Behavioural
§ Test the efficacy of this new stimuli paradigm
§ Explicit structural dependencies in new paradigm allow for more precise manipulations
§ Participants are presented with the four-chord sequences.
§ Make judgments whether the final two chords of each sequence were the same of different
Ø Task directly addresses prolongational relationship between target chords Ø Also expected to expose effects from non-local relations within preceding
context
§ Anticipation created by constructed prolongational relationships is hypothesized to affect judgment task reaction times
Ø Analogous to psycholinguistic lexical decision studies (Wright & Garrett, 1984)
Electrophysiological
§ Neural tracking experiments
§ Investigate the processing of structural violations and hierarchy-building in music § Prior research has identified and studied the brain’s event-related potentials (ERPs)
associated with unexpected harmonic events in a musical sequence (Loui et al., 2005) § Time-course approach taken by Ding et al. (2015) serves as a promising framework
for investigating intermediate levels of musical hierarchies
Towards Investigating
Hierarchical Structures in Music
§ Language and music are highly sophisticated, uniquely-human faculties (Jackendoff, 2009; Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983; Patel, 2007).
§ Words are grouped into abstract, conceptual categories (nouns, verbs; parts of speech) and assembled based on implicit structural rules.
§ Similar structural patterns have been noted in music.
Ø The communicative ability, sonic properties and categorization differ however.
§ Both domains combine discrete sound units into larger forms.
§ Relationships between units in either domain are not purely sequential however.
Ø Connections are formed between events of relative structural importance and form complex hierarchies (Jackendoff, 2009; Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983; Patel, 2007).
Ø Long-distance dependencies regularly occur between non-adjacent units in language, as in Figure 1.
Ø A ready analogy in music comes from tonal relations, systems of keys and modes, shared across musical passages or even whole pieces, as in Figure 2.
❸ Previous Approaches
❹ Developing a New Stimulus Paradigm
Hierarchical processing in language
§ Ding, Melloni, Zhang, Tian, & Poeppel (2015) looked at processing of hierarchical relationships in language.
Ø Compared electromagnetic patterns of brain activity across durations of differently-structured sentences.
Ø Manipulated how words were grouped into intermediate levels of syntactic structure (noun and verb phrases — NPs and VPs; see Figure 3).
Ø Peaks of brain activity were correlated with the time course of phrase-level syntactic constituents, not only at word and sentence levels.
Adapting linguistic approaches to the musical domain
§ Though categorical grammar violations are easily found in language, even highly-marked deviants within a musical sequence may find “resolution” in context.
Ø A sense of grammaticality in music must permit a greater degree of
ambiguity, incorporating “preference” (understood tendencies of various musical elements to suggest certain analyses) and hard-and-fast rules of “well-formedness“ (whether a structure is acceptable)(Jackendoff, 2009; Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983).
§ Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983), or GTTM,
applies concepts from the fields of linguistic syntax, musical theory and cognitive science to create a new approach for analyzing musical structure.
Ø Can serve as a framework for new experimental methodologies of investigating hierarchical processing.
Ø Culminates in a system for reducing musical works to “prolongational” relationships.
§ Implied continued perception of important and stable musical events while the musical surface (the actual notes being played) changes.
§ “Tensing” and “relaxing” observed by a listener.
Ø Uses generative rules of well-formedness and preference, relating musical events through:
§ Strong prolongation (exact repetition)
§ Weak prolongation (different harmonic roots — bass and melody notes) § Progression (changes in pitch content)
Ø Resulting analyses can be represented using linear or tree diagram representations (see Figure 4).
§ The current project involved developing a new experimental stimulus paradigm for the study of structural processing in music based on:
Ø GTTM’s system of prolongational reduction (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983) Ø 4-word stimuli approach used by Ding el al. (2015) for online sentence
processing
Ø 5-chord paradigms used to investigate musical structure (Koelsch, Fritz,
Schulz, Alsop, & Schlaug, 2005; Loui, Grent-’t-Jong, Torpey, & Woldorff, 2005) § Sequences of four chords were composed, varying in their underlying
prolongational structures (as prescribed by GTTM) Ø Results in a total of 30 possible tree structures
Ø One chord of each block serves as a prolongational “head”, the most stable event in the hierarchy; other chords act as recursive elaborations of the head Ø Duration, intensity, timbre and articulation are kept uniform during
experimental presentation, minimizing their confounding impact on grouping and metrical analyses, which influence prolongational structure
Ø Prolongational relationships here are therefore based primarily on: § Pitch content (whether notes are shared between two chords) § Register (inversion of harmonic roots and octave displacement) § Harmonic distance (based on the ‘circle of fifths’)
§ Melodic tendencies
Ø For this project, sequences were only created for structures with the first chord serving as the prolongational head
§ Type of elaboration of final (target) chord was varied
§ Additional sequences with different musical surface structures were added for some certain hierarchies to facilitate experimental
counterbalancing
§ 45 blocks were ultimately composed for the current paradigm (ask the presenter for a diagram of the complete paradigm).
❺ Experimental Applications
References
Acknowledgments
Lee Whitehorne lwhitey@uvic.ca Department of Linguistics University of Victoria March 6th, 2019I would like to extend a great thanks to Dr. Martha McGinnis for involving me in this research and for organizing a budding music and syntax lab. I am also very grateful to our other
interdisciplinary lab members—Christy, Isabel and Juan—and our many esteemed guests for their ongoing support,
encouragement and fresh perspectives.
The Sweet
Sounds
of Syntax
§ The purpose of the current research is to develop new ways of investigating the cognitive foundations of structures in music and language.
§ I propose a hierarchy-centred methodology for studying structural processing of music.
The dogs that had white spots chased the cats
Ding, N., Melloni, L., Zhang, H., Tian, X., & Poeppel, D. (2015). Cortical tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures in connected speech. Nature Neuroscience, 19, 158-164. https://doi.org/10.1038/no.4186 Jackendoff, R. (2009). Parallels and nonparallels between language and music. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 26(3), 195-204. http://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2009.26.3.195
Koelsch, S., Fritz, T., Schulz, K., Alsop, D., & Schlaug, G. (2005). Adults and children processing music: An fMRI study. NeuroImage, 25(4), 1068-1076. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.12.050 Lerdahl, F., & Jackendoff, R. S. (1983). A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Loui, P., Grent-’t-Jong, T., Torpey, D., & Woldorff, M. (2005). Effects of attention on syntax processing in music and language. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(9), 2252-2267. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2010.21542 Patel, A. D. (2007). Music, Language and the Brain. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Wright, B., & Garrett, M. (1984). Lexical decision in sentences: Effects of syntactic structure. Memory & Cognition, 12(1), 31-45. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196995
This research was supported by the Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Award Supervised by Dr. Martha McGinnis
Figure 1. Example of long-distance dependencies
in language. Figure 2. Example of long-distance dependencies in music (in/out-of-key chords).
Dogs
chase swift cats
§ The paradigm described here does fall into the unfortunate trend of focussing
exclusively on a musical idiom of the Western European common-practice (classical) tradition (Jackendoff, 2009; Koelsch et al., 2005; Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983; Loui et al., 2005; Patel, 2007).
Ø The neural mechanisms for processing musical structures are presumably shared across the human species.
Ø However, the elements that comprise music — pitch, rhythm, timbre and more — play different structural roles across cultures and traditions.
Ø For example, the importance of harmony in Western music is quite unique among the world’s musics.
§ GTTM’s rules and abstract structural patterns are non-idiom-specific. Ø It may be possible to develop paradigms based on other musical
traditions/vocabularies based on the methodology described here.
Ø From there, we can better investigate how structure is processed universally, as well as what neuropsychological effects a native-like familiarity with
musical idioms may create.
❻ Different Musical Idioms
❶ Purpose
❷ Background
The dogs
chase cats
The small dogs
bark
Figure 3. Example sentences with varied syntactic structures, represented with tree diagrams.
Figure 4. Example chord sequences with varied structures, represented with tree diagrams.
NP V Adj N NP VP S D N V NP VP NP S D Adj N VP NP S
Scan with your phone to hear examples!
