Collaborative Research: The Role of Narrative in Music Perception

音乐和语言都是人类交流的方式，传达意义。虽然有许多关于语言如何获得意义的研究，但对音乐如何变得有意义却知之甚少。一种假设是，音乐之所以获得意义，部分原因是听众将叙事意义强加于音乐事件，随着音符的展开，将抽象的音乐序列转化为故事情节（这一过程被称为叙事倾听）。 一系列的平行实验将进行不同的音乐摘录的结构特征和听众的文化背景，以解开有关自然和经验在音乐意义的形成中的作用的问题。更多地了解支撑音乐意义的机制，从根本上增加了我们对人类交流和艺术表达的理解，具有更广泛的潜力，从而改善跨文化交流。这项工作还将有助于探索跨文化的非专业听众的音乐体验的新方法，他们往往缺乏音乐词汇来描述他们的感知。通过连接科学和人文学科，该项目将为人文学科的学生提供基于STEM的研究培训，反过来，让科学专业的学生接触到人文学科的问题，这些问题将受益于新的科学方法的发展。该项目的覆盖面将通过开发和传播一个通过手机收集众包数据的新应用程序来扩大。嵌入式GPS技术将使研究人员能够绘制不同地理和文化的叙事聆听模式和变化。该项目采用理论驱动和跨文化的方法来研究塑造叙事聆听音乐的核心因素。研究人员将从很少接触中国音乐的美国听众和很少接触西方音乐的中国听众中获得一组关于西方和中国音乐片段的叙事性听力的跨文化数据。如果叙事性聆听源于一种将抽象刺激具体化的基本倾向，那么听众为了理解他们所听到的内容，就会倾向于将能动性归因于音乐中违背他们预期的点。如果叙事性聆听源于文化适应，那么人们应该更有可能从自己的文化中感知音乐中的叙事，而不是从不同的文化中感知。在一种文化中，人们应该更容易感知高主题关联音乐的叙事，而不是低主题关联音乐。最后，研究人员将研究叙事性听力与音乐感知的其他充分研究方面之间的关系，为既定现象提供新的见解，并开辟新的研究途径。

Music and language are both modes of human communication that convey meaning. Although there are many studies of how language acquires meaning, little is known about how music becomes meaningful. One hypothesis is that music acquires meaning in part because listeners impose narrative significance to musical events, translating abstract musical sequences into a story line as the notes unfold (a process known as narrative listening). A series of parallel experiments will be conducted that vary both the structural features of musical excerpts and the cultural background of the listener in order to disentangle questions about the role of nature and experience in the formation of musical meaning. Learning more about the mechanisms that underpin musical meaning fundamentally adds to our understanding of human communication and artistic expression, with the broader potential to lead to improved intercultural exchange. The work will also contribute new methodologies to probe the musical experiences of lay listeners across cultures, who often lack the musical vocabulary to describe their perceptions. By bridging science and the humanities, the project will provide STEM-based research training to students in the humanities and, in turn, expose students in the sciences to questions in the humanities that would benefit from development of novel scientific methodologies. The project's reach will be expanded by the development and dissemination of a new app for collecting crowd-sourced data via cell phone. Embedded GPS technology will allow the researchers to map patterns and variations in narrative listening across geography and cultures.This project takes a theory-driven and cross-cultural approach to investigate the core factors that shape narrative listening to music. The investigators will obtain a normative set of cross-cultural data on narrative listening for a large sample of Western and Chinese musical excerpts from both American listeners with little exposure to Chinese music and from Chinese listeners will little exposure to Western music. If narrative listening arises from a fundamental tendency to make abstract stimuli concrete, then listeners will tend to ascribe agency to points in the music that violate their expectations in order to make sense of what they hear. If narrative listening arises from enculturation, people should be more likely to perceive narratives in music from their own culture than from a different culture. Within a culture, people should be more likely to perceive narratives for high topical-association music than for low topical-association music. Lastly, the investigators will examine the relationship between narrative listening and other well-studied aspects of music perception, providing novel insights about established phenomena and opening up new avenues of investigation.