processing structure in language and music

springer |  The relationship between structural processing in music and language has received increasing interest in the past several years, spurred by the influential Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH; Patel, Nature Neuroscience, 6, 674–681, 2003). According to this resource-sharing framework, music and language rely on separable syntactic representations but recruit shared cognitive resources to integrate these representations into evolving structures. The SSIRH is supported by findings of interactions between structural manipulations in music and language. However, other recent evidence suggests that such interactions also can arise with nonstructural manipulations, and some recent neuroimaging studies report largely nonoverlapping neural regions involved in processing musical and linguistic structure. These conflicting results raise the question of exactly what shared (and distinct) resources underlie musical and linguistic structural processing. This paper suggests that one shared resource is prefrontal cortical mechanisms of cognitive control, which are recruited to detect and resolve conflict that occurs when expectations are violated and interpretations must be revised. By this account, musical processing involves not just the incremental processing and integration of musical elements as they occur, but also the incremental generation of musical predictions and expectations, which must sometimes be overridden and revised in light of evolving musical input.

the rise of the nipster

rollingstone | Coincidentally or not, the emergence of the nipster has taken place at the same time as the rise of a new far-right political scene in Europe: In this May's European elections, the National Front — the anti-immigrant party headed by Marine Le Pen — won the biggest voting share of parties in the French elections, and the British United Kingdom Independence Party won 27.5 percent of the vote in the U.K. Many people link these parties' success to their ability to package themselves as a friendlier, less-threatening far right. Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde has argued that these parties largely swept into power by linking the euro crisis "to their core ideological features: nativism, authoritarianism and populism." 

The current German wave of, for instance, hip, vegan neo-Nazis functions in a similar way. Rafael says they attempt to slide into debates where young people wouldn't expect them, and then sell their politics as a palatable outlet. "They use subjects like globalization and animal protection as entry points, and then offer a very simple worldview that makes complex subjects very easy to understand," says Rafael. "Of course, in the end, it's always about racism and anti-Semitism and nationalism."  The danger — in both cases — is that extreme-right positions might quietly shift into the mainstream.

Over the past two years, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, an associate professor at American University in Washington, D.C., has been conducting research with young people in Berlin schools who are on the periphery of the extreme-right. She says that, if anything, the change in neo-Nazi fashion has made it more difficult to step in when young people are being embroiled in the scene. "If you were a teacher," she says, "you used to be able to identify a skinhead in your class and you could think of ways to intervene. But now it's harder to mainstream society to understand who these young people are and to engage with them."

Miller-Idriss suggests that for a generation raised on Facebook and Twitter, it may no longer feel ridiculous to, say, love Rihanna in real life but disparage black people on Facebook. "The social media space allows young people to have different expressions of their identities in different places," she says. "This generation of youth likes the idea of having more control over their own identity. They've realized your style doesn't have to be connected to your ideology. You can dress however you want to and still be a neo-Nazi."

With this in mind, Koehler thinks there is a need in Germany for a new, broader educational campaign on how to identify members of the extreme right. "A short while ago we did a study with judges and lawyers, who thought they weren't encountering neo-Nazis because they weren't seeing any skinheads," he says, "but they have no idea anymore what a neo-Nazi looks like."

chimps prefer african and indian music

science20 |  When African and Indian music was played near their large outdoor enclosures, the chimps spent significantly more time in areas where they could best hear the music. When Japanese music was played, they were more likely to be found in spots where it was more difficult or impossible to hear the music. The African and Indian music in the experiment had extreme ratios of strong to weak beats, whereas the Japanese music had regular strong beats, which is also typical of Western music.

"Chimpanzees may perceive the strong, predictable rhythmic patterns as threatening, as chimpanzee dominance displays commonly incorporate repeated rhythmic sounds such as stomping, clapping and banging objects," said de Waal.

Sixteen adult chimps in two groups participated in the experiment at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University. Over 12 consecutive days for 40 minutes each morning, the groups were given the opportunity to listen to African, Indian or Japanese music playing on a portable stereo near their outdoor enclosure. Another portable stereo not playing any music was located at a different spot near the enclosure to rule out behavior that might be associated with an object rather than the music.

The different types of music were at the same volume but played in random order. Each day, researchers observed the chimps and recorded their location every two minutes with handwritten notes. They also videotaped the activity in the enclosure. The chimps' behavior when the music was played was compared to their behavior with no music.

"Chimpanzees displaying a preference for music over silence is compelling evidence that our shared evolutionary histories may include favoring sounds outside of both humans' and chimpanzees' immediate survival cues," said lead author Morgan Mingle, BA, of Emory and Southwestern University in Austin. "Our study highlights the importance of sampling across the gamut of human music to potentially identify features that could have a shared evolutionary root."

musical and spatial representation

frontiersin |  Consistent evidence suggests that pitch height may be represented in a spatial format, having both a vertical and a horizontal representation. The spatial representation of pitch height results into response compatibility effects for which high pitch tones are preferentially associated to up-right responses, and low pitch tones are preferentially associated to down-left responses (i.e., the Spatial-Musical Association of Response Codes (SMARC) effect), with the strength of these associations depending on individuals’ musical skills. In this study we investigated whether listening to tones of different pitch affects the representation of external space, as assessed in a visual and haptic line bisection paradigm, in musicians and non musicians. Low and high pitch tones affected the bisection performance in musicians differently, both when pitch was relevant and irrelevant for the task, and in both the visual and the haptic modality. No effect of pitch height was observed on the bisection performance of non musicians. Moreover, our data also show that musicians present a (supramodal) rightward bisection bias in both the visual and the haptic modality, extending previous findings limited to the visual modality, and consistent with the idea that intense practice with musical notation and bimanual instrument training affects hemispheric lateralization.

about that practice making perfect....,

sciencedaily |  Mom or dad may have driven you to cello rehearsal all those years, but you can also thank your genes for pushing you to practice, according to new research led by a Michigan State University professor. 

Genetics and environment work together to help people become accomplished musicians, finds the study of 850 sets of twins. It's another arrow in the quiver of the argument that both nature and nurture play a role in developing expertise.

"The nature vs. nurture debate has raged since the beginning of psychology," said Zach Hambrick, MSU professor of psychology. "This makes it very clear that it's both. Not only in the sense that both nature and nurture contribute, but that they interact with each other."

The study breaks new ground in ascertaining the specific roles of genes. Essentially, it found:

• Accomplished musicians practiced much more than those who weren't accomplished.
• That propensity to practice was fueled partly by genetics, which the researchers were able to establish by comparing identical twins, who share 100 percent of their genes, with fraternal twins, who share 50 percent of their genes. The finding suggests genetics influence the sorts of activities we pursue.
• When it came to music accomplishment, genes had a bigger influence on those who practiced than those who didn't.

Writers such as Malcolm Gladwell argue that experts are almost entirely "made" and that a lack of innate ability can be overcome with enough training. The way to master that cello, in other words, is to practice for at least 10,000 hours, as past research has suggested.

But the new study challenges that theory by showing genes had a major contribution on the musicians who practiced and became successful. For those who didn't practice, there was essentially no genetic contribution.

"Contrary to the view that genetic effects go away as you practice more and more," Hambrick said, "we found that genes become more important in accounting for differences across people in music performance as they practice."

the neverending eugenic quest...,

sciencedaily | "Williams offers us a window into how the brain works at many different levels," says Bellugi. "We have the tools to measure the different cognitive abilities associated with the syndrome, and thanks to Julie and Debbie we are now able to combine this with studies of the underlying genetic and neurological aspects."

Suspecting that specific genes might lie at the origins of brain plasticity, functional changes in the brain that occur with new knowledge or experiences, and that these genes might be linked to the unusual proficiencies of those with Williams, the team enrolled individuals of various ages in their study. They drew from children, adolescents and adults who all had the full genetic deletion for Williams syndrome and compared them with their non-affected peers. Their study is additionally significant for being one of the first to examine the brain structure and its functioning in children with Williams. And, as Korenberg predicted, a critical piece of the puzzle came from including in their study two adults with partial genetic deletions for Williams.

Using highly sensitive sensors to measure brain activity, the researchers, led by Mills, presented their study participants with both visual and auditory stimuli in the form of unfamiliar faces and spoken sentences. They charted the small changes in voltage generated by the areas of the brain responding to these stimuli, a process known as event-related potentials (ERPs). Mills was the first to publish studies on Williams syndrome using ERPs, developed the ERP markers for this study, and oversaw its design and analysis.

Mills identified ERP markers of brain plasticity in Williams syndrome in children and adults of varying ages and developmental stages. These findings are important because the brains of people with Williams are structured differently than those of people without the syndrome. In the Williams brain, the dorsal areas (along the back and top), which help control vision and spatial understanding, are undersized. The ventral areas (at the front and the bottom), which influence language, facial recognition, emotion and social drive, are relatively normal in size.

It was previously believed that in individuals with Williams, the ventral portion of the brain operated normally. What the team discovered, however, was that this area of the brain also processed information differently than those without the syndrome, and did so throughout development, from childhood to the adult years. This suggests that the brain was compensating in order to analyze information; in other words, it was exhibiting plasticity. Of additional importance, the distinct ERP markers identified by Mills are so characteristic of the different brain organization in Williams that this information alone is approximately 90 percent accurate when analyzing brain activity to identify someone with Williams syndrome.

Other key findings of the study resulted from comparing the ERPs of participants with full Williams deletion with those with partial genetic deletions. While psychological tests focused on facial recognition show no difference between these groups, the scientists found differences in these recognition abilities on the ERP measurements, which look directly at neural activity. Thus, the scientists were able to see how very slight genetic differences affected brain activity, which will allow them identify the roles of sub-sets of Williams genes in brain development and in adult facial recognition abilities.

By combining these one-in-a-million people with tools capable of directly measuring brain activity, the scientists now have the unprecedented opportunity to study the genetic underpinnings of mental disorders. The results of this study not only advance science's understanding of the links between genes, the brain and behavior, but may lead to new insight into such disorders as autism, Down syndrome and schizophrenia. "By greatly narrowing the specific genes involved in social disorders, our findings will help uncover targets for treatment and provide measures by which these and other treatments are successful in alleviating the desperation of autism, anxiety and other disorders," says Korenberg.

music in human evolution?

meltingasphalt | I just finished the strangest, most disconcerting little book. It’s called Why Do People Sing?: Music in Human Evolution by Joseph Jordania.

If the title hasn’t already piqued your interest, its thesis surely will. The thesis is wild, bold, and original, but makes an eerie amount of sense. If true, it would be a revolution — and I don’t use the term lightly — in how we understand the evolution of cooperation, warfare, and religion, not to mention music and maybe even language.

I have my reservations about Jordania’s theory (and his book), but I’ll save them for a later time. As Daniel Dennett once wrote about another remarkable theory:

I think first it is very important to understand [the] project, to see a little bit more about what the whole shape of it is, and delay the barrage of nitpicking objections and criticisms until we have seen what the edifice as a whole is. After all, on the face of it, [the project] is preposterous… [but] I take it very seriously.

These are exactly my feelings about Jordania’s project. Seemingly preposterous, but worth taking very seriously.

exploring rhythm and brain function

the scientist | This September, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart exposed his brain to a live audience at the annual meeting of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) in New Orleans, Louisiana. With an electroencephalography (EEG) device strapped to his head, Hart strutted across the stage, drum in hand, as images of the rhythms pulsing through his brain were projected on big screens at the front of the hall. “It was like taking my brain out of my skull and watching it dance,” he says.

The stunt was the result of a collaboration between Hart and Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. Brought together by their shared interest in the power of rhythm, the duo says they hope to generate new research into its role in higher-order brain functions—and find ways to influence brain rhythms to improve cognitive health.  

“Mickey had an experience several years ago with his grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s,” says Gazzaley. “He noticed she was most communicative when he played the drums. It hit home that music and rhythm could have therapeutic impact, something he’d suspected for a long time.” So the AARP put Hart in touch with Gazzaley, who studies how brain rhythms change with normal ageing and disease, to help raise funds for research designed to explore the science behind Hart's observation.

“We’re going after the rhythm code,” Hart says. “If we crack it, we may be able to use that information to diagnose and treat these brain diseases. That’s the big enchilada!”

imagination also comes from the moving centre

pnas | Music moves us. Its kinetic power is the foundation of human behaviors as diverse as dance, romance, lullabies, and the military march. Despite its significance, the music-movement relationship is poorly understood. We present an empirical method for testing whether music and movement share a common structure that affords equivalent and universal emotional expressions. Our method uses a computer program that can generate matching examples of music and movement from a single set of features: rate, jitter (regularity of rate), direction, step size, and dissonance/visual spikiness. We applied our method in two experiments, one in the United States and another in an isolated tribal village in Cambodia. These experiments revealed three things: (i) each emotion was represented by a unique combination of features, (ii) each combination expressed the same emotion in both music and movement, and (iii) this common structure between music and movement was evident within and across cultures.

nationalgeographic | “Only human.” It’s a downer of an idiom, used to convey the inevitable transgressions and inadequacies of our species. He cheated on his wife with a supermodel, but come on, he’s only human. No, she can’t write three blog posts a day and Tweet every hour and read historical biographies in her spare time, she’s only human.

But, really, what’s “only” about human biology, emotions, behaviors and history? At very least, they make for some good stories.

A cop in Florida once found a scientist dissecting an armadillo penis on the side of the road. A genetic screen made me reconsider my coffee habits. Poverty breaks down connections in a baby’s brain. Tourism in the Galápagos is simultaneously funding conservation efforts and destroying the things that need to be conserved. Stories about people — what we’re made of, what we do, why we do it — are what interest me most, and what you’ll find on this blog.

I’m kicking off with a story about the (maybe) uniquely human capacity to feel emotion through music. Why does a lullaby soothe a newborn, a dirge console the grieving, and a KoRn song make you want to rip your ears out?

According to a study out yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, our cognitive connection to music may have evolved from an older skill, the ability to glean emotion from motion. People will choose the same combination of spatiotemporal features — a certain speed, rhythm, and smoothness — whether pairing a particular emotion with a melody or with a cartoon animation, the study found. But most surprising, the results held true in people from two starkly different cultures: a rural village in Cambodia and a college campus in New England.

The study dates to an afternoon in the spring of 2008, when Beau Sievers sat down for a class on the origins of music at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire. Sievers, a composer, was working on a Master’s degree in something called electroacoustic music (now called digital musics), an unusual program for people who want to study relationships between music, technology and cognitive science. That afternoon the class heard from a guest lecturer, psychology professor Thalia Wheatley, whose neuroimaging studies had pinpointed some of the brain regions involved in perceiving motion. Other labs had found that some of the very same regions activate during music perception, giving Wheatley the idea that the two skills are somehow linked in the mind. She presented the general hypothesis to Sievers’s class, adding that she hadn’t yet found a rigorous and quantitative way to test it.

After class, Sievers asked Wheatley if he could work on that for his Master’s thesis. She said sure, and over the next few months, the duo came up with a clever experiment.

today's music...,

are you humans meant to have language and music?

Discover | What do ironing and hang-gliding have in common? Not much really, except that we weren’t designed to do either of them. And that goes for a million other modern-civilization things we regularly do but are not “supposed” to do. We’re fish out of water, living in radically unnatural environments and behaving ridiculously for a great ape. So, if one were interested in figuring out which things are fundamentally part of what it is to be human, then those million crazy things we do these days would not be on the list.

But what would be on the list?

At the top of the list of things we do that we’re supposed to be doing, and that are at the core of what it is to be human rather than some other sort of animal, are language and music. Language is the pinnacle of usefulness, and was key to our domination of the Earth (and the Moon). And music is arguably the pinnacle of the arts. Language and music are fantastically complex, and we’re brilliantly capable at absorbing them, and from a young age. That’s how we know we’re meant to be doing them, i.e., how we know we evolved brains for engaging in language and music.

But what if this gets language and music all wrong? What if we’re not, in fact, meant to have language and music? What if our endless yapping and music-filled hours each day are deeply unnatural behaviors for our species? (What if the parents in Footloose* were right?!)

I believe that language and music are, indeed, not part of our core—that we never evolved by natural selection to engage in them. The reason we have such a head for language and music is not that we evolved for them, but, rather, that language and music evolved—culturally evolved over millennia—for us. Our brains aren’t shaped for these pinnacles of humankind. Rather, these pinnacles of humankind are shaped to be good for our brains.

But how on Earth can one argue for such a view? If language and music have shaped themselves to be good for non-linguistic and amusical brains, then what would their shapes have to be?

They’d have to possess the auditory structure of…nature. That is, we have auditory systems which have evolved to be brilliantly capable at processing the sounds from nature, and language and music would need to mimic those sorts of sounds in order to harness—to “nature-harness,” as I call it—our brain.

And language and music do nature-harness, a case I make in my third book, Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (Benbella, 2011). The two most important classes of auditory stimuli for humans are (i) events among objects (most commonly solid objects), and (ii) events among humans (i.e., human behavior). And, in my research I have shown that the signature sounds in these two auditory domains drive the sounds we humans use in (i) speech and (ii) music, respectively. Fist tap Dale.

the mixtape of revolution

NYTimes | DEF JAM will probably never sign them, but Cheikh Oumar Cyrille Touré, from a small town about 100 miles southeast of Dakar, Senegal, and Hamada Ben Amor, a 22-year-old man from a port city 170 miles southeast of Tunis, may be two of the most influential rappers in the history of hip-hop.

Mr. Touré, a k a Thiat (“Junior”), and Mr. Ben Amor, a k a El Général, both wrote protest songs that led to their arrests and generated powerful political movements. “We are drowning in hunger and unemployment,” spits Thiat on “Coup 2 Gueule” (from a phrase meaning “rant”) with the Keurgui Crew. El Général’s song “Head of State” addresses the now-deposed President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali over a plaintive background beat. “A lot of money was pledged for projects and infrastructure/Schools, hospitals, buildings, houses/but the sons of dogs swallowed it in their big bellies.” Later, he rhymes, “I know people have a lot to say in their hearts, but no way to convey it.” The song acted as sluice gates for the release of anger that until then was being expressed clandestinely, if at all.

During the recent wave of revolutions across the Arab world and the protests against illegitimate presidents in African countries like Guinea and Djibouti, rap music has played a critical role in articulating citizen discontent over poverty, rising food prices, blackouts, unemployment, police repression and political corruption. Rap songs in Arabic in particular — the new lingua franca of the hip-hop world — have spread through YouTube, Facebook, mixtapes, ringtones and MP3s from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya and Algeria, helping to disseminate ideas and anthems as the insurrections progressed. El Général, for example, was featured on a mixtape put out by the dissident group Khalas (Enough) in Libya, which also included songs like “Tripoli Is Calling” and “Dirty Colonel.”

Why has rap — an American music that in its early global spread was associated with thuggery and violence — come to be so highly influential in these regions? After all, rappers are not the only musicians involved in politics. Late last week, protests erupted when Youssou N’Dour, a Senegalese singer of mbalax, a fusion of traditional music with Latin, pop and jazz, was barred by a constitutional court from pursuing a run for president. But mbalax singers are typically seen as older entertainers who often support the government in power. In contrast, rappers, according to the Senegalese rapper Keyti, “are closer to the streets and can bring into their music the general feeling of frustration among people.”

Another reason is the oratorical style rap employs: rappers report in a direct manner that cuts through political subterfuge. Rapping can simulate a political speech or address, rhetorical conventions that are generally inaccessible to the marginal youth who form the base of this movement. And in places like Senegal, rap follows in the oral traditions of West African griots, who often used rhyming verse to evaluate their political leaders. “M.C.’s are the modern griot,” Papa Moussa Lo, a k a Waterflow, told me in an interview a few weeks ago. “They are taking over the role of representing the people.”

song presentation induces gene expression in the songbird forebrain

PNAS | We investigated the participation of genomic regulatory events in the response of the songbird brain to a natural auditory stimulus of known physiological and behavioral relevance, birdsong. Using in situ hybridization, we detected a rapid increase in forebrain mRNA levels of an immediate-early gene encoding a transcriptional regulator (ZENK; also known as zif-268, egr-1, NGFI-A, or Krox-24) following presentation of tape-recorded songs to canaries (Serinus canaria) and zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata). ZENK induction is most marked in a forebrain region believed to participate in auditory processing and is greatest when birds hear the song of their own species. A significantly lower level of induction occurs when birds hear the song of a different species and no induction is seen after exposure to tone bursts. Cellular analysis indicates that the level of induction reflects the proportion of neurons recruited to express the gene. These results suggest a role for genomic responses in neural processes linked to song pattern recognition, discrimination, or the formation of auditory associations.