Musics, Cultures and Meanings: Music as Communication

This commentary explores interpretations of concepts that lie at the focus of Richard Widdess's paper—"music", and "culture"—with the aim of specifying frameworks within which issues of musical meaning can fruitfully be addressed

Communicative Development: Neonate Crying Reflects Patterns of Native-Language Speech

SummaryThe crying behaviours of newborn infants are shown to be surprisingly sophisticated, reflecting generic prosodic features of their native languages

Meaning and Entrainment in Language and Music Special Issue: Introduction

overview of special double issu

Comments on "Facilitation and Coherence Between the Dynamic and Retrospective Perception of Segmentation in Computer-Generated Music," by Freya Bailes and Roger T. Dean

Although the study by Bailes & Dean (2007) addresses an underresearched area of auditory and musical perception, it raises questions concerning stimuli, methodology, and the study's relation to previous research, that are outlined in this commentary

Investigating Everyday Musical Interaction During COVID-19: An Experimental Procedure for Exploring Collaborative Playlist Engagement.

Musical Group Interaction (MGI) has been found to promote prosocial tendencies, including empathy, across various populations. However, experimental study is lacking in respect of effects of everyday forms of musical engagement on prosocial tendencies, as well as whether key aspects-such as physical co-presence of MGI participants-are necessary to enhance prosocial tendencies. We developed an experimental procedure in order to study online engagement with collaborative playlists and to investigate socio-cognitive components of prosocial tendencies expected to increase as a consequence of engagement. We aimed to determine whether mere perceived presence of a partner during playlist-making could elicit observable correlates of social processing implicated in both MGI and prosocial behaviors more generally and identify the potential roles of demographic, musical, and inter-individual differences. Preliminary results suggest that for younger individuals, some of the social processes involved in joint music-making and implicated in empathic processes are likely to be elicited even by an assumption of virtual co-presence. In addition, individual differences in styles of listening behavior may mediate the effects of mere perceived partner presence on recognition memory

White spaces, music notation and the facilitation of sight-reading.

The use of interword separation has consistently been proven to enhance fluency in reading language scripts. At the same time, neurophysiological evidence has shown that music and language scripts can activate very similar neural circuitry that integratively encodes the symbols that comprise them. By analogy to interword separations in language, we hypothesize that visual separation cues in musical scores should facilitate music reading. We report an experiment in which separating short fragments of musical discourse by vertical white gaps in the notation enhanced sight-reading fluency by significantly reducing the number of mistakes that musicians made when reading the scores without previous preparation. These results are in accordance with a view of music reading as sharing cognitive strategies with language reading; they have significant implications for our understanding of the acquisition of musical literacy and for the design of musical scores, and for our knowledge of the sense-making processes involved in reading in general

Joint rhythmic tapping elicits distinct emotions depending on tap timing and prior musical training.

Music plays a significant role in human life. It is a form of art and entertainment and a powerful medium for interpersonal interaction. The experience of listening to music is often emotional. Previous research has elucidated many of the mechanisms that effect an emotional response in the listener. In contrast, much less is known about how joint musical engagement impacts emotions. Here we focus on synchronized rhythmic interaction, a fundamental feature of musical engagement. There are theoretical reasons for hypothesizing that synchronized interaction should elicit positive affect among interacting individuals, although empirical studies performed with adults have found little consistent evidence for such an effect. We revisited this question, studying children instead of adults, and used an implicit measure of experienced affect to compare children's responses to synchronized versus asynchronized joint tapping. Unlike previous studies, we distinguished between musically trained and untrained participants, because a background of musical training may be associated with altered emotional sensitivities to rhythmic interaction. We found a striking difference in emotional responses to synchronized versus asynchronized tapping, which strongly depended on musical training background. The untrained children responded to synchrony with more positive affect and less negative affect when compared to asynchrony, in line with theoretical predictions. In contrast, the musically trained children showed low positive affect following both synchrony and asynchrony and more negative affect in response to synchrony rather than asynchrony. These results suggest a possible emotional dissociation between synchronized and asynchronized interpersonal rhythmic interaction that may be influenced by musical training background. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).John Templeton Foundatio

Effects on Inter-Personal Memory of Dancing in Time with Others.

We report an experiment investigating whether dancing to the same music enhances recall of person-related memory targets. The experiment used 40 dancers (all of whom were unaware of the experiment's aim), two-channel silent-disco radio headphones, a marked-up dance floor, two types of music, and memory targets (sash colors and symbols). In each trial, 10 dancers wore radio headphones and one of four different colored sashes, half of which carried cat symbols. Using silent-disco technology, one type of music was surreptitiously transmitted to half the dancers, while music at a different tempo was transmitted to the remaining dancers. Pre-experiment, the dancers' faces were photographed. Post-experiment, each dancer was presented with the photographs of the other dancers and asked to recall their memory targets. Results showed that same-music dancing significantly enhanced memory for sash color and sash symbol. Our findings are discussed in light of recent eye-movement research that showed significantly increased gaze durations for people observing music-dance synchrony versus music-dance asynchrony, and in relation to current literature on interpersonal entrainment, group cohesion, and social bonding

Music in Culture and Evolution

Al considerar las relaciones prospectivas entre la música y el pensamiento evolutivo es necesario articular claramente a qué nos referimos cuando usamos el término ‘música’. Las investigaciones antropológicas, y crecientemente, cognitivas y neurocientíficas, sugieren que el término posee una aplicabilidad amplia que va más allá de las concepciones convencionales de la música como mero entretenimiento. A través de las culturas, la música se presenta activa, interactiva e insertada en un rango amplio de actividades sociales; parece ser un rasgo tan “normal” como el lenguaje en la interacción humana. Sin embargo, a diferencia del lenguaje, los significados de la música, paradójicamente, parecen ser naturales -la música parece significar lo que suena- y al mismo tiempo indeterminados en su fundación. Este capítulo argumentaráque esta paradoja está en el corazón del rol de la música en la interacción humana. Partiendo de la premisa de que la música se manifiesta en situaciones donde el foco está puesto en la interacción social como un fin en sí mismo (y no como un medio hacia un fin), se sugerirá que la música puede ser mejor conceptualizada como un medio de comunicación que posee rasgos que son óptimos para el manejo de situaciones de incertidumbre social. Se propondrá que puede darse cuenta de al menos algunos de los aspectos del significado en la música a través de su explotación de los mecanismos de comunicación que en otras especies subyacen al fenómeno de “señalización honesta”. Puede postularse que otras raíces de los rasgos del significado musical se hallan en las regularidades específicas de la especie que aparecen en el mapeo entre el afecto y la vocalización humana, mientras que otros emergen como el resultado de las dinámicas contingentes del proceso cultural. Así, la música incorpora dimensiones de significado múltiples con diferentes raíces evolutivas. La disponibilidad simultánea de las tres dimensiones del significado musical dotan a la experiencia de la música de una intencionalidad flotante -la música parece tratar sobre ‘algo’, pero el objeto de ese ‘sobre algo’ es ambiguo-, mientras que la operación de sensibilidades comunicativas generales de la especie le permite a la música la apariencia de una “señal honesta”. Al mismo tiempo, los procesos cognitivos y de comportamiento que permiten que los humanos aliñen sus acciones y sonidos entre sí en el tiempo dentro de un marco de trabajo comúnmente experimentado de pulsos temporalmente regulares y que puede ser específico de los humanos imparten un sentido de afiliación mutua a la experiencia musical colectiva. La música puede ser concebida como un medio de comunicación que es tan vital como el lenguaje para la vida social humana y para las concepciones y compromisos de los humanos con la espiritualidad humana.When considering the prospective relationships between music and evolutionary thinking, it is necessary articulate clearly just what we mean by the term ‘music’. Anthropological, and increasingly, cognitive and neuroscientific, research suggests that the term has a broad applicability beyond conventional conceptions of music as mere entertainment. Across cultures, music appears active, interactive and embedded in a wide range of social activities; it appears to be as ‘normal’ a feature of human interaction as language. However, unlike language, music’s meanings appear, paradoxically, both natural—music seems to mean like it sounds—and at the same time foundationally indeterminate. This chapter will argue that this paradox is at the heart of music’s role in human interaction. Starting from the premise that music manifests itself in situations where the focus is on social interaction as an end in itself (rather than as a means towards an end), it will suggest that music can best be conceptualised as a communicative medium that has features which are optimal for the management of situations of social uncertainty. It will propose that at least some aspects of meaning in music can be accounted for by its exploitation of communicative mechanisms which, in other species, underlie the phenomenon of ‘honest signalling’. Further features of musical meaning can be postulated to stem from species-specific regularities in the mapping between affect and human vocalisation, while yet others emerge as a result of the contingent dynamics of cultural process. Music thus incorporates multiple dimensions of meaning with different evolutionary roots. The simultaneous availability of all three dimensions of musical meaning endow the experience of music with floating intentionality—music appears to be ‘about’ something’, but the object of the ‘aboutness’ is ambiguous—while the operation of species-general communicative sensitivities affords music the appearance of an ‘honest signal’. At the same time, cognitive and behavioural processes that enable humans to align their actions and sounds in time with each other within a commonly experienced framework of temporally regular pulses and that may be specific to humans impart a sense of mutual affiliativeness to a collective musical experience. Music can be conceived of as a communicative medium that is as vital as language for human social life, and for human conceptions, of and engagements, with human spirituality.Sociedad Argentina para las Ciencias Cognitivas de la Música (SACCoM

Gebrukothuria profundus, a new genus and species of laetmogonid holothurian (Elasipodida, Laetmogonidae) from around the Crozet Plateau in the Southern Indian Ocean

A new genus and species of laetmogonid holothurian (Elasipodida, Laetmogonidae), collected from around the Crozet Plateau in the Southern Indian Ocean, is described. It differs from other members of the family in that the body wall lacks the wheel-shaped calcareous deposits completely. Instead only rods are present. The genus is also distinguished by the combination of other morphological characters lacking in other known genera: absence of circum-oral and ventrolateral papillae together with development of midventral tube feet. All other members of the family Laetmogonidae are known to have wheel-shaped deposits, therefore diagnosis of the family is refined