Cognitive origins of musical communication

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My long-term objective is to understand the musical brain - why some musical sequences are better remembered than others, how music conveys emotion, where music came from, and how the brain subserves musical perception and cognition. Because music has been with our species for a long time, and because people have such strong emotional reactions to it, understanding music can serve as a window in the cognitive neuroscience of emotion, memory, perception, and higher-order cognition. My short-term goal is to focus on issues relating to perception, categorization, and memory encoding of musical pitch. I hope to concentrate on behavioural experiments driven by the following question: what is the nature of mental representations for pitch? Subsidiary concerns include the role of musical expertise in shaping those mental representations, and the extent to which they are malleable. To investigate these questions, I plan to begin with three basic paradigms and see where they lead. I've called this "cognitive origins of musical communication" because pitch categorization and memory are cognitive, top-down processes that are fundamental (along with an understanding of rhythm, timing, amplitude variation and timbre) to understanding why music has the intellectual and emotional impact that it does on we humans. It is an inclusive title reflecting the "discovery" nature of the NSERC program that covers this application. I believe the 5 paradigms listed below constitute a 5-year research plan. Although it is tempting to think of them as one per year, more realistically I think they will each take a couple of years but will be done to some extent in parallel. These brief vignettes are presented to give a flavor of the work, with full anticipation that the studies outlined here in skeleton form will be both fleshed out and followed up on as results dictate. Full methods are contained in the papers cited. Paradigm 1 will pit schematic knowledge of pitch and scale structures against short term memory for pitch, to assess the degree to which learned structures in long-term memory can overpower — or be overpowered by — short term distortions of those pitch structures. This will address foundational issues in memory and perception of auditory patterns. Paradigm 2 adapts a standard free-classification task used in the perception of phonemes (Kuhl, 1991; Studdert-Kennedy, Liberman, Harris & Cooper, 1970), for use with pitch to better understand classification functions and explicit categorization of pitch in both absolute pitch and non-absolute pitch musicians. Paradigm 3 will explore a promising new auditory illusion we have discovered in which melodies can be identified in the absence of overt pitch. Paradigm 4 will continue our work on the psychological structure of musical preferences. Paradigm 5 will investigate the role of oxytocin in the experience of social bonding many people report after engaging in musical activities.