Principal Investigator : Emmanuel Bigand
Associates: Daniel A. D'Adamo. Composer, LEAD-CNRS
François Madurell. Assistant professor in Music Theory. Université Paris V Sorbonne
Benedicte Poulin. Ph.D. student, Cognitive Psychology
Tillmann Barbara. Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology. LEAD CNRS & Dartmouth College

This project is supported by a research grant from the International Foundation for Music Research.
Executive Director: Dr. Norman M. Weinberger
5790 Armanda Drive, Suite 200. Carlsbad, CA 92008. USA
Phone 760 438 5530
Email ifmr@music-research.org
Web site www.music-research.org

Overview of the project.

The main purpose of the project is to evaluate how musically naive listeners differ from musically expert listeners when they are asked to process musical structures. We postulate that listeners discover musical events by focusing on successive zones. Within each of these zones, they extract local relationships between sound events with respect to evoked knowledge of Western musical grammar. The result of this local analysis is then stored in working memory and integrative processes relate these local structures in a more or less coherent global form. The research program was designed (1) to compare the musical knowledge of Western harmony in musically expert and naive listeners and (2) to characterize the nature and the power of the integrative processes in different audiences (listeners) varying by familiarity with music. Although it is likely that the musical cognitive abilities of nonmusicians are generally underestimated, we are not expecting identical processing of musical structures in nonmusicians and musicians. Differences certainly exist but the critical point is to specify the exact nature of these differences. We believe that a scientific account of this issue may have implications for different domains of cognitive science, for pedagogical methods, developments of music technology, and for the musical behavior of the general audience.

Progress during the past year.

During the initial period, the research program was devoted to (1) characterize the abstract musical knowledge of basic regularities of western harmony in both musicians and nonmusicians (2), to investigate how this knowledge influences the processing of the harmonic function of a given chord in large contexts, and (3) to analyze the understanding of musical discourse processes in sonata forms.

1. Harmonic priming experiments have been run in order to probe the harmonic knowledge of two-chord-relationships along the circle of fifths, of the legal resolutions of a diminished chord, and of the distance between major keys. The used harmonic priming paradigm required listeners to evaluate as quickly and accurately as possible whether or not a target chord following a prime chord was acoustically consonant. Musicians and nonmusicians showed a highly similar sensitivity to the different kinds of harmonic relationships that have been experimentally manipulated between prime and target chords. Further experiments are currently running in order to evaluate whether the timbre of the sounds (piano versus sine wave sounds) and the prime duration (varying from 75 ms to 300 ms) contribute to harmonic priming in both groups of listeners.

2. A second group of 12 experiments has investigated how listeners understand the harmonic function of a target chord. In order to maximize the chance to find differences between musicians and nonmusicians, we voluntary decided to focus on very subtle differences in harmonic function (i.e., tonic versus subdominant) and to remove any contribution of the sensory driven processes in the experiments. As a main outcome we found that the processing of a chord depends on its harmonic function, even though the feature of the target chord to be processed was not musical. For example, the discrimination of the phonemes "dee" and "doo" was facilitated when the phoneme was sung on a tonic rather than on a subdominant chord. Experiments currently running were designed to evaluate the speed to process the contextual function of a chord. Up to now, nonmusicians behave exactly as musicians do.

3. Finally, 4 experiments analyzed higher levels of music cognition. Musical excerpts from Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven sonatas were presented to listeners who were asked to indicate whether these excerpts correspond to a musical theme, a transition or an ending. After a training phase, participants listened to a large set of excerpts that may be presented in an incoherent way (i.e., the excerpts belong to different sonatas), in a coherent way (i.e., the excerpts belong to the same sonata) or in a pseudocoherent way (i.e., the excerpts belonging to a given sonata are presented in a scrambled way). As a main result, musical excepts were easier to categorize in the coherent and pseudo coherent conditions rather than in the incoherent condition. Furthermore, thematic sections were found to be more difficult to categorize than musical transitions or endings. We currently run different analyses in order to evaluate how each musical feature contributes to the categorization of musical excerpts for both musicians and nonmusicians.

Publications and meetings

Publications submitted concerning findings from the project
Tillmann, B., Bharucha, J. & Bigand, E. Implicit learning of tonality: A self organizing approach. In press in Psychological Review.

Tillmann, B., Bigand, E. Global contexts effects in normal versus scrambled musical sequences. Submitted to Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human, Perception & Performances.

Meetings concerning findings from this project.
Bigand, E.(2000) Psychologie de la musique et informatique musicale, Journées d'Informatique Musicale, 18 Mai, Bordeaux.
Poulin, B., Bigand, E., D'Adamo, D., Madurell, F., & Tillmann, B. (2000). Does musical expertise influence the processing of harmonic structure ? , Poster presented at The Biological Foundations of Music, New York Academy of Sciences Conference, May 20-22.
Bigand, E. & Tillmann, B. (2000). Harmonic and semantic priming: Some comparisons, International Congress of Psychology, Stockholm, Sweden, July, 23-29, .

Bigand, E., Poulain, B., D'Adamo, D., Madurell, F. & Tillmann, B., More about the (weak) difference between musicians and nonmusicians's abilities to process harmonic structures., 6th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition. August 5 ­ 10, Keele University, United Kindom.
Bigand, E., Poulain, B., Tillmann, B & D'Adamo, D. How much time do we need to process harmonic structures ?, 6th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition. August 5 ­ 10, Keele University, United Kindom..