PATM Music And Language Flashcards
- Language and music: Similarities
and Differences have been the
subject of much thought. Name six names.
- Plato: a philosopher, as well as mathematician, in Classical Greece and an influential figure in philosophy, central in Western philosophy. He was Socrates’ student, and founded the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.
- Darwin: an English naturalistand geologist, best known for his contributions to evolutionary theory
- **Galileo: **an Italian physicist, mathematician, engineer,astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution.
- **Rousseau: **an important figure in the history of philosophy, both because of his contributions to political philosophy and moral psychology.
- **Wittgenstein: **an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, thephilosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
- Bernstein: a British sociologist known for his work in the sociology of education.
- What did Dunbar (1996) speculate?
- Dunbar (1996) speculated that music may have played an important role in the lives of early homo-sapiens
- Changes in group sizes and bodily changes
- Vocal Grooming may have improved group cohesiveness and increased survival
- Evidence for a shared pathway?
We utilise similar emotion cues across music and language domains
Juslin & Laukka (2003) reviewed 104 studies on vocal expression and 41 studies of music performance (vocal and instrumental)
Found substantial overlap in types of acoustic cues used to convey **emotions in speech and music **
- List how Anger can be expressed in Musical Expression and Vocal Expression.
- List how Tenderness can be expressed in Musical Expression and Vocal Expression.
- List how Happiness can be expressed in Musical Expression and Vocal Expression.
- List how Fear can be expressed in Musical Expression and Vocal Expression.
- Describe the structure of Language with a diagram.
- What is a phoneme?
Phonemes are smallest separate sound. Includes consonants and letter combinations (th/sh)
“That” is a 3 phoneme word (th/a/t)
English uses around 40 phonemes. Different languages use between 15 and 80 of the 100 available
- What are Morphemes?
Smallest unit of meaning in language.
Dog
Log
Ball
S (meaning plural)
Pre
Un
ed
- What are the differences between musical and linguistic syntax?
Grammatical categories (verbs, nouns etc) only in language.
The two domains also differ on constituent structure of syntactic linguistic trees
- What makes up musical syntax and is it complex?
- Musical syntax is extremely complex and has multiple levels of organisation
- Scale structure
- Chord structure
- Key structure
- Hierarchical structure of sequences that unfold over the period of the composition
- What did Juslin & Laukka (2003) show in a study?
- The study by Juslin & Laukka (2003) showed that we use some of the same acoustic signals to communicate basic emotions in music as in language
- But there a clearly many differences between
14.Name some important differences distinguishing music and language
- Music is less specified in semantic meaning than language
- Music is obviously not meaningless but meaning is far less tangible than in language “Floating Intentionality” **(Cross, 1999) **
- Describe Pitch Differences
In music pitch has a high level of organisation at different levels
Probe Tone paradigm: Melody built around stable sets of pitch intervals – enables a hierarchy of pitch stability
- Describe tones in language and music.
- Tones in language work to get a job done – e.g. rising pitch signals a question
- Tones in music are “in love with each other”
Linguistic “Tones” do not have anything like the level of organisation that a musical waveform has.
- Describe pitch organisation.
Pitch is more highly organised in some languages than in others but it is still quite unlike music.
**Vietnamese is a tonal language. It has six tones and these change the meaning of the word used **
- Timbre in music is described as what?
McAdams & Bregman, 1979, describe timbre as “the psychoacoustician’s multidimensional wastebasket category for everything that cannot be qualified as pitch or loudness“
In music timbre is the attribute that enables us to distinguish between a clarinet and a flute when they are both playing the same note
- Timbre in langauge is described as what?
In speech timbre is the primary basis for linguistic sound categories (Patel, 2008)
• Timbral contrasts result from continuous changes in the shape of the vocal tract as sound is produced from a variety of sources
- Describe a word that illustrates timbral differences.
SLEEPY
- Alternation between consonants and vowels results in a rapid succession of timbral contrasts
Consonants and vowels have different articulations and distinct timbres.
- Vowels – open unimpeded sound
- Consonants – closed percussive
- Metrical differences differ explain why.
- Temporal periodicity is much less strict in language than in music.
- Regular periodicities in music allow for meter and this serves as a mental framework (scaffolding) for sound perception.
- Beats are not evenly spaced in speech
- However, an important point that Patel makes is that whilst Music and language have their own specialist representations (pitch intervals in music, nouns and verbs in language) they share a number of basic processing mechanisms.
- Describe Statistical learning/ Implicit learning.
Involves tracking patterns in the environment and acquiring implicit knowledge about their statistical properties
Statistical learning has been demonstrated for aspects of language (e.g.Saffran et al., 1996) and music (e.g. Krumhansl, 1990; 2000)
Infants learn a lot about language and music without any formal training
- Why are there suggestions that we may rely on some of the same mechanisms for learning language and music?
- Patel, Iverson & Rosenberg (2006).
- Speech corpus: short, newslike utterances read by native speakers in French and English
- Music corpus: classical instrumental music by 16 French and English composers writing at around the turn of the 20th century (Elgar, Debussy etc)
They extracted and analysed the pitches (not glides) and computed 2 measures of melodic statistics for each sentence.
1) Pitch height (e.g. compared to mean)
2) Variability in pitch interval size within sentences (jump in interval between successive level pitches)
The first variable (pitch height) revealed no differences between French and English for language or music.
The second variable (pitch interval sizes) showed differences between French and English.
French had significantly lower pitch interval variability than English and the music mirrored this pattern.
Quantitative differences emerged between English and French music and this reflected differences in the English and French languages
The authors invoke statistical learning of prosodic pitch patterns in explanation of their findings.
- Describe Shared Syntactic Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH) **(Patel, 2008) **
Describes 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.
