Is Pinker’s ‘auditory cheesecake’ consistent with Mithen’s ‘Hmmmmm’ communication?
This was the topic of an in-class debate today in the music cognition course I am assisting as a teaching fellow. While the discussion in class was brief, it got my gears rolling, and I thought it would make a good discussion topic here on Sound and Mind.
First, some background on Pinker and Mithen. (Read on …)
Leonard B. Meyer: Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology
The University of Chicago Press, 1989
I know this is another oldie as far as these things go, but Meyer’s Style and Music is an important work which does not hold the pride of place in the scholarship of music and music cognition that I think it should. So I think it is worth saying a few words about this book, in the hopes of turning a few heads in its direction.
This book is Leonard Meyer’s mature presentation of his theory of style analysis. Style and Music lays out how Meyer defines style in terms of compositional and perceptual processes. He then explains his concept of style analysis, followed by an in depth pedagogy of this concept by example, primarily focusing on 19th c. Romantic music composition and criticism. Building on his earlier work on meaning in music (see both Emotion and Meaning in Music and Music, the Arts, and Ideas), Meyer bases his ideas of style and style analysis in syntax and probability systems, centering on the related ideas of implication/realization and information theory. Though in the work of later authors, this book’s contribution to music scholarship is mostly played out in cognitive musicology and the psychology of music, most of this book is focused on analysis, criticism, and aesthetics.
Carol L. Krumhansl: Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch
Oxford University Press (1990).
The purpose of Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch (CFMP), according to author Carol L. Krumhansl, is ‘to describe the knowledge listeners have about musical structure and characterize how this knowledge affects the way listeners perceive and remember music’ (p. 281). She focuses specifically on the pitch structure of ‘tonal-harmonic music’ (p. 12) of the common-practice period of the Western classical tradition. Of course, the structure of tonal music and the effect that knowledge of it has on a listener’s perception have long been hot topics in the study of music, and they are particularly salient subjects of inquiry in cognitive musicology. Cognitive musicologists have approached these topics from various angles: some lend toward the traditionally music theoretical or analytical, some are scientific but speculative (e.g. Lerdahl 2001), some are primarily computational (e.g. Temperley 2001, 2007), some are experimentally and/or empirically based (e.g. the work of Aniruddh D. Patel), and some function as a broader survey of a number of kinds of studies (e.g. Huron 2006). Though CFMP has an air of survey, it most decidedly takes an experimental approach, incorporating the ‘methods and theoretical approach’ of ‘cognitive psychology’ (p. 5). This study also ‘employ[s] statistical and other analytical methods’ (p. 8 ) in interpreting the data gained from the experiments cited, and in generalizing from those data and interpretations.
Let me start off by apologizing for my relative absence from Sound and Mind the last few months. This has been an incredibly insane semester. However, the end is in sight, and I have a lot to say here over the next few weeks, partly as a result of an excellent seminar on the history and cognition of tonality by Ian Quinn. I hope we haven’t lost too many of our faithful readers in this drought of posts, and I hope we can have some lively discussion this summer and beyond! That said, onto my post…
I was struck a couple weeks ago by a couple of passages in J. P. Kirnberger’s Die Kunst des reinen Satzes (The Art of Strict Composition), specifically in the chapter on modulation. Though the ideas in this chapter were commonly held by composers and teachers of composition, this treatise from 1771-79 gives the earliest theoretical explanation of key relations I have seen which appeals to distinctly phenomenological principles.
As a follow-up to Friday’s review of Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals, I’d like to draw attention to a post on the blog Babel’s Dawn which discusses some issues in the development of language which were central to Mithen’s theories, namely bipedalism, hairlessness, and their effects on the development of language. It looks to be the first in a series of posts on this thread of issues, so if you’re particularly interested in this topic, check it out.
Steven Mithen: The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005 (UK)
Harvard University Press, 2006 (US)
page numbers in this review refer to the UK edition
Overview and Summary
Steven Pinker’s claim that music is no more than ‘auditory cheesecake,’ a ‘technology’ not an adaptive trait (1997, pp. 529-39), has prompted a number of reactions from the academic music community attempting to defend the honor of the discipline by insisting that music is indeed an adaptation. The Singing Neanderthals, however, is not such a book. Coming from a ‘cognitive archaeologist’ and not a music scholar, Mithen’s stance on the evolutionary relationship between music and language is more even-keeled. While Mithen disagrees with Pinker’s assessment, his premise in this book is not to restore music to the honorable status of ‘adaptation,’ but rather to demonstrate the role that certain aspects of music played in the evolutionary and social development of early Homo sapiens and other hominids.
Edmond Blair Bolles has been reporting from the Cradle of Language Conference (currently being held in Stellenbosch, South Africa) on his blog Babel’s Dawn. A number of speakers have discussed the relationship of music to language, and their possible co-evolution, including Steven Mithen and Ian Cross. Here are links to two posts thus far on the research which has been presented at the conference:
A post on the general topic of music and language
A post on Ian Cross’s talk, ‘Music, meaning and evolution’
Following up on Tim’s review of the Justus & Hutsler article on the evolutionary psychology of music, I’d like to offer some thoughts on Aniruddh D. Patel’s response to that article (and McDermott and Hauser, MP 23, 2005), which is one of several responses in the latest issue of Music Perception. Patel’s response is entitled ‘Musical Rhythm, Linguistic Rhythm, and Human Evolution.’
To help us get into the discussion of evolution and music which has graced the pages of recent issues of Music Perception, special contributor Tim Byron (bio below) has written a review for Sound and Mind of the MP article which started that discussion. That article is “Fundamental Issues in the Evolutionary Psychology of Music: Assessing Innateness and Domain Specificity” by Timothy Justus and Jeffrey Hutsler (MP 23/1, September 2005). Thanks, Tim, for the contribution! And now, the review:
Robert Walser, a musicologist from UCLA, gave a talk at Yale this week entitled ‘Science, Music, and the Brain: A Humanist Cogitates.’ Without summarizing the whole talk, I would like to point out three points which he made which I think are worth repeating and discussing. They are (in the order presented):
I recently came across an article on ‘Shared networks for auditory and motor processing in professional pianists’ (NeuroImage 30: Bangert, Peschel, Schlaug, Rotte, Drescher, Hinrichs, Heinze, Altenmüller). This study, based on fMRI studies of professional pianists and non-musicians, shows that a network of neural regions in the brain are activated in both an aural task (listening to piano melodies) and a motion-oriented task (’playing’ a piano keyboard with no auditory output) in professional pianists, but this coactivation is not found in non-musicians. Further, part of this coactivated network is in Broca’s area, which has typically been associated with speech and language. (Read on …)
I apologize for the lack of posts over the last week or so. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Anyway, I found that there is a new issue of Music Perception out, which has a number of pages devoted to discussion on the origins of music. This should be an interesting read, particularly in light of a couple articles in the recent volume of Cognition which was devoted to music. I hope that over the next few weeks we’ll be able to gain some interesting insights from putting those two journals side by side and seeing what we can make of what this variety of musical and scientific scholars have to say about the evolution and origin of music.
A recent study in Brain (Hyde, Zatorre, Griffiths, Lerch, and Peretz: ‘Morphometry of the amusic brain: a two-site study’) claims to be ‘the first investigation into the structural neural correlates of congenital amusia [tone-deafness].’ This study finds a ‘decrease in white matter found . . . in the right IFG of amusic individuals’ as compared with musically untrained individuals who are not tone-deaf. (Read on …)
Kris and I decided that an interesting way to stimulate new and cross-disciplinary discussion would be to pose several provocative, “impossible” questions in the form of “what is…” Many of us devote our lives, energy, talents, funding, and sanity to music – what is it? What happens when we begin to define it? Because this forum is meant to encourage conversation rather than inhibit it, please feel free to post responses of any length on any topic applicable. Write two sentences, two paragraphs, or two pages; fly over the top, or provide citations.
So, what is music?