Neural Correlates of Processing Syntax in Music and ... - PubMan

Music Perception 5
to her infant relative to a comparable performance with no infant audience (Trainor,
1996). Men’s singing does not generate this different responsiveness (unless the voice
pitch is artificially heightened; O'Neill, Trainor, & Trehub, 2001). Infant-directed
speaking also has a musical quality but infants demonstrate more sustained attentiveness
and engagement during maternal singing than maternal speaking (Nakata & Trehub,
2004; Trehub, 2003c).
Currently, there is no widely accepted and comprehensive model how music perception
develops. Initially, infants’ resolution of frequency, timing, and timbre is finer than that
required for musical purposes (see Trehub, 2001 for a review). Even though, there is a
growing body of evidence, confirming infants’ disposition to structure or organize the
elements of auditory patterns in a adult-like way (Trehub, 1987, 1990, 1993; Trehub &
Trainor, 1990).
There are some features that are shared by most (if not all) musical cultures suggesting
innately specified auditory mechanisms. One of these features is that most scales consist
of a discrete set of five to seven pitches arranged within the octave range (presumably
resulting from constraints on short-term memory and categorization, cf. G. A. Miller,
1956). Moreover, most scales are build of unequal intervals leading to a unique set of
interval relations that might be encoded more easily (Balzano, 1980, 1982; Shepard,
1982; Trehub, Schellenberg, & Kamenetsky, 1999). Within the scale, intervals with
simple frequency relations – such as octave and fifth – are structurally more important:
[1] Infants demonstrate octave equivalence (Demany & Armand, 1984), [2] they prefer
consonance over dissonance and categorize intervals on the basis of their consonance
(Schellenberg & Trainor, 1996; Schellenberg & Trehub, 1996; Trainor & Heinmiller,
1998; Trainor, Tsang, & Cheung, 2002; Zentner & Kagan, 1998), and [3] they more
easily detect changes in sequential intervals from simple (consonant intervals) to complex
frequency ratios (dissonant intervals) than vice versa (Trainor, 1997).
Infants show a strong preference to rely merely on the relationships between pitches
than on their absolute values. 2 Use of reference pulses and the induction of rhythmic
patterns by the asymmetrical subdivision of time pulses are also evident crossculturally.
The preference for relational processing is assumed to be restricted to human
listeners (McDermott & Hauser, 2005). Relational processing operates for pitch structure,
spectral structure, and temporal structure (Hulse, Takeuchi, & Braaten, 1992) and
2
There is some debate about how far infants make use of absolute pitch information (Saffran, 2003).
However, contrasting evidence by Trehub (2003a), and Trehub, Bull and Thorpe (1984) indicated that the
use of absolute pitch information might merely rely on short-term memory. Plantinga and Trainor (2003,
2005) also demonstrated a consistent priority for relative pitch processing. Recently, Saffran, Reeck, Niebuhr,
and Wilson (2005) found that infants used relative pitch cues in task dependent manner, i.e., if such
cues were more easily accessible or if absolute pitch cues were uninformative.