Difficult grammar affects music experience

Reading and listening to music at the same time affects how you hear the music. Language scientists and neuroscientists from Radboud University and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics published this finding in an article in Royal Society Open Science on February 3.

"The neural pathways for language and music share a crossroads," says lead author Richard Kunert. "This has been shown in previous research, but these studies focused on the effect of simultaneous reading and listening on language processing. Until now, the effect of this multitasking on the neural processing of music has been predicted only in theory."

Kunert therefore asked his subjects to read several easy and difficult phrases while they listened to a short piece of music, which Kunert composed himself. Afterwards, he asked the subjects to judge the closure, i.e. the feeling of completeness, of a chord sequence: did it stop before the end, or had they heard the entire sequence from beginning to end?

This is an example of the taks 'how 'complete' is this chord sequence?'. First play fragment 1 and then fragment 2. At the end of fragment 1, you have the feeling that the music is not 'complete' yet, it feels a bit weird. Fragment 2 ends in a better way. Fragment 3 is where it gets interesting: when you listen to this chord while reading an easy sentence (below), it seems more 'complete' than when you are reading a difficult sentence (below).

Easy:

The | surgeon | consoled | the | man | and | the | woman | because | the | surgery | had | not | been | successful.

Difficult:

The | surgeon | consoled | the | man | and | the | woman | put | her | hand | on | his | forehead.

The experiment showed that the subjects judged the music to be less complete with grammatically difficult sentences than with simple sentences. The brain area that is the crossroads of music and language therefore has to do with grammar. "Previously, researchers thought that when you read and listen at the same time, you do not have enough attention to do both tasks well. With music and language, it is not about general attention, but about activity in the area of the brain that is shared by music and language," explains Kunert.

Language and music appear to be fundamentally more alike than you might think. A word in a sentence derives its meaning from the context. The same applies to a tone in a chord sequence or a piece of music. Language and music share the same brain region to create order in both processes: arranging words in a sentence and arranging tones in a chord sequence. Reading and listening at the same time overload the capacity of this brain region, known as Broca's area, which is located somewhere under your left temple.

Previously, researchers demonstrated that children with musical training were better at language than children who did not learn to play an instrument. The results of Kunert and colleagues demonstrate that the direction of this positive effect probably does not matter. Musical training enhances language skills, and language training probably enhances the neural processing of music in the same way. But engaging in language and music at the same time remains difficult for everyone -- whether you are a professional guitar player or have no musical talent at all.
_________________
Reference:

Science Daily. 2016. “Difficult grammar affects music experience”. Science Daily. Posted: February 3, 2016. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160203090944.htm

3D printing revives bronze-age music

An archaeologist has 3D-printed a replica of an iron-age artifact to revive a rich musical culture in ancient Ireland

Billy Ó Foghlú, from The Australian National University (ANU), has found evidence that the artifact may have been a mouthpiece from an iron-age horn and not a spear-butt as previously thought.

When Mr Ó Foghlú used the replica artifact as a mouthpiece, the ancient Irish horn had a richer, more velvety tone.

"Suddenly the instrument came to life," said the ANU College of Asia-Pacific PhD student.

"These horns were not just hunting horns or noisemakers. They were very carefully constructed and repaired, they were played for hours. Music clearly had a very significant role in the culture."

Complex bronze-age and iron-age horns have been found throughout Europe, especially in Scandinavia. However, the lack of mouthpieces in Ireland suggested the Irish music scene had drifted into a musical dark age.

Mr Ó Foghlú was convinced mouthpieces had existed in Ireland, and was intrigued by the so-called Conical Spearbutt of Navan.

Although he could not gain access to the original bronze artifact, Mr Ó Foghlú used the exact measurements to produce a replica using 3D-printing and try it out with his own horn.

The addition of a mouthpiece would have given greater comfort and control to ancient horn players, and may have increased the range of their instruments.

However, few mouthpieces have been found. The dearth of them may be explained by evidence that the instruments were ritually dismantled and laid down as offerings when their owner died, said Mr Ó Foghlú.

"A number of instruments have been found buried in bogs. The ritual killing of an instrument and depositing it in a burial site shows the full significance of it in the culture," he said.

"Tutankhamen also had trumpets buried with him in Egypt. Contemporary horns were also buried in Scandinavia, Scotland and mainland Europe: they all had integral mouthpieces too."
_________________
Reference:

Science Daily. 2015. “3D printing revives bronze-age music”. Science Daily. Posted: September 2, 2015. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150902102317.htm

Universal Rhythm: People Dance to Same Beat Across the Globe

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called music "the universal language of mankind." Now researchers may know why.

A new analysis of music from diverse cultures around the globe reveals that regardless of whether it's hip-hop or classical or alternative rock, all music shares certain universal features, such as having a simple beat. And these characteristics tend to be those that bring people together, the researchers said.

"Our findings help explain why humans make music," study researcher Thomas Currie from the University of Exeter said in a statement. "The results show that the most common features seen in music around the world relate to things that allow people to coordinate their actions, and suggest that the main function of music is to bring people together and bond social groups — it can be a kind of social glue."

Currie, along with Pat Savage, a doctoral student at the Tokyo University of the Arts, and their colleagues analyzed music from around the world, examining 304 recordings from the online Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. The music samples came from every inhabited continent, from both vocal and instrumental music, and included indigenous recordings as well as modern, studio-created music.

The researchers analyzed the music using a few different classification schemes. They systematically coded the features of each piece of music and employed a phylogenetic comparison system similar to those used by evolutionary biologists to classify and statistically analyze organisms. Although they found no features that were part of all the songs analyzed,  the researchers did find dozens of characteristics that were present in a majority of songs across different world regions.

Some of these characteristics were not surprising, such as the music's tendency to use discrete pitches (rather than ones that slide from one tone to the next like the way a voice rises to ask a question), and equally timed beats and short musical phrases.

Other music universals were more unexpected, like the discovery that two-beat rhythms predominate over three-beat rhythms (think of a military march compared with a waltz). "It fits that we have two legs, so the music is probably related to the natural rhythms of movement," said Savage. "And also, two is simpler than three, so maybe it's easier to process and coordinate."

The researchers also found that though a pentatonic or five-note scale is assumed to reign supreme around the world, scales are actually more complicated than that. A lot of the scales that were analyzed actually had four or six notes, though the interval structures were similar to each other. (A scale is a set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch.)

Men as well as bands dominate music around the world, from Papua New Guinea to the Middle East. Some people, as far back as Darwin, have believed that singing evolved as a way for males to gain mates (whale song and bird song are dominated by males). In humans, Savage said, the fact that females are less likely to be involved in music-making is likely more tied into a patriarchal cultural structure than a biological reason — something that he said requires more study.

The finding that most music happens in groups, however, points to the evolution of group bonding and social cohesion through music. Before iPods and smartphones (and before that, CDs and records), multiple people were required to bring music to life; simple repetitive beats brought people together to collaborate on one activity.

Previous studies showed that people who experience music together are more likely to rate those who listen with them as helpful or attractive. Even babies, though too young to talk, are more likely to help an experimenter after bouncing in rhythm with him or her than when they move out of sync.

Savage said that follow-up studies might compare music production across species, analyzing which features are unique to human music and which exist in birds or whales or other music-making creatures.
_________________
Reference:

Gammon, Katharine. 2015. “Universal Rhythm: People Dance to Same Beat Across the Globe”. Live Science. Posted: June 30, 2015. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/51397-people-dance-to-same-beat-worldwide.html

Is Music a Language?

Listen to a few minutes of John Coltrane and Stan Getz trading saxophone licks, and there’s no denying that music is a form of conversation: The two jazz legends riff on each other’s melodies and build to a cat-and-mouse climax that is basically the musical equivalent of Shakespearean repartee.

But how the brain processes musical discourse is not well-understood. Is music a language? If not, how can we still use it to communicate?

At Johns Hopkins University, a team of researchers recently came up with a way to study the neurological basis of musical exchange by watching the brain activity of jazz improvisors. In one way, they found, music is exactly like language, but in another, it’s not similar at all.

The musicians, 11 male pianists, had to put up with a little less comfort than they’re accustomed to on the stage of a hip club. Each slid supine into an MRI machine with a custom built all-plastic keyboard on his lap and a pair of mirrors arranged overhead for him to see the keys. For 10 minutes, he was asked to jam with another musician in the room by trading fours—swapping solos every four bars of the beat—as the MRI machine recorded the sparks flying in their heads.

The results took a big step toward describing the complexity of music’s relationship to language. During the improvisations, the syntactic areas of players’ brains—that is, the areas that interpret the structure of sentences—were super active, as if the two players were speaking to each other. Meanwhile, the semantic areas of their brains—the parts that process language’s meaning—totally shut down. The brain regions that respond to musical and spoken conversation overlapped, in other words, but were not entirely the same.

This distinction has two big implications. First, because our brains don’t discriminate between music and language structurally, we may in fact understand the structures of all forms of communication in the same way. Secondly, the way we understand the actual meaning of a conversation, though—the message its lines deliver to us—appears to depend on the medium of communication.

“Meaning in music is fundamentally context-specific and imprecise, thereby differing wholly from meaning in natural language,” writes Charles Limb, the study’s lead author (who’s also an accomplished musician; check out his TED talk on the the science of improvisation). “This study underscores the need for a broader definition of musical semantics,” he concludes later.

Music is not a language, but it certainly doesn’t lack meaning, the study shows. We rely on something beyond language to fully comprehend it.
________________
References:

Bisceglio, Paul. 2014. “Is Music a Language?”. The Pacific Standard Magazine. Posted: February 26, 2014. Available online: http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/music-language-75521/

Evidence of Ancient Human History Encoded in Music's Complex Patterns

In the same way that fragments of ancient pottery and bones offer valuable information about human history, music can also reveal previously hidden clues about the past, according to new research from an international team led by McMaster University psychologist Steven Brown.

The team has established for the first time that the history of human populations is embedded in music, where complex combinations of rhythm, pitch and arrangement form a code that scientists can read in a manner that can be compared to the way they read changes in human DNA and language.

"Music is an untapped migrational marker that can be used to help people understand the history of human populations," says Brown, an associate professor of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour. "It adds to the whole story of human history. We need more evidence, and this is a new kind of evidence that we can add to the pot."

Brown's research team used a comparison between the mitochondrial DNA and the folk music of nine indigenous populations of Taiwan to show that each tells a similar story about the ways those populations have changed and converged over the last 6,000 years.

Mitochondrial DNA changes at a predictable rate, acting as an evolutionary clock that makes it ideal for such comparisons.

The group included researchers from Tokyo University of the Arts, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and China Medical University and Mackay Memorial Hospital, both in Taiwan. Their results are published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, one of the society's biological journals.

The researchers analyzed the structures of 220 Taiwanese choral songs recorded since the 1940s. They compared the results with DNA samples taken from 1,050 subjects from different parts of the island and found that the musical results shared significant similarities to the genetic results when it came to tracking changes over thousands of years.

The findings prove that music can be a repository of scientific information about the people who make it, says Brown, who is director of the NeuroArts Lab in McMaster's Department of Psychology.

"Languages and genes change slowly over time, but music can change much more quickly," Brown says. "I think people thought that music was too transient to carry evidence of what happened thousands of years ago. Our results support the idea that music actually has elements in it that are ancient. In addition to being able to evolve quickly, it can also retain traces of ancient population movements."

Brown's lab is devoted to understanding of the neural, cognitive and evolutionary foundations of the arts, including: music, dance, drama and the visual arts, and is associated with McMaster's Institute for Music and the Mind. Research on the project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
__________________________
References:

2014. “Evidence of Ancient Human History Encoded in Music's Complex Patterns”. Science Daily. Posted: November 19, 2013. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131119152816.htm

The importance of keeping a beat

Researchers link ability to keep a beat to reading, language skills

The findings of a Northwestern University study of more than 100 high school students lend proof to the surprising link between music, rhythmic abilities and language skills.

The study -- the first to provide biological evidence linking the ability to keep a beat to the neural encoding of speech sounds -- has significant implications for reading, according to Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.

Previous investigations found a link between reading ability and beat-keeping, says Kraus in a study published in the Sept. 18 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Previous research has established a link between reading ability and neural response consistency. "By directly linking auditory responses with beat-keeping ability, we have closed the triangle," Kraus says.

The study demonstrates that accurate beat-keeping involves synchronization between the parts of the brain responsible for hearing as well as movement. Where previous research investigations focused on the motor half of the equation, Kraus and co-author Adam Tierney focused on the auditory component.

Because hearing sounds of speech and associating them with the letters comprising written words is crucial to learning to read, the Northwestern researchers reasoned that the association between reading and beat synchronization likely has a common basis in the auditory system.

To investigate the relationship between beat-keeping and auditory processing, 124 Chicago high school students visited Kraus's lab and were given two tests. In the first, they were asked to listen to a metronome and tap their finger along to it on a special tapping pad. Tapping accuracy was computed based on how closely their taps aligned in time to the tick-tock of the metronome.

In a "brainwave test," the students were fitted with electrodes measuring the consistency of their brain response to a repeated syllable. Across the population, the more accurate the adolescents were at tapping along to the beat, the more consistent their brain response was to the speech syllable.

"This is supported biologically," Kraus says. "The brainwaves we measured originate from a biological hub of auditory processing with reciprocal connections with the motor-movement centers. An activity that requires coordination of hearing and movement is likely to rely on solid and accurate communication across brain regions."

Accurate beat-keeping's implications for reading and language skills simply make sense, according to the co-authors. "Rhythm is an integral part of both music and language," Kraus says. "And the rhythm of spoken language is a crucial cue to understanding."

For example, you might slow down your speech or stress one syllable more than another to emphasize a particular point. And minute timing differences distinguish consonants, such as "b" and "p." Hearing that timing distinction is necessary to identify the sounds with the letters that represent them.

"Musicians have highly consistent auditory-neural responses," says Kraus. "It may be that musical training -- with its emphasis on rhythmic skills -- can exercise the auditory-system, leading to less neural jitter and stronger sound-to-meaning associations that are so essential to learning to read."

Kraus, who is the Knowles Chair in Northwestern's School of Communication and professor of neurobiology in Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is conducting longitudinal investigations that look directly at the effects of music training by measuring beat synchronization, response consistency, reading and other language skills in children as they progress through music instruction from year to year.
__________________________
References:

EurekAlert. 2013. “The importance of keeping a beat”. EurekAlert. Posted: September 17, 2013. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-09/nu-tio091313.php

Musicians rebuild Cambodia's lost ancient harp

A Cambodian composer has revealed the sound of an ancient harp which has gone unheard for more than eight centuries.

The pin harp is shown being played by maidens in the stone reliefs on the walls of the Angkor Wat temple complex.

It lends its name to pinpeat orchestras, which perform ceremonial music of the royal courts and temples in Cambodia.

Archaeology lecturer Preap Chanmara says unlike the other orchestra instruments - cymbals, xylophones, flutes and drums - the pin harp has been lost.

"We know that there are many music instruments on the sculptures - some even dating back to the time before Angkor Era: the 7th century to the 13th century," he said.

"There were many temples and sculptures back then, so there were also many different kinds of music instruments.

"Some are still being used today, whereas some others were lost."

Composer Him Sophy says the puzzle of Cambodia's missing harp had always haunted him.

"I [want] enthusiastically to know what and why it disappeared," he said.

"[On] the other side, as a composer, I love harp very much - all of my compositions I use harp, even for my symphony."

Using the carvings and other harps as a blueprint, Him Sophy joined a French researcher and musician Keo Sonan Kavei in recreating the small boat-like instrument using animal hide and silk string.

Keo Sonan Kavei says making the harp left him with "two types of happiness".

"I was worried as to whether or not it could be played," he said.

"Secondly, I was worried as to whether or not somebody before me has made it before.

The only person to play the harp so far has been Keo Sonan Kavei's 13-year-old daughter, Sereyroth.

"When she started to learn it, I could see that she was talented," he said.

"There are five generations of musicians in my family - when it was my turn, I had to rediscover something that was once lost and update it so that the world can see Cambodia's ancient music instruments.

"We're just putting it back out in the world."

With arts, music and dance almost destroyed during the Khmer Rouge regime, the effort to revive Cambodia's traditional music has been embraced by international arts bodies, culminating in the festival Season of Cambodia this month in New York.

Him Sophy says while no one knows how exactly to play the pin harp or what it should sound like, its value lies in what it represents - and the future compositions it will inspire.

"Now we not only revive music during the Khmer Rouge, we revive since the Angkor period," he said.

"For 300 years that [empire] controlled the whole of South-East Asia and now we are building our culture also, that is the pride of Cambodia and the pride of the world.

"That is the value of what we are creating."
__________________________
References:

Ellen, Rosa. 2013. “Musicians rebuild Cambodia's lost ancient harp”. Yahoo News Australia. Posted: May 21, 2013. Available online: http://au.news.yahoo.com/latest/a/-/latest/17250773/musicians-rebuild-cambodias-lost-ancient-harp/

Speaking a tonal language (such as Cantonese) primes the brain for musical training

First strong evidence of bi-directional relationship between music and language

Non-musicians who speak tonal languages may have a better ear for learning musical notes, according to Canadian researchers.

Tonal languages, found mainly in Asia, Africa and South America, have an abundance of high and low pitch patterns as part of speech. In these languages, differences in pitch can alter the meaning of a word. Vietnamese, for example, has eleven different vowel sounds and six different tones. Cantonese also has an intricate six-tone system, while English has no tones.

Researchers at Baycrest Health Sciences' Rotman Research Institute (RRI) in Toronto have found the strongest evidence yet that speaking a tonal language may improve how the brain hears music. While the findings may boost the egos of tonal language speakers who excel in musicianship, they are exciting neuroscientists for another reason: they represent the first strong evidence that music and language – which share overlapping brain structures – have bi-directional benefits!

The findings are published today in PLOS ONE, an international, peer-reviewed open-access science journal.

The benefits of music training for speech and language are already well documented (showing positive influences on speech perception and recognition, auditory working memory, aspects of verbal intelligence, and awareness of the sound structure of spoken words). The reverse – the benefits of language experience for learning music – has largely been unexplored until now.

"For those who speak tonal languages, we believe their brain's auditory system is already enhanced to allow them to hear musical notes better and detect minute changes in pitch," said lead investigator Gavin Bidelman, who conducted the research as a post-doctoral fellow at Baycrest's RRI, supported by a GRAMMY Foundation® grant.

"If you pick up an instrument, you may be able to acquire the skills faster to play that instrument because your brain has already built up these auditory perceptual advantages through speaking your native tonal language."

But Bidelman, now assistant professor with the Institute for Intelligent Systems and School of Communication Science & Disorders at the University of Memphis, was quick to dispel the notion that people who speak tonal languages make better musicians. Musicianship requires much more than the sense of hearing and plenty of English-speaking musical icons will put that quick assumption to rest.

That music and language – two key domains of human cognition – can influence each other offers exciting possibilities for devising new approaches to rehabilitation for people with speech and language deficits, said Bidelman.

"If music and language are so intimately coupled, we may be able to design rehabilitation treatments that use musical training to help individuals improve speech-related functions that have been impaired due to age, aphasia or stroke," he suggested. Bidelman added that similar benefits might also work in the opposite direction. Musical listening skills could be improved by designing well-crafted speech and language training programs.

The study

Fifty-four healthy adults in their mid-20s were recruited for the study from the University of Toronto and Greater Toronto Area. They were divided into three groups: English-speaking trained musicians (instrumentalists) and Cantonese-speaking and English-speaking non-musicians. Wearing headphones in a sound-proof lab, participants were tested on their ability to discriminate complex musical notes. They were assessed on measures of auditory pitch acuity and music perception as well as general cognitive ability such as working memory and fluid intelligence (abstract reasoning, thinking quickly). While the musicians demonstrated superior performance on all auditory measures, the Cantonese non-musicians showed similar performance to musicians on music and cognitive behavioural tasks, testing 15 to 20 percent higher than that of the English-speaking non-musicians.

Bidelman added that not all tonal languages may offer the music listening benefits seen with the Cantonese speakers in his study. Mandarin, for example, has more "curved" tones and the pitch patterns vary with time – which is different from how pitch occurs in music. Musical pitch resembles "stair step, level pitch patterns" which happen to share similarities with the Cantonese language, he explained.

Bidelman's research team included Sylvain Moreno, senior scientist with Baycrest's RRI and lead scientist with the Baycrest Centre for Brain Fitness; and Stefanie Hutka, an RRI graduate student and PhD student in the Department of Psychology, University of Toronto.

The GRAMMY Foundation, which supported the study, works in partnership with its founder The Recording Academy® to bring national attention to important issues such as the value and impact of music and arts education.
__________________________
References:

EurekAlert. 2013. “Speaking a tonal language (such as Cantonese) primes the brain for musical training”. EurekAlert. Posted: April 2, 2013. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/bcfg-sat040213.php

Theory: Music underlies language acquisition

Contrary to the prevailing theories that music and language are cognitively separate or that music is a byproduct of language, theorists at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) advocate that music underlies the ability to acquire language.

"Spoken language is a special type of music," said Anthony Brandt, co-author of a theory paper published online this month in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Auditory Neuroscience. "Language is typically viewed as fundamental to human intelligence, and music is often treated as being dependent on or derived from language. But from a developmental perspective, we argue that music comes first and language arises from music."

Brandt, associate professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School, co-authored the paper with Shepherd School graduate student Molly Gebrian and L. Robert Slevc, UMCP assistant professor of psychology and director of the Language and Music Cognition Lab.

"Infants listen first to sounds of language and only later to its meaning," Brandt said. He noted that newborns' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception depend on the discrimination of the sounds of language – "the most musical aspects of speech."

The paper cites various studies that show what the newborn brain is capable of, such as the ability to distinguish the phonemes, or basic distinctive units of speech sound, and such attributes as pitch, rhythm and timbre.

The authors define music as "creative play with sound." They said the term "music" implies an attention to the acoustic features of sound irrespective of any referential function. As adults, people focus primarily on the meaning of speech. But babies begin by hearing language as "an intentional and often repetitive vocal performance," Brandt said. "They listen to it not only for its emotional content but also for its rhythmic and phonemic patterns and consistencies. The meaning of words comes later."

Brandt and his co-authors challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language cognition and is more difficult. "We show that music and language develop along similar time lines," he said.

Infants initially don't distinguish well between their native language and all the languages of the world, Brandt said. Throughout the first year of life, they gradually hone in on their native language. Similarly, infants initially don't distinguish well between their native musical traditions and those of other cultures; they start to hone in on their own musical culture at the same time that they hone in on their native language, he said.

The paper explores many connections between listening to speech and music. For example, recognizing the sound of different consonants requires rapid processing in the temporal lobe of the brain. Similarly, recognizing the timbre of different instruments requires temporal processing at the same speed -- a feature of musical hearing that has often been overlooked, Brandt said.

"You can't distinguish between a piano and a trumpet if you can't process what you're hearing at the same speed that you listen for the difference between 'ba' and 'da,'" he said. "In this and many other ways, listening to music and speech overlap." The authors argue that from a musical perspective, speech is a concert of phonemes and syllables.

"While music and language may be cognitively and neurally distinct in adults, we suggest that language is simply a subset of music from a child's view," Brandt said. "We conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development."

Brandt said more research on this topic might lead to a better understanding of why music therapy is helpful for people with reading and speech disorders. People with dyslexia often have problems with the performance of musical rhythm. "A lot of people with language deficits also have musical deficits," Brandt said.

More research could also shed light on rehabilitation for people who have suffered a stroke. "Music helps them reacquire language, because that may be how they acquired language in the first place," Brandt said.
_________________________
References:

EurekAlert. 2012. “Theory: Music underlies language acquisition”. EurekAlert. Posted: September 18, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-09/ru-tmu091812.php

Speakers of a tone language show improved pitch perception

People who speak Cantonese, a tonal language, demonstrate enhance musical pitch perception relative to Canadian French and English speakers, according to an Apr. 11 report in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

The researchers, led by Patrick Wong, Li-Hai Tan, and Isabelle Peretz at the University of Montreal also investigated individuals with congenital amusia, a neurogenetic disorder that affects processing of pitch and rhythm in music. Interestingly, Cantonese speaking amusics still showed enhanced pitch perception relative to Canadian amusics. These results, the authors write, argue for a re-conceptualization of communicative disorders within appropriate cultural frameworks.
___________
References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "Speakers of a tone language show improved pitch perception". EurekAlert. Posted: April 11, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/plos-soa040912.php

Wong PCM, Ciocca V, Chan AHD, Ha LYY, Tan L-H, et al. (2012) Effects of Culture on Musical Pitch Perception. PLoS ONE 7(4): e33424. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0033424

Science Historian Cracks the 'Plato Code'

Plato was the Einstein of Greece's Golden Age and his work founded Western culture and science. Dr Jay Kennedy's findings are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.

Dr Kennedy, whose findings are published in the leading US journal Apeiron, reveals that Plato used a regular pattern of symbols, inherited from the ancient followers of Pythagoras, to give his books a musical structure. A century earlier, Pythagoras had declared that the planets and stars made an inaudible music, a 'harmony of the spheres'. Plato imitated this hidden music in his books.

The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea -- the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. The decoded messages also open up a surprising way to unite science and religion. The awe and beauty we feel in nature, Plato says, shows that it is divine; discovering the scientific order of nature is getting closer to God. This could transform today's culture wars between science and religion.

"Plato's books played a major role in founding Western culture but they are mysterious and end in riddles," Dr Kennedy, at Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences explains.

"In antiquity, many of his followers said the books contained hidden layers of meaning and secret codes, but this was rejected by modern scholars.

"It is a long and exciting story, but basically I cracked the code. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato.

"This is a true discovery, not simply reinterpretation."

This will transform the early history of Western thought, and especially the histories of ancient science, mathematics, music, and philosophy.

Dr Kennedy spent five years studying Plato's writing and found that in his best-known work the Republic he placed clusters of words related to music after each twelfth of the text -- at one-twelfth, two-twelfths, etc. This regular pattern represented the twelve notes of a Greek musical scale. Some notes were harmonic, others dissonant. At the locations of the harmonic notes he described sounds associated with love or laughter, while the locations of dissonant notes were marked with screeching sounds or war or death. This musical code was key to cracking Plato's entire symbolic system.

Dr Kennedy, a researcher in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, says: "As we read his books, our emotions follow the ups and downs of a musical scale. Plato plays his readers like musical instruments."

However Plato did not design his secret patterns purely for pleasure -- it was for his own safety. Plato's ideas were a dangerous threat to Greek religion. He said that mathematical laws and not the gods controlled the universe. Plato's own teacher had been executed for heresy. Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death. Encoding his ideas in secret patterns was the only way to be safe.

Plato led a dramatic and fascinating life. Born four centuries before Christ, when Sparta defeated plague-ravaged Athens, he wrote 30 books and founded the world's first university, called the Academy. He was a feminist, allowing women to study at the Academy, the first great defender of romantic love (as opposed to marriages arranged for political or financial reasons) and defended homosexuality in his books. In addition, he was captured by pirates and sold into slavery before being ransomed by friends.

Dr Kennedy explains: "Plato's importance cannot be overstated. He shifted humanity from a warrior society to a wisdom society. Today our heroes are Einstein and Shakespeare -- and not knights in shining armour -- because of him."

Over the years Dr Kennedy carefully peeled back layer after symbolic layer, sharing each step in lectures in Manchester and with experts in the UK and US.

He recalls: "There was no Rosetta Stone. To announce a result like this I needed rigorous, independent proofs based on crystal-clear evidence.

"The result was amazing -- it was like opening a tomb and finding new set of gospels written by Jesus Christ himself.

"Plato is smiling. He sent us a time capsule."

Dr Kennedy's findings are not only surprising and important; they overthrow conventional wisdom on Plato. Modern historians have always denied that there were codes; now Dr Kennedy has proved otherwise.

He adds: "This is the beginning of something big. It will take a generation to work out the implications. All 2,000 pages contain undetected symbols."
_____________________
References:

Science Daily. 2010. "Science Historian Cracks the 'Plato Code'". Science Daily. Posted: June 29, 2010. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100628111846.htm

Punk rock in North African music

This article has been removed by request. There was an error in the report. Hopefully I will be able to replace it in the future.