupled with sentences in the native language of the listeners, said sentences containing either violations of syntax or violations of semantics, Steinbeis and Koelsch found that syntactic violations in the sentence reduced the effect of the ERAN, and that semantic violations in the sentence reduced the effect of the N500. Thus, if one accepts the premise that these two ERP peaks do correspond to harmonic expectancy, this harmonic expectancy has two different processes that correlate to language's syntax and semantics.

The implications of this? I'm not sure, beyond a a possible negation of that one opinion that music syntax and music semantics are identical. I suppose it opens up the possibility that there are universal meanings in music, with varying potential levels to "universal." And it could lead to investigations on whether music-making evolved as a byproduct of language development or vice-versa.

Don't give up your day job

I'm pleasantly surprised to admit that I agree with Norman Lebrecht about something. He wrote a post about the principal 'cellist of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Said 'cellist, Nathan Waks, once was head of music at the Australian Broadcasting Company. That part isn't important. What is important is that Mr. Waks has another job alongside playing with the orchestra, as CEO of a winery (Nathan Waks also wrote a comment to the post). Mr. Lebrecht points out that this model leads to a much happier life, compared to full-time orchestral players who get burned out. What struck me about the post is that the concertmaster, Dene Olding, has a similar arrangement to the new concertmaster of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Zack De Pue. He is in the popular chamber group Time for Three. The ISO has also hired Alexander Kerr, a professor at Indiana University, to be the principal guest concertmaster when Zack is on tour with his other chamber groups. The day job can be teaching, composing, playing in a chamber group, or running a bistro.

Is it over?

(I'm in a questioning mood today.)

Adam Baratz has found an interesting topic to blog about from an unusual source, an LSAT study guide. The topic of discussion is Historically Informed Performance practice, which I have blogged about before. More specifically, Adam isolates possible answers to why symphonies may have played final finales more slowly in Mozart and Beethoven's days, and why audiences don't applaud between movements anymore. Alex Ross has looked at the latter phenomenon closely, supporting the comment I made on Adam's blog. You'll have to visit Adam's site to see what I said.

Do you see what I hear?

Michael Schutz and Scott Lipscomb have published a study that shows how percussionists use visual cues to make audiences think notes are of different lengths, when the actual notes are the same duration. A world-class percussionist was video-taped performing long and short notes. The video was split into visual and audio components, which were then cross-matched so Long note visuals were sometimes matched with Short note audio and vice-versa. Listeners were told that some of the videos had mismatched visual and audio cues, and were instructed to judge duration solely by the sound. However, the duration ratings varied according to visual cues rather than audio cues.

This is another reason why live music creates a much different experience than an audio recording. The visual cues actively change our perception of the musical sounds, even when they are acoustically exactly the same as a recording (which is rarely the case).

Schutz, M. and S. Lipscomb. "Hearing gestures, seeing music: vision influences perceived tone duration." Perception (2007), 36/6, 888-897.

Harmonic tension as meaning

A study published in Cerebral Cortex may be of interest to those who followed the recent harmonic theory bruha. The junior research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences measured the electric response potentials of listeners' brains when harmonic expectation was violated, combined with another factor of syntactic or semantic language violation. They found that both types of language violation affected different locations of brain waves, a strong argument that harmonic tension-resolution is a grammar, but also has associated meanings. The study does not reveal whether these meanings are universal, merely that individuals do interpret harmonies beyond a syntactic level. The authors presented preliminary research of this at the Neurosciences and Music conference I attended in 2005. And Dave Munger has written about this line of research.

Steinbeis, N. and S. Koelsch. "Shared neural resources between music and language indicate semantic processing of musical tension-resolution patterns." Cerebral Cortex 2007 (eprint).

"I just let gravity pull me down, I don't give a ****"

I have survived the Reach the Beach Relay, and have the medal to prove it. Our team, Go Swim, finished 197 out of 350 teams, and 70th out of 154 Mixed Open teams. We ran 203 miles in 29 hours and 30 minutes, giving a pace of 8:36 per mile. My personal pace was a little slower, though still faster than my predicted 10 minute-mile. I ran 14.8 miles in three separate legs of 3.5, 4.5, and 6.8 miles, with times of 30, 40, and 60 minutes (surprisingly these times do not involve rounding beyond a few seconds). So my overall pace was 8:47 per mile. I ran at three in the afternoon, one in the morning (50 degrees with a light rain), and eleven that same morning (just after a heavy rain, slightly warmer).

The atmosphere was crazy, about 700 vans driving around the highways and backways of New Hampshire. The vans were decorated with horses, kangaroos, shaggy dogs, lewd sayings, etc. Some running teams wore pirate hats, or tutus, or capes. You would expect that runners who agree to run 15-25 miles on three hours sleep would be more sane. And now my sore calves and I are going to bed.

*The title was a quote from one of my teammates, giving advice on how to run down hills.