Re: working memory and melody

[Brian Gygi <bgygi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Robert Port wrote:

> The recent comments on this issue (from Deutsch, Demeny and others) 
> are compatible with Margaret Wilson's claim that  ``the phonological 
> loop'' is basically articulatory or motor. See her review article: 
> `The case for sensorimotor coding in working memory' in /Psychonomic 
> Bulletin & Review 8/ (2001), pp. 44-57.  She concludes that ``only a 
> sensorimotor model can accommodate the broad range of effects that 
> characterize verbal working memory'' and points out that this supports 
> the general viewpoint of embodied cognition.  So what Baddeley called 
> `phonological' is not at all what linguists would call phonological 
> (since they would expect that to mean something completely abstract 
> and devoid of sensory or motor content).
>     So the prediction would have to be that the only way the 
> ``phonological loop'' could encode music is if it could be stored as 
> something one could SING! 
So then to rehearse environmental sounds, would one have to imitate a 
glass breaking or a car starting?  I could not even begin to imitate 
some of the sounds that I work with.

Brian Gygi
Acoustics Research Institute
Vienna Austria