Cognitive origins of musical communication

我的长期目标是了解音乐大脑——为什么一些音乐序列比其他的更容易被记住，音乐是如何传达情感的，音乐是从哪里来的，以及大脑是如何支持音乐感知和认知的。因为音乐已经伴随人类很长时间了，因为人们对它有如此强烈的情感反应，理解音乐可以作为情感、记忆、感知和高阶认知的认知神经科学的一个窗口。******我的短期目标是关注与音乐音高的感知、分类和记忆编码有关的问题。我希望把重点放在由以下问题驱动的行为实验上：音调的心理表征的本质是什么？次要的关注点包括音乐专业知识在塑造这些心理表征中的作用，以及它们的可塑性程度。为了调查这些问题，我打算从三个基本范例开始，看看它们会导致什么。我称之为“音乐交流的认知起源”，因为音高分类和记忆是认知的，自上而下的过程，是理解为什么音乐对我们人类有智力和情感影响的基础（以及对节奏、时间、振幅变化和音色的理解）。这是一个包含性的标题，反映了NSERC项目涵盖该应用的“发现”性质。我相信下面列出的5个范例构成了一个5年的研究计划。虽然很容易将它们视为每年一次，但更现实的是，我认为它们将分别花费几年时间，但在某种程度上是并行完成的。这些简短的小插曲是为了给工作的味道，与充分的预期，在这里概述的骨架形式的研究将被充实和后续的结果指示。完整的方法包含在引用的论文中。******范式1将把音高和音阶结构的示意图知识与音高的短期记忆进行对比，以评估长期记忆中习得的结构在多大程度上能够压倒或被这些音高结构的短期扭曲所压倒。这将解决记忆和听觉模式感知的基础问题。******范式2采用了音素感知中使用的标准自由分类任务（Kuhl, 1991; Studdert-Kennedy, Liberman, Harris & Cooper, 1970），用于音高，以便更好地理解绝对音高和非绝对音高音乐家的分类功能和明确的音高分类。******范式3将探索我们发现的一种有希望的新听觉错觉，在这种听觉错觉中，旋律可以在没有明显音高的情况下被识别出来。******范式4将继续研究音乐偏好的心理结构。******范式5将研究催产素在许多人参与音乐活动后报告的社会联系体验中的作用

***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.***