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Re: Dissonance with integration?
Martin,
I think you are forgetting the importance of mental states and priming in
music perception. Certainly there are biological "bottom-up" processes
that you suggest below, but i think we are using the same words in
different languages here...
"Pitch" and "chroma" to me are nameable bits of musical information -
without higher order cognitive functions, pitch and chroma cannot be
categorized or sorted -- or indeed, even recognized. species with more
highly developed cognitive function have octave recognition, others do
not... it's escaping me who did the study on Tamarins' preferences for
consonance/dissonance...
i think you are referring to the auditory system's capability of
extracting surface-level features such as frequency relationships and
harmonicity -- "Pitch" is a cultural phenomenon, as Kevin has suggested.
Frequencies and harmonic relationships are, more or less "physics" that is
processed by the auditory pathway until its arrival at the auditory
cortex.
speaking of which -- have you read the paper about plasticity in tonotopic
maps? perhaps this has something to do with perception about consonance
and dissonance. i'll see if i can find it... the finding was that in A1
the tonotopic map is not organized as once thought, is different across
individuals, and has L/R/ lateralization differences...
are we speaking about consonance as "Harmonically related" and dissonance
as "not harmonically related"? i can see that as a point of confusion
between disciplines.
I agree that there are hard-wired responses to acoustic phenomena
(fight/flight/etc), but music is, for the most part, unnatural. Using
comparisons to animal calls is interesting, but at the end of the day, not
the same thing. without cognitive processes such as memory, music
perception would be fleeting. Mental state has as much to do with
receiving musical information as the timbral content of the sound...
regardless of the style or level of dissonance the particular culture has
imparted on particular organizations of sounds -- also a "top-down"
process.
i guess i'm confused as to why it can't be looked at both ways...
-m
On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Martin Braun wrote:
"As I understand it, the first level of nerves from cochlea to brain are
something like the telephone wires that run by my house. Do they interpret
the impulses or [simply] transmit them?"
Before musical information reaches the "language top" of the brain (same
level as manages phonemes) the "lower machinery" has already extracted pitch,
consonance, dissonance, chroma, and nearly all of the "emotional byproducts".
In fact, if it was possible to black out the products of the "lower
machinery" (say, by anesthesia), the "language top" of the brain would have
no cue whatsoever that it was music that was in the air.
"I'm not sure what would make a memory chip happy or sad."
If a chip has the same life span with noise as with music, I would regard it
as being equally happy with either. Just yesterday I learned that in East
Germany average life span of humans has increased by six years after
Communism's fall in 1989. Here the noise before 1989 was not so much an
acoustic one, of course.
Martin
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Martin Braun
Neuroscience of Music
S-671 95 Klässbol
Sweden
email: nombraun@xxxxxxxxx
web site: http://www.neuroscience-of-music.se/index.htm
----- Original Message ----- From: "Kevin Austin" <kevin.austin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Martin Braun" <nombraun@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2010 9:13 PM
Subject: Dissonance with integration?
---
matthew mccabe <mccabem@xxxxxxx>
visiting assistant professor / music tech :: columbus state university
ph.d., music composition :: uf college of fine arts
lab member :: reilly cognition and language lab :: uf phhp
http://plaza.ufl.edu/mccabem/ http://www.euph0r1a.net/