ORCID Profile
0000-0001-5003-2367
Current Organisation
Keio University
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Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 30-11-2022
Abstract: What, if any, similarities and differences between music and speech are consistent across cultures? Both music and language are found in all known human societies and are argued to share evolutionary roots and cognitive resources, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music across languages on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyze a novel dataset of 300 high-quality annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of singing, recitation, conversational speech, and instrumental music from our 75 coauthors whose 55 1st/heritage languages span 21 language families to find strong evidence for cross-culturally consistent differences and similarities between music and language. Of our six pre-registered predictions, five were strongly supported: relative to speech, songs use 1) higher pitch, 2) slower temporal rate, and 3) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar 4) pitch interval size, and 5) timbral brightness. Our 6th prediction that song and speech would show similar pitch declination was inconclusive, with exploratory analysis suggesting that songs tend to follow an arched contour while speech contours tend to decline overall but end with a slight rise. Because our non-representative language s le and unusual design involving coauthors as participants could affect our results, we also performed robustness analyses - including a parallel reanalysis of a previously published dataset of 418 song/speech recordings from 209 in iduals whose 16 languages span 11 language families (Hilton & Moser et al., 2022, Nature Human Behaviour) - which confirmed that our conclusions are robust to these potential biases. Exploratory analyses identified additional features such as phrase length, intensity, and rhythmic/melodic regularity that also consistently distinguish song from speech, and suggest that such features also vary along a “musi-linguistic” continuum in a cross-culturally consistent manner when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Further exploratory analysis suggests that pitch height is the only consistently sexually dimorphic feature (female singing/speaking is almost one octave higher than male on average), and that other factors such as musical training and recording context may also interact to influence the magnitude of song-speech differences. Our study provides strong empirical evidence for the existence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 20-03-2023
Abstract: When we listen to music, we often feel the urge to tap our fingers, stomp our feet, or move our bodies. This pleasurable sensation of wanting to move one's body with the music has been termed "groove." Research on groove was initially conducted mainly in the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology and philosophy, and in the 2000s, researchers within the field of empirical psychology began to investigate the concept of groove and the characteristics of music associated with it. In the 2010s, studies of the relationship between groove and underlying brain structures and functional processes emerged and the topic has recently become a prominent theme in empirical research on musical behavior. This review aims to provide a comprehensive characterization of groove and to highlight future directions for related empirical research. In doing so, we focus on two topics that have the potential to provide new insights into perception and action from the perspectives of psychology and neuroscience: (1) sensorimotor interactions and (2) the role of the motor system in predictive processing. To this end, we survey the literature on groove conducted in the fields of psychology and neuroscience from 2006 to 2022 in five sections: (1) the concept of groove, (2) musical features related to groove, (3) responses to groove including body movement and neurophysiological activity, (4) characteristics of listeners that influence the experience of groove, and (5) the effect of culture and environment on groove perception. Through the review, we propose four themes as promising future directions for empirical study: (1) social aspects of groove, (2) the effect of microtiming and syncopation on groove, (3) the mechanisms by which groove is evoked, and (4) clinical implications and applications of groove. Taken together, these research efforts may ultimately lead to an increased understanding of human sociality, evolution, and the brain and mind.
Location: United States of America
No related grants have been discovered for Shinya Fujii.