Responding To Music Flashcards
(25 cards)
What is important in terms of how we respond to music?
Long-term memory of music
What songs tend to be remembered well even if the pitch is off?
Simple songs such as Happy Birthday
We have a collective memory for happy birthday, irrespective of pitch.
Describe the study by Levitin (2007) on memorising music
Asked people to sing pop songs that they knew from recordings
What did Levitin (2007) find in terms of memorising music?
The recording is in a particular key and starts on a particular note.
When people who sang Hey Jude, they started on the same note that the recording started on.
Suggests that they memorised the pitch of the song and the tempo etc.
The pitch and tempo have been so strongly coded in the brain that when they are asked to reproduce it, they reproduce it as it was recorded.
This finding was found irrespective of musical training and ability. Suggests that most of us have a sort of pitch-finding ability that we don’t necessarily realise we have.
What have EEG studies found in terms of listening to or imagining music?
Janata (1997) found that the same part of the brain is activated when we are either listening or imagining music. There is the same pattern of EEG activity.
Suggests that the memory traces that we have for the music that we like and are familiar with are being activated/re-activated when we listen to the music.
The music is being perfectly preserved in long-term memory.
What does the term ‘earworms’ refer to?
Involuntary musical imagery
Get a song stuck in our head that we cannot get rid of.
What type of tunes do earworms tend to be?
Simple tunes
Melodic contours
Popular tones
Chorus/verse/particular section/chunk
How long do earworms tend to be?
15/30 second fragments of a song
What disorder are earworms more common in?
OCD
What makes music enjoyable for us?
Violates our expectations - music becomes more interesting once our expectations are not fulfilled
How can music violate expectations?
Use unusual chord changes
Breaks in rhythm
Change in timbre
What is a deceptive cadence?
A dominant chord followed by an unexpected chord
Is it possible to have too much expectancy violation?
Yes - Shoenberg.
The more expectancy violations you have, the more uncomfortable the listening experience becomes.
Difficult for audiences to understand and appreciate atonal music (e.g., Mozart, Beethoven, Handel)
Who is notorious for producing atonal music?
Schoenberg (German composer)
What are aspects of Schoenberg’s music?
Atonal
No key structure
Little repetition of passages etc.
Hard to memorise
Few expectancies set up
Why might someone like Schoenberg’s music?
Enjoy the different textures
Hear something new every time you listen to Schoenberg
Why might some people not like Schoenberg’s music?
You can’t really anticipate anything because there is something different going on every minute of the music.
It can be difficult to understand, appreciate, and get to know the music.
Do humans prefer tonal or atonal music?
Tonal music (McDermott & Hauser, 2007)
Do humans discriminate between tonal or atonal music?
Yes
Do animals discriminate between tonal or atonal music?
No
What type of music do Tamarin monkeys prefer? (McDermott & Hauser, 2007)
Silence - this suggests that the appreciation of music is fundamentally human
What did Levitin propose about music’s purpose in life?
We can identify an evolutionary function for music, but it is not necessarily the most obvious function (e.g., dancing or musical performance might play a role in mate selection or social bonding)
Psychologically, how could music tap into biological or cognitive processes?
Different components make it meaningful.
Rhythm (engages our muscular system), organisation (engages our cognitive system, we like patterns/predicability), cultural capital (in a social sense - cultural knowledge - something to share with people)
From a social point of view, what is the point of music?
Music just serves as an accompaniment for some activites.
Could serve a mental health function (makes us feel better, acts as an emotion regulator, affects mood)
Music could enhance social encounters (e.g., going clubbing)
Could enhance ceremonial functions (political demonstrations, the use of military bands or music in weddings)
