117 research outputs found
Prosody beyond pitch and emotion in speech and music: evidence from right hemisphere brain damage and congenital amusia
This dissertation examines the relationship of prosodic processing in language and music from a new perspective, considering acoustic features that have not been studied before in the framework of the parallel study of language and music. These features are argued to contribute to the effect of âexpressivenessâ which is here defined as the combination of the acoustic features (variation in duration, pitch, loudness, and articulation) that results in aesthetic appreciation of the linguistic and the musical acoustic stream and which is distinct from pitch, emotional and pragmatic prosody as well as syntactic structure.
The present investigation took a neuropsychological approach, comparing the performance of a right temporo-parietal stroke patient IB; a congenitally amusic individual, BZ; and 24 control participants with and without musical training. Apart from the main focus on the perception of âexpressivenessâ, additional aspects of language and music perception were studied. A new battery was designed that consisted of 8 tasks; âspeech prosody detectionâ, âexpressive speech prosodyâ, âexpressive music prosodyâ, âemotional speech prosodyâ, âemotional music prosody, âspeech pitchâ, âspeech rateâ, and âmusic tempoâ. These tasks addressed both theoretical and methodological issues in this comparative cognitive framework.
IBâs performance on the expressive speech prosody task revealed a severe perceptual impairment, whereas his performance on the analogous music task examining âexpressivenessâ was unimpaired. BZ also performed successfully on the same music task despite being characterised as congenital amusic by an earlier study. Musically untrained controls also had a successful performance. The data from IB suggest that speech and music stimuli encompassing similar features are not necessarily processed by the same mechanisms. These results can have further implications for the approach to the relationship of language and music within the study of cognitive deficits
Preserved appreciation of aesthetic elements of speech and music prosody in an amusic individual: A holistic approach
We present a follow-up study on the case of a Greek amusic adult, B.Z., whose impaired performance on scale, contour, interval, and meter was reported by Paraskevopoulos, Tsapkini, and Peretz in 2010, employing a culturally-tailored version of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia. In the present study, we administered a novel set of perceptual judgement tasks designed to investigate the ability to appreciate holistic prosodic aspects of âexpressivenessâ and emotion in phrase length music and speech stimuli. Our results show that, although diagnosed as a congenital amusic, B.Z. scored as well as healthy controls (N = 24) on judging âexpressivenessâ and emotional prosody in both speech and music stimuli. These findings suggest that the ability to make perceptual judgements about such prosodic qualities may be preserved in individuals who demonstrate difficulties perceiving basic musical features such as melody or rhythm. B.Z.âs case yields new insights into amusia and the processing of speech and music prosody through a holistic approach. The employment of novel stimuli with relatively fewer non-naturalistic manipulations, as developed for this study, may be a useful tool for revealing unexplored aspects of music and speech cognition and offer the possibility to further the investigation of the perception of acoustic streams in more authentic auditory conditions
Music and language expressiveness: When emotional character does not suffice: the dimension of expressiveness in the cognitive processing of music and language
Book synopsis: In recent decades, the relationship between music, emotions, health and well-being has become a hot topic. Scientific research and new neuro-imaging technologies have provided extraordinary new insights into how music affects our brains and bodies, and researchers in fields ranging from psychology and music therapy to history and sociology have turned their attention to the question of how music relates to mind, body, feelings and health, generating a wealth of insights as well as new challenges. Yet this work is often divided by discipline and methodology, resulting in parallel, yet separate discourses.
In this context, The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Well-being seeks to foster truly interdisciplinary approaches to key questions about the nature of musical experience and to demonstrate the importance of the conceptual and ideological frameworks underlying research in this field. Incorporating perspectives from musicology, history, psychology, neuroscience, music education, philosophy, sociology, linguistics and music therapy, this volume opens the way for a generative dialogue across both scientific and humanistic scholarship.
The Companion is divided into two sections. The chapters in the first, historical section consider the varied ways in which music, the emotions, well-being and their interactions have been understood in the past, from Antiquity to the twentieth century, shedding light on the intellectual origins of debates that continue today. The chapters in the second, contemporary section offer a variety of current scientific perspectives on these topics and engage wider philosophical problems. The Companion ends with chapters that explore the practical application of music in healthcare, education and welfare, drawing on work on music as a social and ecological phenomenon.
Contextualising contemporary scientific research on music within the history of ideas, this volume provides a unique overview of what it means to study music in relation to the mind and well-being
Beyond existing prosodic dichotomies: perception of aesthetic prosodic properties of speech and music in a right-hemisphere stroke patient
Speech and music processing impairments have been studied in parallel through the investigation of atomistic features such as pitch and duration and gestalt aspects of emotion. The present study explores another holistic dimension of speech and music prosody here termed âexpressiveness.â Novel tasks were designed to investigate whether such hitherto unexplored prosodic aspects of speech and music display processing differences. Five perceptual judgement tasks were employed, two of which involved music and speech stimuli manipulations of âexpressivenessâ. Effort was made to maintain more of their natural acoustic complexity, avoiding manipulations which derive music-like stimuli from speech tokens to artificially match items. We examined the performance of IB, an individual who had a right temporo-parietal lesion with frontal extension and compared his performance with 24 neurotypical controls on these prosodic judgements. IBâs performance was found to be comparable to that of neurotypical controls on a perceptual discrimination task of âexpressive music prosodyâ, outperforming one-third of them, whereas he displayed severely impaired performance on âexpressive speech prosodyâ. These results suggest that some prosodic elements may be perceived differently across the domains of language and music. Based on other inter-task comparisons, it is also proposed that the interplay among prosodic features such as loudness and duration might lead to different holistic processing between emotional prosody and âexpressiveâ prosodic qualities in the speech domain. Inevitably, the current work only provides preliminary evidence and future research with more patients sharing a lesion profile similar to that of IB is warranted
Auditory imagery in congenital amusia
Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder affecting various aspects of music and speech processing. Although perception and auditory imagery in the general population may share mechanisms, it is not known whether previously documented perceptual impairments in amusia are coupled with difficulties in imaging auditory objects. We employed the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale (BAIS) to assess participantsâ self-perceived voluntary imagery and a short earworm questionnaire to gauge their subjective experience of involuntary musical imagery. A total of 32 participants with amusia and 34 matched controls, recruited based on their performance on the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), filled out the questionnaires in their own time. The earworm scores of amusic participants were not statistically significantly different from those of controls. By contrast, their scores on vividness and control of auditory imagery were significantly lower relative to controls. Overall, results suggest that the presence of amusia may not have an adverse effect on generating involuntary musical imageryâat the level of self-reportâbut still significantly reduces the individualâs self-rated voluntary imagery of musical, vocal, and environmental sounds. We discuss the findings in the light of previous research on explicit musical judgments and implicit engagement with music, while also touching on some statistical power considerations
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Exploring the role of singing, semantics, and amusia screening in speech-in-noise perception in musicians and non-musicians
Sentence repetition has been the focus of extensive psycholinguistic research. The notion that music training can bolster speech perception in adverse auditory conditions has been met with mixed results. In this work, we sought to gauge the effect of babble noise on immediate repetition of spoken and sung phrases of varying semantic content (expository, narrative, and anomalous), initially in 100 English-speaking monolinguals with and without music training. The two cohorts also completed some non-musical cognitive tests and the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA). When disregarding MBEA results, musicians were found to significantly outperform non-musicians in terms of overall repetition accuracy. Sung targets were recalled significantly better than spoken ones across groups in the presence of babble noise. Sung expository targets were recalled better than spoken expository ones, and semantically anomalous content was recalled more poorly in noise. Rerunning the analysis after eliminating thirteen participants who were diagnosed with amusia showed no significant group differences. This suggests that the notion of enhanced speech perception â in noise or otherwise â in musicians needs to be evaluated with caution. Musicianship aside, this study showed for the first time that sung targets presented in babble noise seem to be recalled better than spoken ones. We discuss the present design and the methodological approach of screening for amusia as factors which may partially account for some of the mixed results in the field
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Auditory imagery in congenital amusia
Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder affecting various aspects of music and speech processing. Although perception and auditory imagery in the general population may share mechanisms, it is not known whether previously documented perceptual impairments in amusia are coupled with difficulties in imaging auditory objects. We employed the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale (BAIS) to assess participantsâ self-perceived voluntary imagery and a short earworm questionnaire to gauge their subjective experience of involuntary musical imagery. Thirty-two participants with amusia and 34 matched controls, recruited based on their performance on the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), filled out the questionnaires in their own time. The earworm scores of amusic participants were not statistically significantly different from those of controls. By contrast, their scores on vividness and control of auditory imagery were significantly lower relative to controls. Overall, results suggest that the presence of amusia may not have an adverse effect on generating involuntary musical imagery â at the level of self-report â but still significantly reduces the individualâs self-rated voluntary imagery of musical, vocal, and environmental sounds. We discuss the findings in the light of previous research on explicit musical judgements and implicit engagement with music, while also touching on some statistical power considerations
GO Explorer: A gene-ontology tool to aid in the interpretation of shotgun proteomics data
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Spectral counting is a shotgun proteomics approach comprising the identification and relative quantitation of thousands of proteins in complex mixtures. However, this strategy generates bewildering amounts of data whose biological interpretation is a challenge.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we present a new algorithm, termed GO Explorer (GOEx), that leverages the gene ontology (GO) to aid in the interpretation of proteomic data. GOEx stands out because it combines data from protein fold changes with GO over-representation statistics to help draw conclusions. Moreover, it is tightly integrated within the PatternLab for Proteomics project and, thus, lies within a complete computational environment that provides parsers and pattern recognition tools designed for spectral counting. GOEx offers three independent methods to query data: an interactive directed acyclic graph, a specialist mode where key words can be searched, and an automatic search. Its usefulness is demonstrated by applying it to help interpret the effects of perillyl alcohol, a natural chemotherapeutic agent, on glioblastoma multiform cell lines (A172). We used a new multi-surfactant shotgun proteomic strategy and identified more than 2600 proteins; GOEx pinpointed key sets of differentially expressed proteins related to cell cycle, alcohol catabolism, the Ras pathway, apoptosis, and stress response, to name a few.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>GOEx facilitates organism-specific studies by leveraging GO and providing a rich graphical user interface. It is a simple to use tool, specialized for biologists who wish to analyze spectral counting data from shotgun proteomics. GOEx is available at <url>http://pcarvalho.com/patternlab</url>.</p
Phrase-final words in Greek storytelling speech: a study on the effect of a culturally-specific prosodic feature on short-term memory
Prosodic patterns of speech appear to make a critical contribution to memoryrelated
processing. We considered the case of a previously unexplored prosodic feature of
Greek storytelling and its effect on free recall in thirty typically developing children between
the ages of 10 and 12 years, using short ecologically valid auditory stimuli. The combination
of a falling pitch contour and, more notably, extensive final-syllable vowel lengthening,
which gives rise to the prosodic feature in question, led to statistically significantly higher
performance in comparison to neutral phrase-final prosody. Number of syllables in target
words did not reveal substantial difference in performance. The current study presents a
previously undocumented culturally-specific prosodic pattern and its effect on short-term
memory
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