Musical syntax: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 07:48, 23 January 2014

Revision as of 07:50, 23 January 2014

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==Neuronal processing of musical and linguistic syntax==

'''<ref>•PatelPatel, A.D. (2003). Language, music, syntax and the brain. Nature Neuroscience. 6(7):674-681</ref>'''Investigating the neuronal processing of musical syntax can serve two interesting aspects. The first is to learn more about the processing of music in general. That is which areas of the [[brain]] are involved and if there are specific markers of brain activity due to the processing of music and musical syntax. The second aspect is to compare the processing of musical and linguistic syntax to find out, if they have an effect upon each other or if there even is a significant overlap. The verification of an overlap would support the thesis, that syntactic operations (musical as well as linguistic) are modular. "Modular" means, that the complex system of processing is decomposed into subsystems with modular functions. Concerning the processing of syntax this would mean, that the [[___domain knowledge|___domain]] of music and language each have specific syntactic representations, but that they share [[neural resources]] for activating and integrating these representations during [[syntactic processing]].

===Processing of music and musical syntax===

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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>•KoelschKoelsch, 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: