Neurological and developmental approaches to poor pitch perception and production.

Whereas much of research in music and neuroscience is aimed at understanding the mechanisms by which the human brain facilitates music, emerging interest in the neuromusic community aims to translate basic music research into clinical and educational applications. In the present paper, we explore the problems of poor pitch perception and production from both neurological and developmental/educational perspectives. We begin by reviewing previous and novel findings on the neural regulation of pitch perception and production. We then discuss issues in measuring singing accuracy consistently between the laboratory and educational settings. We review the Seattle Singing Accuracy Protocol--a new assessment tool that we hope can be adopted by cognitive psychologists as well as music educators-and we conclude with some suggestions that the present interdisciplinary approach might offer for future research.

ERP responses to cross-cultural melodic expectancy violations.

In this preliminary study, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) to melodic expectancy violations in a cross-cultural context. Subjects (n= 10) were college-age students born and raised in the United States. Subjects heard 30 short melodies based in the Western folk tradition and 30 from North Indian classical music. Each melody was presented in its original and deviation form, and subjects were asked to judge the congruence of the melody. Results indicated that subjects found the Indian melodies less congruous overall and were less sensitive to deviations in the Indian melody condition. ERP data were partly consistent with the behavioral data with significant P600 responses to deviations in both cultural conditions, but less robust in the Indian context. Results are interpreted in light of previous research on listeners' abilities to generate expectancies in unfamiliar cultures and the possibility of overlap in the scale systems influencing the findings.

An fMRI investigation of the cultural specificity of music memory.

This study explored the role of culture in shaping music perception and memory. We tested the hypothesis that listeners demonstrate different patterns of activation associated with music processing-particularly right frontal cortex-when encoding and retrieving culturally familiar and unfamiliar stimuli, with the latter evoking broader activation consistent with more complex memory tasks. Subjects (n = 16) were right-handed adults born and raised in the USA (n = 8) or Turkey (n = 8) with minimal music training. Using fMRI procedures, we scanned subjects during two tasks: (i) listening to novel musical examples from their own culture and an unfamiliar culture and (ii) identifying which among a series of brief excerpts were taken from the longer examples. Both groups were more successful remembering music of their home culture. We found greater activation for culturally unfamiliar music listening in the left cerebellar region, right angular gyrus, posterior precuneus and right middle frontal area extending into the inferior frontal cortex. Subjects demonstrated greater activation in the cingulate gyrus and right lingual gyrus when engaged in recall of culturally unfamiliar music. This study provides evidence for the influence of culture on music perception and memory performance at both a behavioral and neurological level.

Cultural constraints on music perception and cognition.

Research suggests that music, like language, is both a biological predisposition and a cultural universal. While humans naturally attend to and process many of the psychophysical cues present in musical information, there is a great - and often culture-specific - diversity of musical practices differentiated in part by form, timbre, pitch, rhythm, and other structural elements. Musical interactions situated within a given cultural context begin to influence human responses to music as early as one year of age. Despite the world's diversity of musical cultures, the majority of research in cognitive psychology and the cognitive neuroscience of music has been conducted on subjects and stimuli from Western music cultures. From the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, identification of fundamental cognitive and neurological processes associated with music requires ascertaining that such processes are demonstrated by listeners from a broad range of cultural backgrounds and in relation to various musics across cultural traditions. This chapter will review current research regarding the role of enculturation in music perception and cognition and the degree to which cultural influences are reflected in brain function. Exploring music cognition from the standpoint of culture will lead to a better understanding of the core processes underlying perception and how those processes give rise to the world's diversity of music forms and expressions.

Exploring the influence of cultural familiarity and expertise on neurological responses to music.

Contemporary music education in many countries has begun to incorporate not only the dominant music of the culture, but also a variety of music from around the world. Although the desirability of such a broadened curriculum is virtually unquestioned, the specific function of these musical encounters and their potential role in children's cognitive development remain unclear. We do not know if studying a variety of world music traditions involves the acquisition of new skills or an extension and refinement of traditional skills long addressed by music teachers. Is a student's familiarity with a variety of musical traditions a manifestation of a single overarching "musicianship" or is knowledge of these various musical styles more similar to a collection of discrete skills much like learning a second language? Research on the comprehension of spoken language has disclosed a neurologically distinct response among subjects listening to their native language rather than an unfamiliar language. In a recent study comparing Western subjects' responses to music of their native culture and music of an unfamiliar culture, we found that subjects' activation did not differ on the basis of the cultural familiarity of the music, but on the basis of musical expertise. We discuss possible interpretations of these findings in relation to the concept of musical universals, cross-cultural stimulus characteristics, cross-cultural judgment tasks, and the influence of musical expertise. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

FMRI investigation of cross-cultural music comprehension.

The popular view of music as a "universal" language ignores the privileged position of the cultural insider in comprehending musical information unique to their own tradition. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that listeners would demonstrate different neural activity in response to culturally familiar and unfamiliar music and that those differences may be affected by the extent of subjects' formal musical training. Just as familiar languages have been shown to use distinct brain processes, we hypothesized that an analogous difference might be found in music and that it may depend in part on subjects' formal musical knowledge. Using fMRI we compared the activation patterns of professional musicians and untrained controls reared in the United States as they listened to music from their culture (Western) and from an unfamiliar culture (Chinese). No overall differences in activation were observed for either subject group in response to the two musical styles, although there were differences in recall performance based on style and there were activation differences based on training. Trained listeners demonstrated additional activation in the right STG for both musics and in the right and left midfrontal regions for Western music and Chinese music, respectively. Our findings indicate that listening to culturally different musics may activate similar neural resources but with dissimilar results in recall performance.