Musical syntax
When analysing the regularities and structure of
Comparison to linguistic syntax
Syntax in general can be referred to as a study of the principles and rules needed for the construction of a language or as a term in particular describing these principles and rules for a special language.
Linguistic syntax – three principles[1]
Linguistic syntax is especially marked by its structural richness, which becomes apparent in its multi layered organization as well as in the strong relationship between syntax and meaning. That is that there are special linguistic syntactic principles that define how the language is formed out of different subunits, such as words out of
Musical syntax[1]
Concerning musical syntax these three aspects of richness in linguistic syntax as well as the abstractness should be found in music too, if one wants to claim that music has a comparable syntax. An annotation that has to be made concerns the fact that most of the studies dealing with musical syntax are confined to the consideration of Western European tonal music. Thus this article can also only focus on Western tonal music.
Multilayered organization
Considering the multilayered organization of music, three levels of pitch organization can be found in music.
Scale degrees
The lowest level are
Chord structure
The next superordinate level of pitch organization is the
Key structure
The highest level of pitch organization can be seen in
Hierarchical structure
Considering the last two basic aspects of linguistic syntax, namely the considerable significance of the order of subunits for the meaning of a sentence as well as the fact that words undertake abstract grammatical functions defined through context and structural relations, it seems to be useful to analyse the hierarchical structure of music to find correlations in music.
Ornamentation
One aspect of hierarchical structure of music is the ornamentation. The meaning of the word "ornamentation" points to the fact that there are events in a musical context that are less important to form an idea of the general gist of a sequence than others. The decision on the importance of events not only comprises harmonic considerations, but also rhythmic and motivic information. But a classification of events simply into ornamental and structural events would be too superficial. In fact the most common hypothesis implies, that music is organized into structural levels, which can be pictured as branches of a tree. A pitch that is structural at a higher level may be ornamental at a deeper level. This can be compared with the hierarchical syntactic structure of a sentence in which there are structural elements that are necessary to build up a sentence like the noun phrase and the verb phrase but looking at a deeper level the structural elements also contain additional or ornamental constituents.
Tension and resolution
Searching for other aspects of hierarchical structure of music there is a controversial discussion, if the organization of tension and resolution in music can be described as hierarchical structure or only as a purely sequential structure. According to Patel[1] research in this area has produced apparently contradictory evidence, and more research is needed to answer this question. The question concerning the kind of structure that features tension and resolution in music is linked very close to the relationship between order and meaning in music. Considering tension and resolution as one possible kind of meaning in music a hierarchical structure would imply that a change of order of musical elements would have an influence on the meaning of the music.
Abstractness
The last aspect to examine is the
All in all the consideration of syntax in music and language shows, that music has a syntax comparable to the linguistic syntax especially concerning a great complexity and a hierarchical organization. Nevertheless, it has to be emphasized, that musical syntax is not a simple variant of linguistic syntax, but a similar complex system with its own substance. That means that it would be the wrong way just to search for musical analogies of linguistic syntactic entities such as nouns or verbs.
Neuronal processing of musical and linguistic syntax
Investigating the neuronal processing of musical syntax can serve two proposed aspects.[2] The first is to learn more about the processing of music in general. That is, which areas of the brain are involved and if there are specific markers of brain activity due to the processing of music and musical syntax. The second aspect is to compare the processing of musical and linguistic syntax to find out, if they have an effect upon each other or if there even is a significant overlap. The verification of an overlap would support the thesis, that syntactic operations (musical as well as linguistic) are modular. "Modular" means, that the complex system of processing is decomposed into subsystems with modular functions. Concerning the processing of syntax this would mean, that the domain of music and language each have specific syntactic representations, but that they share neural resources for activating and integrating these representations during syntactic processing.
Processing of music and musical syntax
Requirements
Processing of music and musical syntax comprises several aspects concerning melodic, rhythmic, metric, timbral and harmonic structure. For the processing of
MMN and ERAN[3]
The violation of these automatically made predictions lead to the observation of so-called ERPs (event related potential, a stereotyped electrophysiological response to an internal or external stimulus). Two forms of ERPs can be detected in the context of processing music. One is the MMN (mismatch negativity), which has first been investigated only with physical deviants like frequency, sound intensity, timbre deviants (referred to as phMMN) and could now also be shown for changes of abstract auditory features like tone pitches (referred to as afMMN). The other one is the so-called ERAN (early right anterior negativity), which can be elicited by syntactic irregularities in music. Both the ERAN and the MMN are ERPs indicating a mismatch between predictions based on regularities and actually experienced acoustic information. As for a long time it seemed to be, that the ERAN is a special variant of the MMN, the question arises, why they are told apart today. There are several differences between the MMN and the ERAN found in the last years:
Differences – occurrence
Even though music syntactic regularities are often simultaneously acoustical similar and music syntactic irregularities are often simultaneously acoustical different, an ERAN but not an MMN can be elicit, when a chord does not represent a physical but a syntactic deviance. To demonstrate this, so-called "Neapolitan sixth chords" are used. These are consonant chords when played solitary, but which are added into a musical phrase of in which they are only distantly related to the harmonic context. Added into a chord sequence of five chords, the addition of a
Differences – development
This is represented in the development of the ERAN and MMN. The ERAN cannot be verified in newborn babies, whereas the MMN can actually be demonstrated in fetus. In two-year-old children, the ERAN is very small, in five-year-old children a clear ERAN is found, but with a longer latency than in adults. With the age of 11 years children show an ERAN similar to ERANs in adults. Out of these observation the thesis can be built that the MMN is essential for the establishment and maintenance of representations of the acoustic environment and for processes of the auditory scene analysis. But only the ERAN is completely based on learning to build up a structural model, which is established with reference to representations of syntactic regularities already existing in a long-term memory format. Considering effects of training both the ERAN and the MMN can be modulated by training.
Differences – neural sources
Differences between the ERAN and the MMN also exist in the
Processes to elicit the MMN or ERAN
(1)First, a separation of sound sources, an extraction of sound features and the establishment of representations of auditory objects of the incoming acoustic input have to be made. The same processes are required for the MMN and ERAN.
(2)For the MMN regularities are filtered on-line out of the input to create a model of the acoustic environment. At this point, there is a difference to the ERAN as for the ERAN representations of regularities already exist in a long-term memory format and the incoming sound is integrated into a pre existent model of musical structure.
(3)According to the model of musical structure, predictions concerning forthcoming auditory events are formed. This process is similar for the ERAN and for the MMN.
(4)At least a comparison between the actually incoming sound and the predictions based on the model is made. This process is partly the same for the MMN and the ERAN as well.
Comparison of the processing of musical and linguistic syntax[1]
As the ERAN is similar to an ERP called
Neuropsychological approach
This method deals with the question, how structure and function of the brain relate to outcomes in behaviour and other psychological processes. From this area of research there has been evidence for the dissociation between musical and linguistic syntactic abilities. In case reports it was possible to show that amusia ( a deficiency in fine-grainded perception of pitch which leads to musical tone-deafness and can be congenital or acquired later in life as from brain damage) is not necessarily linked to aphasia (severe language impairments following brain damage) and vice versa. This means that individuals with normal speech and language abilities showed musical tone-deafness as well as individuals with language impairments had sufficient means of musical syntactic abilities. The problem of neuropsychologic research is that there has not been a former case report which showed that aphasia does not necessarily entail amusia in non-musicians, to the contrary newer findings suggest that amusia is almost always linked to aphasia.
Neuroimaging
Furthermore, results from neuroimaging led to the "shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis" (SSIRH), which supports the presumption, that there is an overlap between the processing of musical and linguistic syntax and that syntactic operations are modular. Furthermore, research using the method of electroencephalography has shown that a difficulty or irritation in musical as well as in linguistic syntax elicit ERPs which are similar to each other.
How can the discrepancy between neuropsychology and neuroimaging be explained?
Modularity
In fact, the concept of modularity itself can help to understand the different and apparently contradicting findings in neuropsychologic research and neuroimaging. Introducing the concept of a dual system, in which there is a distinction between syntactic representation and syntactic processing, this could mean, that there is a distinction between long-term structural knowledge in a domain (representation) and operations conducted on that knowledge (syntactic processing). A damage in an area representing long-term musical knowledge would lead to amusia without aphasia, but a damage in an area representing syntactic processing would cause an impairment of both musical and linguistic syntactic processing.
Comparison of syntactic processing-three theories
The comparison of the syntactic processing of language and music is based on three theories which should be mentioned but which are not explained in detail. The first two, the "dependency locality theory" and the "expectancy theory" refer to syntactic processing in language, whereas the third one, the "tonal pitch space theory", relates to the syntactic processing in music.
The language theories contribute to the concept that in order to conceive the structure of a sentence, resources are consumed. If the conception of a this structure is difficult due to the fact that distant words belong to each other or an expected structure of the sentence is violated, more resources, namely the ones for activating low-activation items, are consumed.
Violating an anticipated structure in music could mean a harmonically unexpected note or chord in a musical sequence. As in language this is associated with a "processing cost due to the tonal distance" (Patel, 2008) and therefore means that more resources are needed for activating low-activation items.
SSIRH – the leading concept
Overall these theories lead to the "shared syntactic integration resources hypothesis" as the areas from which low-activation items are activated could be the correlate to the overlap between linguistic and musical syntax. Strong evidence for the existence of this overlap comes from studies, in which music-syntactic and a linguistic-syntactic irregularities were presented simultaneously. They showed an interaction between the ERAN and the
From this facts it can be reasoned that the ERAN relies on neural resources related to syntactic processing (Koelsch 2008). Furthermore, they give strong evidence for the thesis, that there is an overlap between the processing of musical and linguistic syntax and therefore that syntactic operations (musical as well as linguistic) are modular.
References
This article incorporates material from the
- ^ a b c d Patel, A.D. (2008). Music, Language, and the Brain. Oxford University Press, USA
- ^ Patel, A.D. (2003). Language, music, syntax and the brain]. Nature Neuroscience. 6(7):674-681
- ^ Koelsch, S. (2009). "Music-syntactic Processing and Auditory Memory – Similarities and Differences between ERAN and MMN". Psychophysiology, 46(1): 179-190.