Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report.

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and (ii) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six preregistered predictions, five were strongly supported: Relative to speech, songs use (i) higher pitch, (ii) slower temporal rate, and (iii) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar (iv) pitch interval size and (v) timbral brightness. Exploratory analyses suggest that features vary along a "musi-linguistic" continuum when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Our study provides strong empirical evidence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech.

Linked auditory and motor patterns in the improvisation vocabulary of an artist-level jazz pianist.

Improvising musicians possess a stored library of musical patterns forming the basis for their improvisations. According to a prominent theoretical framework by Pressing (1988), this library includes linked auditory and motor information. Though examples of libraries of melodic patterns have been shown in extant recordings by some improvising musicians, the underlying motor component has not been experimentally investigated nor related to its auditory counterparts. Here we analyzed a large corpus of ∼100,000 notes from improvisations by one artist-level jazz pianist recorded during 11 live performances with audience. We compared the library identified from these recordings to a control corpus consisting of improvisations by 24 different advanced jazz pianists. In addition to pitch, our recordings included accurate micro-timing and key velocity (i.e., force) data. Following a previously validated procedure, this information was used to identify the underlying motor patterns through correlations between relative timing and velocity between notes in different iterations of the same pitch pattern. A computational model was, furthermore, used to estimate the information content and generated entropy exhibited by recurring pitch patterns with high and low timing and velocity correlations as perceived by a stylistically enculturated expert listener. Though both corpora contained a large number of recurring patterns, the single-player corpus showed stronger evidence that pitch patterns were linked to motor programs in that within-pattern timing and velocity correlations were significantly higher compared to the control corpus. Even when controlling for potentially greater baseline levels of motor self-consistency in the single-player corpus, this effect remained significant for velocity correlations. Amongst recurring 5-tone pitch patterns, those exhibiting more consistent motor schema also used less idiomatic pitch transitions that were both more unexpected and generated more uncertain expectations in enculturated experts than less consistently repeated patterns. Interestingly, we only found partial evidence for fixed pattern boundaries as predicted by the Pressing model and therefore suggest an expanded view in which the beginning and ends of idiomatic audio-motor patterns are not always clear-cut. Our results indicate that the library of melodic patterns may be idiosyncratic to the individual improviser and relies both on motor programming and predictive processing to promote stylistic distinctiveness.

Musicians show more integrated neural processing of contextually relevant acoustic features.

Little is known about expertise-related plasticity of neural mechanisms for auditory feature integration. Here, we contrast two diverging hypotheses that musical expertise is associated with more independent or more integrated predictive processing of acoustic features relevant to melody perception. Mismatch negativity (MMNm) was recorded with magnetoencephalography (MEG) from 25 musicians and 25 non-musicians, exposed to interleaved blocks of a complex, melody-like multi-feature paradigm and a simple, oddball control paradigm. In addition to single deviants differing in frequency (F), intensity (I), or perceived location (L), double and triple deviants were included reflecting all possible feature combinations (FI, IL, LF, FIL). Following previous work, early neural processing overlap was approximated in terms of MMNm additivity by comparing empirical MMNms obtained with double and triple deviants to modeled MMNms corresponding to summed constituent single-deviant MMNms. Significantly greater subadditivity was found in musicians compared to non-musicians, specifically for frequency-related deviants in complex, melody-like stimuli. Despite using identical sounds, expertise effects were absent from the simple oddball paradigm. This novel finding supports the integrated processing hypothesis whereby musicians recruit overlapping neural resources facilitating more integrative representations of contextually relevant stimuli such as frequency (perceived as pitch) during melody perception. More generally, these specialized refinements in predictive processing may enable experts to optimally capitalize upon complex, domain-relevant, acoustic cues.

Oxytocin as an allostatic agent in the social bonding effects of music.

Despite acknowledging that musicality evolved to serve multiple adaptive functions in human evolution, Savage et al. promote social bonding to an overarching super-function. Yet, no unifying neurobiological framework is offered. We propose that oxytocin constitutes a socio-allostatic agent whose modulation of sensing, learning, prediction, and behavioral responses with reference to the physical and social environment facilitates music's social bonding effects.

Predictive Uncertainty Underlies Auditory Boundary Perception.

Anticipating the future is essential for efficient perception and action planning. Yet the role of anticipation in event segmentation is understudied because empirical research has focused on retrospective cues such as surprise. We address this concern in the context of perception of musical-phrase boundaries. A computational model of cognitive sequence processing was used to control the information-dynamic properties of tone sequences. In an implicit, self-paced listening task (N = 38), undergraduates dwelled longer on tones generating high entropy (i.e., high uncertainty) than on those generating low entropy (i.e., low uncertainty). Similarly, sequences that ended on tones generating high entropy were rated as sounding more complete (N = 31 undergraduates). These entropy effects were independent of both the surprise (i.e., information content) and phrase position of target tones in the original musical stimuli. Our results indicate that events generating high entropy prospectively contribute to segmentation processes in auditory sequence perception, independently of the properties of the subsequent event.

Articulatory motor planning and timbral idiosyncrasies as underlying mechanisms of instrument-specific absolute pitch in expert musicians.

The study of musical expertise illustrates how intense training in a specialized domain may instigate development of implicit skills. While absolute pitch, or the ability to identify musical pitches without external reference, is rare even in professional musicians and is understood to have a genetic component, anecdotal evidence and pilot data suggest that some musicians without traditional absolute pitch are nonetheless better able to name notes played on their musical instrument of expertise than notes played on less familiar instruments. We have previously termed this particular gain in absolute pitch identification ability "instrument-specific absolute pitch" (ISAP) and have proposed that this skill is related to learned instrument type-specific timbral and intonational idiosyncrasies and articulatory motor planning activated by the timbre of the instrument. In this Registered Report Protocol, we describe two experiments designed to investigate ISAP in professional oboists. Experiment 1 tests for ISAP ability by comparing oboists' pitch identification accuracies for notes played on the oboe and on the piano. A subset of the participants from Experiment 1 who demonstrate this ability will be recruited for Experiment 2; the purpose of Experiment 2 is to test hypotheses concerning a mechanistic explanation for ISAP. The outcome of these experiments may provide support for the theory that some individuals have ISAP and that the underlying mechanisms of this ability may rely on the perception of subtle timbral/intonational idiosyncrasies and on articulatory motor planning developed through intensive long-term training. In general, this work will contribute to the understanding of specialized expertise, specifically of implicit abilities and biases that are not addressed directly in training, but that may yet develop through practice of a related skill set.

Audiovisual structural connectivity in musicians and non-musicians: a cortical thickness and diffusion tensor imaging study.

Our sensory systems provide complementary information about the multimodal objects and events that are the target of perception in everyday life. Professional musicians' specialization in the auditory domain is reflected in the morphology of their brains, which has distinctive characteristics, particularly in areas related to auditory and audio-motor activity. Here, we combined diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) with a behavioral measure of visually induced gain in pitch discrimination, and we used measures of cortical thickness (CT) correlations to assess how auditory specialization and musical expertise are reflected in the structural architecture of white and grey matter relevant to audiovisual processing. Across all participants (n = 45), we found a correlation (p < 0.001) between reliance on visual cues in pitch discrimination and the fractional anisotropy (FA) in the left inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF), a structure connecting visual and auditory brain areas. Group analyses also revealed greater cortical thickness correlation between visual and auditory areas in non-musicians (n = 28) compared to musicians (n = 17), possibly reflecting musicians' auditory specialization (FDR < 10%). Our results corroborate and expand current knowledge of functional specialization with a specific focus on audition, and highlight the fact that perception is essentially multimodal while uni-sensory processing is a specialized task.

Perceptual learning of tone patterns changes the effective connectivity between Heschl's gyrus and planum temporale.

Learning of complex auditory sequences such as music can be thought of as optimizing an internal model of regularities through unpredicted events (or "prediction errors"). We used dynamic causal modeling (DCM) and parametric empirical Bayes on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to identify modulation of effective brain connectivity that takes place during perceptual learning of complex tone patterns. Our approach differs from previous studies in two aspects. First, we used a complex oddball paradigm based on tone patterns as opposed to simple deviant tones. Second, the use of fMRI allowed us to identify cortical regions with high spatial accuracy. These regions served as empirical regions-of-interest for the analysis of effective connectivity. Deviant patterns induced an increased blood oxygenation level-dependent response, compared to standards, in early auditory (Heschl's gyrus [HG]) and association auditory areas (planum temporale [PT]) bilaterally. Within this network, we found a left-lateralized increase in feedforward connectivity from HG to PT during deviant responses and an increase in excitation within left HG. In contrast to previous findings, we did not find frontal activity, nor did we find modulations of backward connections in response to oddball sounds. Our results suggest that complex auditory prediction errors are encoded by changes in feedforward and intrinsic connections, confined to superior temporal gyrus.

A Theory of Instrument-Specific Absolute Pitch.

While absolute pitch (AP)-the ability to name musical pitches globally and without reference-is rare in expert musicians, anecdotal evidence suggests that some musicians may better identify pitches played on their primary instrument than pitches played on other instruments. We call this phenomenon "instrument-specific absolute pitch" (ISAP). In this paper we present a theory of ISAP. Specifically, we offer the hypothesis that some expert musicians without global AP may be able to more accurately identify pitches played on their primary instrument(s), and we propose timbral cues and articulatory motor imagery as two underlying mechanisms. Depending on whether informative timbral cues arise from performer- or instrument-specific idiosyncrasies or from timbre-facilitated tonotopic representations, we predict that performance may be enhanced for notes played by oneself, notes played on one's own personal instrument, and/or notes played on any exemplar of one's own instrument type. Sounds of one's primary instrument may moreover activate kinesthetic memory and motor imagery, aiding pitch identification. In order to demonstrate how our theory can be tested, we report the methodology and analysis of two exemplary experiments conducted on two case-study participants who are professional oboists. The aim of the first experiment was to determine whether the oboists demonstrated ISAP ability, while the purpose of the second experiment was to provide a preliminary investigation of the underlying mechanisms. The results of the first experiment revealed that only one of the two oboists showed an advantage for identifying oboe tones over piano tones. For this oboist demonstrating ISAP, the second experiment demonstrated that pitch-naming accuracy decreased and variance around the correct pitch value increased as an effect of transposition and motor interference, but not of instrument or performer. These preliminary data suggest that some musicians possess ISAP while others do not. Timbral cues and motor imagery may both play roles in the acquisition of this ability. Based on our case study findings, we provide methodological considerations and recommendations for future empirical testing of our theory of ISAP.

Correction to: Visually induced gains in pitch discrimination: Linking audio-visual processing with auditory abilities.

During copy-editing, the y-axes of Fig. 2 (top) and Fig. 3 (top) were erroneously labelled mean BCG (d') in the version of the paper published as Online First. The correct label is meanCE (d').

Visually induced gains in pitch discrimination: Linking audio-visual processing with auditory abilities.

Perception is fundamentally a multisensory experience. The principle of inverse effectiveness (PoIE) states how the multisensory gain is maximal when responses to the unisensory constituents of the stimuli are weak. It is one of the basic principles underlying multisensory processing of spatiotemporally corresponding crossmodal stimuli that are well established at behavioral as well as neural levels. It is not yet clear, however, how modality-specific stimulus features influence discrimination of subtle changes in a crossmodally corresponding feature belonging to another modality. Here, we tested the hypothesis that reliance on visual cues to pitch discrimination follow the PoIE at the interindividual level (i.e., varies with varying levels of auditory-only pitch discrimination abilities). Using an oddball pitch discrimination task, we measured the effect of varying visually perceived vertical position in participants exhibiting a wide range of pitch discrimination abilities (i.e., musicians and nonmusicians). Visual cues significantly enhanced pitch discrimination as measured by the sensitivity index d', and more so in the crossmodally congruent than incongruent condition. The magnitude of gain caused by compatible visual cues was associated with individual pitch discrimination thresholds, as predicted by the PoIE. This was not the case for the magnitude of the congruence effect, which was unrelated to individual pitch discrimination thresholds, indicating that the pitch-height association is robust to variations in auditory skills. Our findings shed light on individual differences in multisensory processing by suggesting that relevant multisensory information that crucially aids some perceivers' performance may be of less importance to others, depending on their unisensory abilities.

"If You Have to Ask, You'll Never Know": Effects of Specialised Stylistic Expertise on Predictive Processing of Music.

Musical expertise entails meticulous stylistic specialisation and enculturation. Even so, research on musical training effects has focused on generalised comparisons between musicians and non-musicians, and cross-cultural work addressing specialised expertise has traded cultural specificity and sensitivity for other methodological limitations. This study aimed to experimentally dissociate the effects of specialised stylistic training and general musical expertise on the perception of melodies. Non-musicians and professional musicians specialising in classical music or jazz listened to sampled renditions of saxophone solos improvised by Charlie Parker in the bebop style. Ratings of explicit uncertainty and expectedness for different continuations of each melodic excerpt were collected. An information-theoretic model of expectation enabled selection of stimuli affording highly certain continuations in the bebop style, but highly uncertain continuations in the context of general tonal expectations, and vice versa. The results showed that expert musicians have acquired probabilistic characteristics of music influencing their experience of expectedness and predictive uncertainty. While classical musicians had internalised key aspects of the bebop style implicitly, only jazz musicians' explicit uncertainty ratings reflected the computational estimates, and jazz-specific expertise modulated the relationship between explicit and inferred uncertainty data. In spite of this, there was no evidence that non-musicians and classical musicians used a stylistically irrelevant cognitive model of general tonal music providing support for the theory of cognitive firewalls between stylistic models in predictive processing of music.

Comparison of survival of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients with or without a localized non-small cell lung cancer.

OBJECTIVES: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) are often co-existing diseases with poor prognosis. The aim of this study was to compare survival in COPD patients with localized NSCLC treated with stereotactic body radiotherapy (NSCLC group) with COPD patients without a malignant diagnosis (non-malignant group). MATERIALS AND METHODS: The NSCLC group was prospectively recorded at the Department of Oncology from 2007 to 2013. The non-malignant group was selected among patients referred to the Department of Respiratory Medicine from 2005 until 2011 suspected of thoracic malignancy but without the malignant diagnosis maintained. RESULTS: In a propensity score matched comparison the median overall survival was 53 vs. 71 months in the NSCLC and non-malignant groups, respectively (p<0.001). Subgroup analyses showed survival for patients with mild/moderate COPD was affected statistically significant with a higher mortality rate by a diagnosis of localized NSCLC with hazard ratio=2.62 (95% CI: 1.47-4.68) while an insignificant higher mortality rate with hazard ratio=1.22 (95% CI: 0.71-2.08) was found in patient with severe/very severe COPD. CONCLUSION: Despite the serious prognosis of COPD, a localized NSCLC diagnosis negatively affects survival in COPD patients. However, stereotactic body radiotherapy should still be considered for COPD patients diagnosed with localized NSCLC.

Predictive uncertainty in auditory sequence processing.

Previous studies of auditory expectation have focused on the expectedness perceived by listeners retrospectively in response to events. In contrast, this research examines predictive uncertainty-a property of listeners' prospective state of expectation prior to the onset of an event. We examine the information-theoretic concept of Shannon entropy as a model of predictive uncertainty in music cognition. This is motivated by the Statistical Learning Hypothesis, which proposes that schematic expectations reflect probabilistic relationships between sensory events learned implicitly through exposure. Using probability estimates from an unsupervised, variable-order Markov model, 12 melodic contexts high in entropy and 12 melodic contexts low in entropy were selected from two musical repertoires differing in structural complexity (simple and complex). Musicians and non-musicians listened to the stimuli and provided explicit judgments of perceived uncertainty (explicit uncertainty). We also examined an indirect measure of uncertainty computed as the entropy of expectedness distributions obtained using a classical probe-tone paradigm where listeners rated the perceived expectedness of the final note in a melodic sequence (inferred uncertainty). Finally, we simulate listeners' perception of expectedness and uncertainty using computational models of auditory expectation. A detailed model comparison indicates which model parameters maximize fit to the data and how they compare to existing models in the literature. The results show that listeners experience greater uncertainty in high-entropy musical contexts than low-entropy contexts. This effect is particularly apparent for inferred uncertainty and is stronger in musicians than non-musicians. Consistent with the Statistical Learning Hypothesis, the results suggest that increased domain-relevant training is associated with an increasingly accurate cognitive model of probabilistic structure in music.