Musical syntax: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:46, 25 April 2014

Revision as of 19:47, 23 May 2014

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Syntax in general can be referred to as a study of the principles and rules needed for the construction of a language or as a term in particular describing these principles and rules for a special language.

===Linguistic syntax – three principles <ref name=Patel2008>Patel, A.D. (2008). Music, Language, and the Brain. Oxford University Press, USA</ref>===

Linguistic syntax is especially marked by its structural richness which becomes apparent in its multi layered organization as well as in the strong relationship between syntax and meaning. That is that there are special linguistic syntactic principles which define how the language is formed out of different subunits, such as words out of [[morphemes]], phrases out of words and sentences out of phrases. Furthermore, linguistic syntax is featured by the fact that a word can take on abstract [[grammatical functions]] which are less defined through properties of the word itself but through the context and structural relations. This is for example that every [[noun]] can be used as a [[subject (grammar)|subject]], [[object (grammar)|object]] or [[indirect object]], but without a sentence as the normal context of a word, no statement about its [[grammatical function]] can be made. At last, linguistic syntax is marked by abstractness. This means that only conventional structural relations and not psychoacoustic relationships are the basis for the linguistic syntax.

===Musical syntax <ref name=Patel2008/>===

Concerning musical syntax these three aspects of richness in linguistic syntax as well as the abstractness should be found in music too, if one wants to claim that music has a comparable syntax. An annotation that has to be made concerns the fact that most of the studies dealing with musical syntax are confined to the consideration of Western European tonal music. Thus this article can also only focus on [[tonality|Western tonal music]].

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=====Tension and resolution=====

Searching for other aspects of hierarchical structure of music there is a controversial discussion, if the organization of [[Tension (music)|tension]] and [[Resolution (music)|resolution]] in music can be described as hierarchical structure or only as a purely sequential structure. According to [[Patel]] <ref name =Patel2008/> research in this area has produced apparently contradictory evidence, and more research is needed to answer this question.

The question concerning the kind of structure which features tension and resolution in music is linked very close to the relationship between order and meaning in music. Considering tension and resolution as one possible kind of meaning in music a hierarchical structure would imply that a change of order of musical elements would have an influence on the meaning of the music.

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(4)Concerning harmonic aspects of major-minor tonal music, Musical syntax can be characterized by statistical regularities in the succession of chord functions in time, that is probabilities of chord transitions. As these regularities are stored in a [[long-term memory]], predictions about following chords are made automatically, when listening to a musical phrase.

====MMN and ERAN <ref>Koelsch, S. (2009). "Music-syntactic Processing and Auditory Memory – Similarities and Differences between ERAN and MMN". Psychophysiology, 46(1): 179-190.</ref>====

The violation of these automatically made predictions lead to the observation of so-called [[Event-related potential|ERPs]] (event related potential, a stereotyped electrophysiological response to an internal or external stimulus). Two forms of ERPs can be detected in the context of processing music. One is the [[Mismatch negativity|MMN]] (mismatch negativity), which has first been investigated only with physical deviants like [[frequency]], [[sound intensity]], [[timbre]] deviants (referred to as [[phMMN]]) and could now also be shown for changes of abstract auditory features like tone pitches (referred to as [[afMMN]]). The other one is the so-called [[Electroencephalography|ERAN]] (early right anterior negativity) which can be elicited by syntactic irregularities in music. Both the ERAN and the MMN are ERPs indicating a mismatch between predictions based on regularities and actually experienced acoustic information. As for a long time it seemed to be, that the ERAN is a special variant of the MMN, the question arises, why they are told apart today. There are several differences between the MMN and the ERAN found in the last years:

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(4)At least a comparison between the actually incoming sound and the predictions based on the model is made. This process is partly the same for the MMN and the ERAN as well.

=== Comparison of the processing of musical and linguistic syntax <ref name=Patel2008/>===

As the ERAN is similar to an ERP called [[Early Left Anterior Negativity|ELAN]] which can be elicited by violation of linguistic syntax it seems to be obvious that the ERAN really represents syntactic processing. Deduced from this thought an interaction between music-syntactic and language-syntactic processing would be very likely.There are different possibilities in [[neuroscience]] to approach to an answer to the question of an overlap between the neuronal processing of linguistic and musical syntax.

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====Neuroimaging====

Furthermore, results from [[neuroimaging]] led to the "[["shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis"]]" (SSIRH), which supports the presumption, that there is an overlap between the processing of musical and linguistic syntax and that syntactic operations are modular. Furthermore, research using the method of [[electroencephalography]] has shown that a difficulty or irritation in musical as well as in linguistic syntax elicit ERPs which are similar to each other.

How can the discrepancy between [[neuropsychology]] and neuroimaging be explained?