Music
May 5, 2008
Category: Music • Research
If you've had a lot of musical training, you can probably tell the difference between a major and minor key. If you haven't had much training, even after having the difference explained to you, you're still not likely to be able to make that determination. Listen the following clip. It plays the same melody in a major and a minor key. Can you tell which is which?
But if the question is phrased differently, even non-musicians can reliably tell the difference: When listeners are told that some music (which happens to be in a major key) sounds "happy" and other music (in a minor key) sounds "sad," non-musicians can pick out the difference. With that information in mind, do you want to change your answer about the two samples above? If you do, you're probably a non-musician. If you don't, you either got lucky in your answer, or you are a musician. Either way, it's clear that musicians process "major" and "minor" differently from non-musicians. So what's different about the mental processing of musicians and non-musicians?
A team led by Andrea Halpern created 35 short tunes like the clips above. Each tune was then modified to have a minor-key and major-key variant -- this involved changing just a few notes in each tune. Then three expert musicians rated each clip for musicality and how "major" or "minor" each clip sounded. The 24 best examples of tunes with readily-identifiable major and minor keys were selected for study.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:22 PM • Comments (21)
April 1, 2008
Category: Attention • Music • Research
Imagine yourself walking on a treadmill that starts at a reasonable pace: say, two and a half miles per hour. Every two minutes, the treadmill increases its speed by 0.2 mph: 2.7 mph, 2.9 mph, 3.1 mph, and so on. If you're in good physical condition, at some point -- usually between about 3.0 and 4.5 mph -- you'll find it more comfortable to start running instead of walking. Different individuals have different thresholds based on their fitness level and other factors, but even taking these things into account, it's difficult to explain exactly why people start running when they do. Do different people have different thresholds for pain?
Gregory Daniels and Karl Newell paid 12 physically fit college students to walk on a treadmill as it gradually increased in speed. To disguise the real purpose of the study, the students were fitted with fake oxygen consumption meters and cardiographs. They were told to walk, but to begin running as soon as it felt more comfortable. They also rated their physical exertion every two minutes by pointing to a numeric chart on the wall (remember, their mouths were covered with the oxygen consumption meters so they couldn't talk).
But most importantly, the walkers were also sometimes asked to complete simple addition and subtraction problems. Every 10 seconds, a new tape-recorded problem and answer was played, and the walkers had to raise their right hand to indicate a correct answer and raise their left hand for an incorrect answer. They repeated the experiment four times: two times with no math problems, and once each with easy (single-digit) and hard (double-digit) math problems. Here are the results:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:23 PM • Comments (18)
March 20, 2008
Category: Music • Perception • Research
Point-light displays are an amazing demonstration of how the visual system creates order out of what initially seems to be a random pattern. Take a look at this short movie (QuickTime required). Just looking at the first frame, it might be difficult to tell what's being displayed, but after watching for just a second, it all becomes quite clear:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:10 PM • Comments (11)
February 20, 2008
Category: Music • Research • Social
One of the most common "icebreaker" conversation topics is music preferences. We ask friends what they're listening to on their iPods, bloggers post playlists on their sidebars, and one of the most popular websites on the planet (MySpace) is built around sharing music. The assumption is that musical preferences can tell us something beyond what someone likes to listen to -- we believe we can judge a person's personality, fashion preferences, and more based just on the style of music they prefer.
For me, it's difficult not to form a mental picture of a person when I hear what music they listen to. A heavy metal fan evokes an entirely different mental image for me compared to a classical music buff or someone who likes religious music. But are these mental pictures accurate? Can we really make reliable judgments based just on music preferences? Until recently, very little research had been conducted on the subject.
We've discussed one such study here on Cognitive Daily, by Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling, which suggested that music preferences do correlate with some personality traits. Now Rentfrow and Gosling have conducted a new study which explores a wider range of musical styles, and focuses more on stereotypes than individual preferences.
They quizzed over 200 college students on their stereotypes of fans of one of 14 different musical genres: blues, classical, folk, jazz, alternative, heavy metal, rock, country, pop, religious, soundtracks, electronic, rap, and soul. For most genres, the judges were largely in agreement as to what the typical fan was like.
The graph below shows how the judges rated five personality traits of fans of four of the genres:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:49 PM • Comments (16)
January 8, 2008
Category: Music • Research
Listen to the following three short audio samples. Your job is to say whether the tempo (the rate at which the notes are played) is speeding up or slowing down. Even if it sounds like it's maintaining the same tempo, make your best guess as to whether it's speeding up or slowing down.
[Update: There's a new demo here. And see this correction]
Clip 1:
Clip 2:
Clip 3:
If the results here follow the pattern found in a number of studies, there should be a bias in the responses (and yes, some of the clips really are slowing down or speeding up). I'll explain what's supposed to happen later on in the post.
Music researcher Daniel Levitin (also a former music producer for acts like Carlos Santana and Blue Öyster Cult) has found, working with Perry Cook, that despite these biases in perceiving tempo for single notes, even untrained individuals have a remarkable memory for the tempo of songs they know well. They can sing them back, a capella, at almost precisely the same tempo as the recordings they hear on the radio.
If some studies have shown biases in the way we perceive tempo, then why are we so accurate with familiar songs? It's probably not due to the subtle variations in tempo produced by artists: One study had pianists play songs at several different tempos -- deliberately too slow or fast, then used a computer to speed up or slow down the tempo of the same music. Even musically trained listeners couldn't tell the difference between the artificially sped-up music and music played faster by the musicians.
Sandra Quinn and Roger Watt recently explored the phenomenon using a different method, which I'll discuss below.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:32 PM • Comments (29)
October 25, 2007
Category: Emotion • Music • Research
Take a look at these schematic faces:
Just a few simple changes to the mouth and eyebrows can create faces depicting a wide array of emotions. Face 1, for example, is clearly quite happy, and face 12 is sad. Face 7 is obviously angry. But what about face 4? Embarrassed? Happy but sleepy?
Perhaps your own emotion at the time you look at the faces might affect your understanding of the emotions the faces convey, especially when the emotional state depicted is unclear. Perhaps people suffering from clinical depression are stuck in a sort of infinite feedback loop: every face they see seems sadder than it really is, causing more negative emotions, worsening the depression.
Working with healthy college students, a team led by Antoinette L. Bouhuys manipulated their emotional states before asking them to rate the emotions depicted in pictures.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:28 PM • Comments (14)
October 10, 2007
Category: Music • Perception • Research
There are lots of people who, with training, can identify musical notes when they know the starting point -- when they hear a song starting with "C," they can name the rest of the notes in the song. But much rarer is the ability to identify musical notes without
any context. This is what people are talking about when they talk about "perfect pitch" or "absolute pitch."
Let's do a quick test to get a rough sense of how many CogDaily readers have absolute pitch. Listen to this note:
Now, what note is it?
Obviously these results won't be perfect, but they should give us a general idea. I'll give the answer below so you can see how many people got it right.
But what is the nature of absolute pitch? Do people with "absolute pitch" ever make mistakes? Does the ability change as we age? A team led by E. Alexandra Athos recently published the results of the largest-ever study of absolute pitch. They collected data from over 2,000 individuals, 981 of whom were defined as having absolute pitch. They're
still collecting data online, and you can participate -- even if you don't have perfect pitch. So what did they find?
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:32 PM • Comments (30)
May 15, 2007
Category: Development / Aging • Movement and exercise • Music • Research
When Greta earned her Ph.D. 13 years ago, Jim was two and a half years old, and Nora was just 10 months old. Jim knew a few words, and Nora couldn't talk at all. You might think a baby as young as Nora wouldn't have an appreciation for music or dance. If you can't walk, what good is dancing?
But babies -- and Nora was no exception -- love to be bounced. Bouncing her on your knee would elicit peals of laughter. Is this love of rhythmic bouncing somehow related to an appreciation of music?
Jessica Phillips-Silver and Laurel Trainor developed an ingenious study to see if babies even younger than Nora in this picture could appreciate musical rhythm. Seven-month-old babies sat on experimenters' laps for two minutes while a simple rhythm was played:
Half the babies were bounced every other beat, and the rest of the babies were bounced on every third beat.
Then the babies were allowed to control the music themselves, based on where they looked. A light flashed, signaling the music was ready to start. The music started as soon as they looked at the light, and stopped when they looked away. Half the time the music was accented in the same pattern as the babies had been bounced earlier, so when the babies had been bounced every other beat it sounded something like this:
The other half the time it was accented every third beat:
So which music did the babies play longer? Here are the results:
The first two columns show the results of the initial experiment. Babies listened longer to the music that matched the bouncing pattern they had been exposed to previously. The experiment was repeated with the babies blindfolded during training, to make sure that it was the motion of the baby and not the visual stimulus of the "world" bouncing up and down that cause the effect. The results were the same. Finally, it was repeated once more when an experimenter bounced with the music as the baby watched. In this case babies expressed no preference.
Phillips-Silver and Trainor argue that this illustrates that there's a strong connection between body movement and rhythm even in babies as young as seven months old. So something like an appreciation for dance develops before babies can walk or talk!
Phill-Silver, J., & Trainor, L.J. (2005). Feeling the beat: Movement influences infant rhythm perception. Science, 308, 1430.
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:59 PM • Comments (3)
February 8, 2007
Category: Attention • Language • Music • Research
Recently I attended a concert featuring the premier of an up-and-coming composer's work. She gave a brief talk before her piece was played, during which she explained the complex symbology of her work. The musical notes weren't just noises; they were intended to convey a meaning above and beyond a mere sequence of sounds. But if her music really did convey such deep meaning, why did she have to explain it to the audience beforehand? Can music ever express semantic meaning directly, without requiring a composer or someone else to "translate" for us?
Certainly not all music is as difficult to interpret as the piece I heard that night, which featured such innovations as playing every note on the scale simultaneously on different instruments (I've already forgotten what this was supposed to signify). The Flight of the Bumblebee, for example, really does sound sort of like a bumblebee. Do people who don't know that work's title think of bees the first time they hear it? Perhaps more importantly, if they do think of bees, are they thinking about them the same way as if they'd heard the word "bumblebee," or does musical "meaning" necessarily differ from meaning expressed in words?
A team led by Stefan Koelsch believes they have designed a set of experiments that can answer these questions. The experiments rely on a known brain response to "semantic priming." Priming occurs when we are exposed to a word. Continuing with the "bee" example, if we read the word "bee," and then are asked to perform some sort of task on a related word or concept, we work faster and more accurately. We might, for example, be faster at unscrambling the letters VEIH to form the word "hive." We have been primed to think about bees, and so we're better at dealing with bee-related concepts, from honey to stings. But what if we heard Flight of the Bumblebee for the first time, without being told what the song was about? Would we still be better at handling bee-related language? In other words, does bee music prime as effectively as the word bee?
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Posted by Dave Munger at 6:29 PM • Comments (23)
November 29, 2006
Category: Music • Perception • Research
One of the unanswered questions in Krista Hyde and Isabelle Peretz's research on amusia ("tone-deafness") is why amusics frequently say they are unable to clap to the rhythm of a song, or to dance well. In Hyde and Peretz's study, amusics could detect rhythm changes as well as normal individuals, even while being unable to detect changes in musical pitch.
Hyde and Peretz speculated that amusics might not be able to detect rhythm changes when the pitch of the notes change -- that their problems with rhythm might be directly related to the fact that amusics can't detect many changes in pitch. But there is another possibility. Perhaps Hyde and Peretz's rhythm test was too simple: it involved playing five identical notes at a constant rate, then changing the timing of one note in the sequence. So it's also possible that amusics have difficulty only with more complex rhythmic structures.
A team led by Jessica Foxton has developed an elegant way to test these two hypotheses. They created four types of rhythmic sequences, each just five notes long. The first, most basic sequence was just five identical notes, played at a constant rate. The second sequence made the rhythm slightly more complex by alternating between tones repeated rapidly and slowly. The final two sequences had the same rhythm as the first two, but instead of playing the same tone, each note was randomly varied.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 10:48 AM • Comments (5)
November 15, 2006
Category: Learning and testing • Music • Research
There was some doubt as to whether the "tone-deafness" test I linked to Monday really tests for amusia. The defining trait of amusia is the inability to discern the difference between different musical pitches. So here's a test that might generate a more clear-cut result. The following track plays five sequences of five notes. In every case, four of the notes are the same. The only note that ever varies is the second-to-last note. Ideally, these sequences would be played in a random order, but for a quick-and-dirty test, I'm going to gradually increase the pitch of the fourth note in the sequence. Your task: listen to the recording and indicate when you notice that the fourth note is different from the rest of the notes in a sequence.
Let's make this a poll:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:48 PM • Comments (7)
November 7, 2006
Category: Music • Perception • Research
Take a look at this video of a professional drummer playing the conga:
It's easy to see that the sound coming from the drum is perfectly synchronized with the motion of the drummer's hands. Or is it? When a sound enters your ear, it takes less than 1 millisecond for the signal to be transported from the outer to the inner ear, where it can be perceived by the brain. The equivalent process in the eye takes 50 milliseconds. Then there is the matter of the physical difference in the speed of light versus sound. If the drummer is between 15 and 20 meters away, the faster travel of the light makes up for the 49-millisecond difference in processing speed. Sound produced at a longer distance -- say, 100 meters or more from the viewer -- is noticeably delayed.
But if the drummer is close by -- in this case, the camera was placed just 29 cm from the drum -- then in principle we should perceive the sound of the drum before we perceive the hand hitting the drum. And we do. Roberto Arrighi, David Alais, and David Burr have actually measured the difference between the time viewers perceive a sound and when they see the sound being made. Even more remarkably, they showed how this difference can vary under different circumstances.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 11:26 AM • Comments (6)
October 23, 2006
Category: Music • Perception • Research
There's nothing cooler for a perception researcher (or writer) than a new visual illusion. When I learned about this one, I spent half the day Thursday trying to recreate it, but I couldn't get it to work. Finally, in five minutes on Friday morning, I think I figured it out. (Update: Actually, as it turned out, I didn't figure it out at all. In the meantime, Chris from Mixing Memory pointed me to Shams' web page with much better demos. So let's try this again, using one of Shams' demos.) Play the movie and watch for a dot flashing in the middle of the screen. Make sure you've got the sound turned up on your computer -- the flash will be accompanied by beeps. How many times does the dot flash?
Let's make this one a poll:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:09 PM • Comments (16)
September 20, 2006
Category: Music • Research
In 2001, Mark Orr and Stellan Ohlsson found that experts preferred more complex bluegrass music compared to non-experts, but there was no difference in preferences with jazz music. The model they were using to describe music preferences did not appear to describe all types of music. But what if the problem wasn't the model, but the "experts"?
All the participants in the 2001 study were college students. "Experts" had an average of 9.7 years of music training. This seems like a lot, but compared to professional musicians, it's still not much. In their new study, Orr and Ohlsson recruited 22 experts with an average of 28.4 (jazz) to 32.8 (bluegrass) years of training, who had either taught or performed professionally for at least 5 years. If an expert effect was to be found, it should be found with this group.
These experts listened to the same professional improvisations that the college students had heard in 2001. They were asked to rate each improv for both perceived complexity and "liking," on a scale of 1 to 7. The experts, like the college students, rated the complexity as the musicians had intended. So it's clear that "complexity" was a similar concept for each group. But what about preference?
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Posted by Dave Munger at 12:23 PM • Comments (0)
September 19, 2006
Category: Music • Research
A week ago Friday we conducted a little survey about musical preferences. Readers were asked to listen to three different clips, then say which music they preferred. We promised you we'd be back to let you know what the preferences were, and whether they said anything about how preferences are formed.
Our survey was inspired by much more exhaustive work conducted by Mark G. Orr and Sellan Ohlsson. They are interested in the question of how expertise informs preferences. Do experienced jazz musicians like the same music as untrained listeners? One dimension you might want to consider is complexity. Who prefers more complex music--trained or untrained listeners? Research in the 1970s suggested that both groups prefer to avoid extremes. Music that is too simple or too complex is preferred less than music somewhere inbetween: the typical graph would look like this:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 8:38 AM • Comments (5)
August 31, 2006
Category: Development / Aging • Music • Research
Just by listening to music, we can learn a lot about its structures and conventions. For example, even you have no musical training, you can tell that something is wrong with this scale (it's followed by a proper C-major scale):
But we learn a lot more than just standard scales when we listen to music. When you're exposed to a particular type of music for many years, you learn much more. Consider the following sequence of chords:
Anyone who's been raised listening to Western music should recognize this sequence as an appropriate musical phrase (if you don't read music, don't worry -- I'll play it for you in a moment).
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:32 PM • Comments (32)
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