Empirical Musicology Review v4 n1 Commentaries

Abstract

The work of Post and Huron (2009) is an example of how the received wisdom in musicology can be fruitfully challenged by simple empirical procedures – in this case demonstrating a counterintuitive, yet strong, relationship between the minor mode and fast tempi in the Romantic era. The fact that the authors’ explanation in terms of the emotional similarities of the minor mode with the Sturm und Drang attributes (other than “sadness”) is not wholly convincing in music-historical terms does not diminish the importance of the finding. However, there is still no resolution of the central psychological conundrum of why the minor mode is generally associated with “sadness.” And it is unclear why the authors drew on speech prosody rather than human emotion-driven and emotion-expressing movement for their tempo observations. There are other aspects of the data that require further exploration. One is the differential distribution of the associations of various tempo markings with mode across the periods of the common-practice era. Another is the 3: 1 preponderance of allegro over adagio in the authors’ search of 50,000 tracks in the ClassicsOnline.com database and the possibility that this ratio is a partial consequence of the psychological implications of the sonata form that were intuitively understood and used by composers.

Abstract

Khetrapal reviews the literature on music and autism and stresses the need for a greater focus on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying both autism and music perception. I build upon this review and discuss the strong connections between speech prosody and emotion in music. These connections imply that emotion recognition training in one domain can influence emotion recognition in the other. Understanding of emotional speech is frequently impaired in individuals with ASD, so music therapy should be explored further as a possible treatment.

Abstract

In a series of studies we have shown that movement (or vestibular stimulation) that is synchronized to every second or every third beat of a metrically ambiguous rhythm pattern biases people to perceive the meter as a march or as a waltz, respectively. Riggle (this volume) claims that we postulate an "innate", "specialized brain unit" for beat perception that is "directly" influenced by vestibular input. In fact, to the contrary, we argue that experience likely plays a large role in the development of rhythmic auditory-movement interactions, and that rhythmic processing in the brain is widely distributed and includes subcortical and cortical areas involved in sound processing and movement. Further, we argue that vestibular and auditory information are integrated at various subcortical and cortical levels along with input from other sensory modalities, and it is not clear which levels are most important for rhythm processing or, indeed, what a "direct" influence of vestibular input would mean. Finally, we argue that vestibular input to sound location mechanisms may be involved, but likely cannot explain the influence of vestibular input on the perception of auditory rhythm. This remains an empirical question for future research.

Abstract

Tierney et al. (2008) reported that musicians performed better on an auditory sequence memory task when compared to non-musicians, but the two groups did not differ in performance on a sequential visuo-spatial memory task. Schellenberg (2008) claims that these results can be attributed entirely to differences in IQ. This explanation, however, cannot account for the fact that the musicians’ advantage was modality-specific.