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

Music Perception 7
chronize movements. Vice versa, movements influence the auditory encoding of rhythm
(Phillips-Silver & Trainor, 2005), illustrating the strong multisensory connection between
body movement and auditory rhythm processing.
The segmentation of musical phrases involves the use of acoustic and structural cues.
Acoustic cues as changes in pitch height (mostly falling) and tone duration (mostly
increasing) are critical markers for boundaries. Even 4½-month old infants prefer
pauses at phrase boundaries (Jusczyk & Krumhansl, 1993). Later, at 8 months, rhythmical
cues were also found to contribute to phrase segmentation, i.e., increasing the duration
of a element within a isosynchronous sequence results in segmentation, whereas an
increase in intensity did not (in both, adults and children, Trainor & Adams, 2000).
Structural cues, such as syntactic regularities, may contribute to the segmentation of
phrases (e.g., a dominant-tonic progression usually marks the end of a musical phrase).
Vice versa, the acquisition of these regularities may presuppose basic grouping mechanisms
for parsing a sequence of melody notes.
A critical feature of music – central to the scope of this work – is that musical events
fulfil different structural functions beyond the immediate sounding qualities. How
these structural functions are patterned through time defines more abstract and complex
dynamic organization. This again, may give rise to experiencing particular emotional
qualities. Saffran, Loman, and Robertson (2000) demonstrated that 7-month old infants
retained music with which they were familiarized over 2 weeks (but only if the passage
appeared in the musical context in which it was learned). This suggests that infants are
capable of forming sophisticated representations of music and that they learn and remember
structured information. Such structural regularities may be acquired by statistical
learning mechanisms (Tillmann, Bharucha, & Bigand, 2000). Dowling (1988) proposed
that the repetitiveness and the simplicity of lullabies may help children to acquire
musical structure. Likewise, musical training may accelerate this sensitivity to musical
relations (Dowling, 1999).
Prerequisite to the acquisition of these regularities is a reference system. Musical scales
have a specific interval structure (often consisting of unequal interval steps) that is typical
for the music of the culture in which children grow up. This interval structure must
be acquired by children which takes place within the first year of life (Lynch & Eilers,
1992). As for language-specific phonemic contrasts (Cheour et al., 1998), infants are
initially sensitive to musical scales from different cultures (Lynch, Eilers, Oller, Urbano,
& Wilson, 1991). Likewise, Trehub et al. (1999) demonstrated that infants are
able to detect perturbations to both diatonic and unfamiliar unequal interval scales
whereas adults only detected changes to melodies from a diatonic scale. Infants are able
to discriminate changes smaller than a semitone before they internalize the scale struc-