Musical Cognition

A Science of Listening

Henkjan Honing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412852920
• eBook ISBN: 9781351297349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

Why do people attach importance to the wordless language we call music? Musical Cognition suggests that music is a game. In music, our cognitive functions such as perception, memory, attention, and expectation are challenged; yet, as listeners, we often do not realize that the listener plays an active role in reaching the awareness that makes music so exhilarating, soothing, and inspiring. In reality, the author contends, listening does not happen in the outer world of audible sound, but in the inner world of our minds and brains.

Recent research in the areas of psychology and neuro-cognition allows Henkjan Honing to be explicit in a way that many of his predecessors could not. His lucid, evocative writing style guides the reader through what is known about listening to music while avoiding jargon and technical diagrams. With clear examples, the book concentrates on underappreciated musical skills-"sense of rhythm" and "relative pitch"-skills that make people musical creatures. Research on how living creatures respond to music supports the conviction that all humans have a unique, instinctive attraction to music. Everyone is musical.

Musical Cognition includes a selection of intriguing examples from recent literature exploring the role that an implicit or explicit knowledge of music plays when one listens to it. The scope of the topics discussed ranges from the ability of newborns to perceive a beat, to the unexpected musical expertise of ordinary listeners. The evidence shows that music is second nature to most human beings-biologically and socially.

Part 1

De do do do, de da da da
Babble Music

1

First Listening
Experiences

On the face of it, it is a strange phenomenon: adults who, the moment they lean over to peer into a baby buggy, start babbling a curious baby talk. And it doesn’t just happen to fathers and mothers; it overcomes many people in the same situation. In fact, we all seem to be capable of it, this “de do do do, de da da da.”

But what exactly are we saying to our little fellow human beings? What message can be derived from this “de do do do, de da da da?”

The technical term for this baby talk is infant-directed speech (IDS). It is a form of speech that distinguishes itself from normal adult speech through its higher overall pitch, exaggerated melodic contours, slower tempo, and greater rhythmic variation. It appears to be a kind of musical language, however it is one with an indistinct meaning and virtually no grammar. For these reasons, I will call it “babble music.”

Babies love it, and coo with delight in response to the rhythmic little melodies, which often have the same charm as pop songs like The Police’s “De do do do, De da da da” and Kylie Minoque’s hit “La la la.”

***

Numerous sound archives around the world have recordings of musical babble conversations between adults and children. If you listen to several of them, most of the time you won’t be able to understand what’s being said, but you will be able to identify the situation and particularly the mood because of the tone. It will quickly become apparent whether the message is playful, instructive, or admonitory.

Words of encouragement such as “That’s the way!” or “Well done!” are usually uttered in an ascending and subsequently descending tone, with the emphasis on the highest point of the melody. Warnings such as “No, stop it!” or “Be careful, don’t touch!” on the other hand, are generally voiced at a slightly lower pitch, with a short, staccato-like rhythm. If the speech were to be filtered out so that its sounds or phonemes were no longer audible and only the music remained, it would still be clear whether encouragement or warning was involved. This is because the relevant information is contained more in the melody and rhythm then it is in the words themselves.¹

Most linguists see the use of rhythm, dynamics, and intonation as an aid for making infants familiar with the words and sentence structures of the language of the culture in which they will be raised. Words and word divisions are emphasized through exaggerated intonation contours and varied rhythmic intervals, thereby facilitating the process of learning a specific language. (This, apart from the discussion about which aspects of linguistic grammar are innate.)²

Pedagogically speaking, the period during which parents use “babble music” is remarkably long. Infants have a distinct preference for babble music from the moment they are born, only developing an interest in adult speech after about nine months. Before that time, they appear to listen mostly to the sounds themselves. An interest in specific words, word division, and sound structure only comes after about a year, at which time they also begin to utter their first meaningful words.³ The characterization of IDS as an aid to learning specific languages therefore seems less plausible to me, at least with respect to the earliest months.

An alternative might be to see IDS not as a preparation for speech but as a form of communication in its own right: a kind of “music” used to communicate and discover the world for as long as “real” speech is absent.⁴ If you subsequently emphasize the type of information most commonly conveyed in babble music, or rather, those aspects of speech in which infants have the greatest interest during their first nine months, the conclusion must be that babble music is first and foremost a way of conveying emotional information. It is an emotional language that, even without grammar, is still meaningful.

The role of melody and rhythm in this emotional language is as significant as the role of word order is insignificant. This is because during their first year, infants are primarily interested in the musical aspects of babbling. Both caregivers and infants make use of the melodic, rhythmic, and dynamic aspects of IDS; they speak the same “language”—the “language of emotion.”

It will therefore come as no surprise that the musical components of IDS also form an important part of speech later in life, although by then of course, we use rhythm, stress, and intonation infinitely more subtly than when talking to infants. From the tone of someone’s utterance, we can decipher whether he or she is happy, angry, or excited. C’est le ton qui fait la musique, it’s not what you say but how you say it. And we usually have little difficulty in deciding whether what is said is a question, an assertion, or an ironic remark.

But there are also other reasons for viewing IDS as babble music rather than as a preparation for adult speech. The relationship between the linguistic aspects of IDS(such as the meaning of words) and the musical aspects (such as rhythm and melody) is clearly visible, especially in those cultures where the native language is a tonal one, such as Mandarin Chinese. In tonal languages, a melody can easily conflict with the meaning of the word, which is determined by pitch. A well-known example is the word “ma” in Mandarin Chinese. Depending on the pitch at which it is uttered, it can mean either “mother” or “horse.” It is striking that in such cases the emotional information of IDS “wins” over the purely phonemic aspects.⁵ During the earliest months, the musical information of a word is thus much more important than its specific meaning.

***

Canadian developmental psychologist Laurel J. Trainor has been conducting extensive research in this area. She is not alone in believing that the most important function of IDS is to create and maintain an emotional relationship between the caregiver and the infant. She has shown in various studies that young infants have no difficulty at all in deciphering the emotional information in speech or in a children’s song at the moment it’s sung.

It is very exciting when you realize that infants can derive specific emotional information from the complex timing, phrasing, and variations in pitch in the “babble music” their parents speak with them: minimal differences in pitch, intonation, and length of syllables, corresponding to emotions ranging from “comfort” to “fear” and “surprise” to “affection,” are interpreted correctly.⁶

Striking, too, is the fact that infants can distinguish these “melodious” emotions before they are able to recognize them in facial expressions. The cognitive functions involved in listening to music and speech appear to precede the development of visual perception. (In some ways, a head start would seem logical because babies already have functional hearing some three months before they are born.)

It appears that many of the musical skills we normally attribute to adults are also present in infants from the age of a few days to several months. Four-month-old babies can distinguish pitch intervals with great precision, as well as remember and recognize simple folk songs.⁷

Infants also seem to be much more sensitive to a wide range of subtle melodic and rhythmic differences than most adults. A study conducted at the University of Miami, in which both adults and six-month-old infants listened to melodies from Western and Javanese musical traditions, bears this out.

Javanese melodies sound distinctly different to Western ears: the tones are tuned differently, have different frequency ratios (i.e., pitch intervals) than they do in our culture. In the listening experiment, one tone in each melody was tuned either slightly higher or slightly lower than normal. The adult listeners were easily able to identify these changes in the Western melodies, but not in the Javanese variations. The (North American) infants, on the other hand, could hear the differences in both the Western and the Javanese melodies.⁸

All these studies support the idea that we’re born with a set of listening skills but can lose our sensitivity to specific musical nuances as we become accustomed to the conventions of the musical tradition in which we grow up.⁹ In the case of the Miami study, this means that the more deeply people in the West become embedded in prevailing music traditions, the less they are able to distinguish tonal nuances in the less frequently heard Javanese music. (Conversely, you would expect Javanese children to lose their sensitivity to Western tonal systems at a later age. Unfortunately, there is still a dearth of substantial comparative research in this area, though I don’t expect this will be the case for much longer as Western music is being listened to increasingly in Indonesia.)

The phenomenon of the loss of certain sensitivities relevant to our perception of music is paralleled in our linguistic development. Here, too, certain tonal nuances will often no longer be noticed or precisely reproducible at a later age. A case in point is the ability to hear the difference between an “r” and an “l.” Japanese infants can hear the difference with no difficulty at all, while Japanese adults struggle to make the distinction.¹⁰ In fact, humans lose flexibility in exchange for a more efficient processing of those aspects that are relevant to a specific language or musical tradition.

This kind of developmental psychology research has also been conducted on other aspects of music, such as rhythm and timing, with similar results. Infants and young children turn out to be extremely sensitive to melodic and rhythmic differences in speech and music, and often have a more highly developed sensitivity in these areas than the average adult.¹¹

The flexibility of young children in experiencing and interpreting music disappears by about the time they start to go to school.¹² By this age they will have been heavily influenced by culture-specific aspects of music such as tonal and harmonic structure. Such aspects are clearly learned as a result of exposure to the musical patterns characteristic of the music of the culture in which they are raised.

***

In short, the ability to recognize subtle differences in rhythm and pitch—in both speech and music—appears to be innate. From a young age we are very skilled decoders of the often emotionally laden, non-linguistic information embedded in the prosody—the rhythm, stress, and intonation—of music and speech.

IDS or “babble music” is the first thing that draws on that ability. Language, with its specific word order and virtually unlimited lexicon and multiplicity of meanings, only blossoms much later in human beings.¹³ IDS therefore tells us something about the function of music in human development and the innateness of musicality to each individual.

So how important is all this? Apart from the essential significance of “babble music” for emotional bonding between infants and parents, what is the evolutionary advantage of music and musicality?*

Music and Evolution

In the evolutionary sense, music can be described as “pointless”: it does not quell our hunger, nor do we seem to live a day longer because of it. In fact, music appears to be of little use to us, aside perhaps from the pleasure that creating or listening to it affords us. This, at least, is what cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker maintains. At the end of the 1990s, he famously characterized music as “auditory cheesecake”: a delightful dessert but, from an evolutionary perspective, no more than a by-product of language.¹⁴

Pinker provoked considerable anger in many music scholars at the time by con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: De do do do, de da da da | Babble Music
• Part 2: Ooh-ooh-ooh | The Magic of Music
• Part 3: Hmmm … | Music and Musicality
• Part 4: Tá-ta-ta-tá-ta | Music as Cognition
• Part 5: Aha! | Music in Our Heads
• Afterword
• Index