Culture in music cognition
Culture in music cognition refers to the impact that a person's
Preferences
Effect of culture
Culturally bound preferences and familiarity for music begin in
Familiarity for culturally regular
In addition to influencing preference for meter, culture affects people's ability to correctly identify music styles. Adolescents from Singapore and the UK rated familiarity and preference for excerpts of Chinese, Malay, and Indian music styles.[6] Neither group demonstrated a preference for the Indian music samples, although the Singaporean teenagers recognized them. Participants from Singapore showed higher preference for and ability to recognize the Chinese and Malay samples; UK participants showed little preference or recognition for any of the music samples, as those types of music are not present in their native culture.[6]
Effect of musical experience
An individual's musical experience may affect how they formulate preferences for music from their own culture and other cultures.[7] American and Japanese individuals (non-music majors) both indicated preference for Western music, but Japanese individuals were more receptive to Eastern music. Among the participants, there was one group with little musical experience and one group that had received supplemental musical experience in their lifetimes. Although both American and Japanese participants disliked formal Eastern styles of music and preferred Western styles of music, participants with greater musical experience showed a wider range of preference responses not specific to their own culture.[7]
Dual cultures
Bimusicalism is a phenomenon in which people well-versed and familiar with music from two different cultures exhibit dual sensitivity to both genres of music.[8] In a study conducted with participants familiar with Western, Indian, and both Western and Indian music, the bimusical participants (exposed to both Indian and Western styles) showed no bias for either music style in recognition tasks and did not indicate that one style of music was more tense than the other. In contrast, the Western and Indian participants more successfully recognized music from their own culture and felt the other culture's music was more tense on the whole. These results indicate that everyday exposure to music from both cultures can result in cognitive sensitivity to music styles from those cultures.[8]
Bilingualism typically confers specific preferences for the language of lyrics in a song.[9] When monolingual (English-speaking) and bilingual (Spanish- and English-speaking) sixth graders listened to the same song played in an instrumental, English, or Spanish version, ratings of preference showed that bilingual students preferred the Spanish version, while monolingual students more often preferred the instrumental version; the children's self-reported distraction was the same for all excerpts. Spanish (bilingual) speakers also identified most closely with the Spanish song.[9] Thus, the language of lyrics interacts with a listener's culture and language abilities to affect preferences.
Emotion recognition
The cue-redundancy model of emotion recognition in music differentiates between universal, structural auditory cues and culturally bound, learned auditory cues (see schematic below).[2][3]
Psychophysical cues
Structural cues that span all musical traditions include dimensions such as pace (tempo), loudness, and timbre.[10] Fast tempo, for example, is typically associated with happiness, regardless of a listener's cultural background.
Culturally bound cues
Culture-specific cues rely on knowledge of the conventions in a particular musical tradition.[2][11] Ethnomusicologists have said that there are certain situations in which a certain song would be sung in different cultures. These times are marked by cultural cues and by the people of that culture.[12] A particular timbre may be interpreted to reflect one emotion by Western listeners and another emotion by Eastern listeners.[3][13] There could be other culturally bound cues as well, for example, rock n' roll music is usually identified to be a rebellious type of music associated with teenagers and the music reflects their ideals and beliefs that their culture believes.[14]
Cue-redundancy model
According to the cue-redundancy model, individuals exposed to music from their own cultural tradition utilize both psychophysical and culturally bound cues in identifying emotionality.[10] Conversely, perception of intended emotion in unfamiliar music relies solely on universal, psychophysical properties.[2] Japanese listeners accurately categorize angry, joyful, and happy musical excerpts from familiar traditions (Japanese and Western samples) and relatively unfamiliar traditions (Hindustani).[2] Simple, fast melodies receive joyful ratings from these participants; simple, slow samples receive sad ratings, and loud, complex excerpts are perceived as angry.[2] Strong relationships between emotional judgments and structural acoustic cues suggest the importance of universal musical properties in categorizing unfamiliar music.[2][3]
When both
Categorization of unfamiliar music varies with intended emotion.[2][13] Timbre mediates Western listeners' recognition of angry and peaceful Hindustani songs.[13] Flute timbre supports the detection of peace, whereas string timbre aids anger identification. Happy and sad assessments, on the other hand, rely primarily on relatively "low-level" structural information such as tempo. Both low-level cues (e.g., slow tempo) and timbre aid in the detection of peaceful music, but only timbre cued anger recognition.[13] Communication of peace, therefore, takes place at multiple structural levels, while anger seems to be conveyed nearly exclusively by timbre. Similarities between aggressive vocalizations and angry music (e.g., roughness) may contribute to the salience of timbre in anger assessments.[15]
Stereotype theory of emotion in music
The stereotype theory of emotion in music (STEM) suggests that cultural stereotyping may affect emotion perceived in music. STEM argues that for some listeners with low expertise, emotion perception in music is based on stereotyped associations held by the listener about the encoding culture of the music (i.e., the culture representative of a particular music genre, such as Brazilian culture encoded in Bossa Nova music).[16] STEM is an extension of the cue-redundancy model because in addition to arguing for two sources of emotion, some cultural cues can now be specifically explained in terms of stereotyping. Particularly, STEM provides more specific predictions, namely that emotion in music is dependent to some extent on the cultural stereotyping of the music genre being perceived.
Complexity
Because musical complexity is a
Repetition
When listening to music from within one's own cultural tradition, repetition plays a key role in emotion judgments. American listeners who hear classical or jazz excerpts multiple times rate the elicited and conveyed emotion of the pieces as higher relative to participants who hear the pieces once.[18]
Methodological limitations
Methodological limitations of previous studies preclude a complete understanding of the roles of psychophysical cues in emotion recognition. Divergent
Memory
Enculturation is a powerful influence on music memory. Both long-term and working memory systems are critically involved in the appreciation and comprehension of music. Long-term memory enables the listener to develop musical expectation based on previous experience while working memory is necessary to relate pitches to one another in a phrase, between phrases, and throughout a piece.[20]
Neuroscience
Neuroscientific evidence suggests that
Effect of culture
Memory for music
Despite the universality of music,
Development
Enculturation affects music memory in early
Children's developing music cognition may be influenced by the language of their native culture.
Musical expectations
Enculturation also biases listeners' expectations such that they expect to hear tones that correspond to culturally familiar
Limits of enculturation
Despite the powerful effects of music enculturation, evidence indicates that cognitive comprehension of and affinity for different cultural modalities is somewhat plastic. One long-term instance of plasticity is bimusicalism, a musical phenomenon akin to bilingualism. Bimusical individuals frequently listen to music from two cultures and do not demonstrate the biases in recognition memory and perceptions of tension displayed by individuals whose listening experience is limited to one musical tradition.[8]
Other evidence suggests that some changes in music appreciation and comprehension can occur over a short period of time. For instance, after half an hour of passive exposure to original melodies using familiar Western pitches in an unfamiliar musical grammar or harmonic structure (the Bohlen–Pierce scale), Western participants demonstrated increased recognition memory and greater affinity for melodies in this grammar.[29] This suggests that even very brief exposure to unfamiliar music can rapidly affect music perception and memory.
See also
- Cognitive musicology
- Cognitive neuroscience of music
- Embodied music cognition
- Music therapy
- Psychology of music preference
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