Culture in music cognition refers to the impact that a person's
culture
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.Tyl ...
has on their
music cognition
Music psychology, or the psychology of music, may be regarded as a branch of both psychology and musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behaviour and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, res ...
, including their preferences,
emotion recognition
Emotion recognition is the process of identifying human emotion. People vary widely in their accuracy at recognizing the emotions of others. Use of technology to help people with emotion recognition is a relatively nascent research area. Genera ...
, and
musical memory Musical memory refers to the ability to remember music-related information, such as melodic content and other progressions of tones or pitches. The differences found between linguistic memory and musical memory have led researchers to theorize that ...
. Musical preferences are biased toward culturally familiar musical traditions beginning in infancy, and adults' classification of the emotion of a musical piece depends on both culturally specific and universal structural features.
Additionally, individuals'
musical memory Musical memory refers to the ability to remember music-related information, such as melodic content and other progressions of tones or pitches. The differences found between linguistic memory and musical memory have led researchers to theorize that ...
abilities are greater for culturally familiar music than for culturally unfamiliar music.
The sum of these effects makes culture a powerful influence in music cognition.
Preferences
Effect of culture
Culturally bound preferences and familiarity for music begin in
infancy
An infant or baby is the very young offspring of human beings. ''Infant'' (from the Latin word ''infans'', meaning 'unable to speak' or 'speechless') is a formal or specialised synonym for the common term ''baby''. The terms may also be used to ...
and continue through
adolescence
Adolescence () is a transitional stage of physical and psychological development that generally occurs during the period from puberty to adulthood (typically corresponding to the age of majority). Adolescence is usually associated with the t ...
and
adulthood
An adult is a human or other animal that has reached full growth. In human context, the term ''adult'' has meanings associated with social and legal concepts. In contrast to a " minor", a legal adult is a person who has attained the age of major ...
.
People tend to prefer and remember music from their own cultural tradition.
Familiarity for culturally regular
meter
The metre (British spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its prefi ...
styles is already in place for young infants of only a few months' age.
The looking times of 4- to 8-month old Western infants indicate that they prefer Western meter in music, while Turkish infants of the same age prefer both Turkish and Western meters (Western meters not being completely unfamiliar in Turkish culture). Both groups preferred either
meter
The metre (British spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its prefi ...
when compared with arbitrary meter.
In addition to influencing preference for meter, culture affects people's ability to correctly identify music styles. Adolescents from Singapore and the UK rated familiarity and preference for excerpts of
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
,
Malay
Malay may refer to:
Languages
* Malay language or Bahasa Melayu, a major Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore
** History of the Malay language, the Malay language from the 4th to the 14th century
** Indonesi ...
, and
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
n music styles.
Neither group demonstrated a preference for the Indian music samples, although the Singaporean teenagers recognized them. Participants from
Singapore
Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...
showed higher preference for and ability to recognize the Chinese and Malay samples;
UK participants showed little preference or recognition for any of the music samples, as those types of music are not present in their native culture.
Effect of musical experience
An individual's musical experience may affect how they formulate preferences for music from their own culture and other cultures.
American and Japanese individuals (non-music majors) both indicated preference for
Western music, but Japanese individuals were more receptive to
Eastern
Eastern may refer to:
Transportation
*China Eastern Airlines, a current Chinese airline based in Shanghai
*Eastern Air, former name of Zambia Skyways
*Eastern Air Lines, a defunct American airline that operated from 1926 to 1991
*Eastern Air Li ...
music. Among the participants, there was one group with little musical experience and one group that had received supplemental musical experience in their lifetimes. Although both American and Japanese participants disliked formal Eastern styles of music and preferred Western styles of music, participants with greater musical experience showed a wider range of preference responses not specific to their own culture.
Dual cultures
Bimusicalism is a phenomenon in which people well-versed and familiar with music from two different cultures exhibit dual
sensitivity to both
genres of music
A music genre is a conventional category that identifies some pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions. It is to be distinguished from ''musical form'' and musical style, although in practice these terms are some ...
.
In a study conducted with participants familiar with Western, Indian, and both Western and Indian music, the bimusical participants (exposed to both Indian and Western styles) showed no
bias
Bias is a disproportionate weight ''in favor of'' or ''against'' an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group, ...
for either music style in recognition tasks and did not indicate that one style of music was more tense than the other. In contrast, the Western and Indian participants more successfully recognized music from their own culture and felt the other culture's music was more tense on the whole. These results indicate that everyday exposure to music from both cultures can result in cognitive sensitivity to music styles from those cultures.
Bilingualism
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...
typically confers specific preferences for the language of
lyrics
Lyrics are words that make up a song, usually consisting of verses and choruses. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist. The words to an extended musical composition such as an opera are, however, usually known as a "libretto" and their writer, a ...
in a song.
When
monolingual
Monoglottism (Greek μόνος ''monos'', "alone, solitary", + γλῶττα , "tongue, language") or, more commonly, monolingualism or unilingualism, is the condition of being able to speak only a single language, as opposed to multilingualism. ...
(
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
-speaking) and bilingual (
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...
- and English-speaking) sixth graders listened to the same song played in an instrumental, English, or Spanish version, ratings of preference showed that bilingual students preferred the Spanish version, while monolingual students more often preferred the instrumental version; the children's self-reported distraction was the same for all excerpts. Spanish (bilingual) speakers also identified most closely with the Spanish song.
Thus, the language of lyrics interacts with a listener's culture and language abilities to affect preferences.
Emotion recognition
The cue-redundancy model of emotion recognition in music differentiates between universal, structural auditory cues and culturally bound, learned auditory cues (see schematic below).
Psychophysical cues
Structural cues that span all musical traditions include dimensions such as pace (tempo),
loudness
In acoustics, loudness is the subjectivity, subjective perception of sound pressure. More formally, it is defined as, "That attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which sounds can be ordered on a scale extending from quiet to loud". The rel ...
, and
timbre
In music, timbre ( ), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound or musical tone, tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voice ...
.
Fast tempo, for example, is typically associated with happiness, regardless of a listener's cultural background.
Culturally bound cues
Culture-specific cues rely on knowledge of the conventions in a particular musical tradition.
Ethnomusicologists have said that there are certain situations in which a certain song would be sung in different cultures. These times are marked by cultural cues and by the people of that culture.
A particular timbre may be interpreted to reflect one emotion by Western listeners and another emotion by Eastern listeners.
There could be other culturally bound cues as well, for example, rock n' roll music is usually identified to be a rebellious type of music associated with teenagers and the music reflects their ideals and beliefs that their culture believes.
Cue-redundancy model
According to the cue-redundancy model, individuals exposed to music from their own cultural tradition utilize both psychophysical and culturally bound cues in identifying emotionality.
Conversely, perception of intended emotion in unfamiliar music relies solely on universal, psychophysical properties.
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
listeners accurately categorize angry, joyful, and happy musical excerpts from familiar traditions (Japanese and Western samples) and relatively unfamiliar traditions (Hindustani).
Simple, fast
melodies
A melody (from Greek language, Greek μελῳδία, ''melōidía'', "singing, chanting"), also tune, voice or line, is a Linearity#Music, linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most liter ...
receive joyful ratings from these participants; simple, slow samples receive sad ratings, and loud, complex excerpts are perceived as angry.
Strong relationships between emotional judgments and structural acoustic cues suggest the importance of universal musical properties in categorizing unfamiliar music.
When both
Korean
Korean may refer to:
People and culture
* Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula
* Korean cuisine
* Korean culture
* Korean language
**Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl
**Korean dialects and the Jeju language
** ...
and
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
participants judged the intended emotion of Korean
folksong
Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has b ...
s, the American group's identification of happy and sad songs was equivalent to levels observed for Korean listeners.
Surprisingly, Americans exhibited greater accuracy in anger assessments than the Korean group. The latter result implies cultural differences in anger
perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...
occur independently of familiarity, while the similarity of American and Korean happy and sad judgments indicates the role of universal
auditory cues
Auditory means of or relating to the process of hearing:
* Auditory system, the neurological structures and pathways of sound perception
** Auditory bulla, part of auditory system found in mammals other than primates
** Auditory nerve, also known ...
in emotional perception.
Categorization of unfamiliar music varies with intended emotion.
Timbre mediates Western listeners' recognition of angry and peaceful Hindustani songs.
Flute
The flute is a family of classical music instrument in the woodwind group. Like all woodwinds, flutes are aerophones, meaning they make sound by vibrating a column of air. However, unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is a reedless ...
timbre supports the detection of peace, whereas
string timbre aids anger identification. Happy and sad assessments, on the other hand, rely primarily on relatively "low-level" structural information such as
tempo
In musical terminology, tempo (Italian, 'time'; plural ''tempos'', or ''tempi'' from the Italian plural) is the speed or pace of a given piece. In classical music, tempo is typically indicated with an instruction at the start of a piece (often ...
. Both low-level cues (e.g., slow tempo) and timbre aid in the detection of peaceful music, but only timbre cued anger recognition.
Communication of peace, therefore, takes place at multiple structural levels, while anger seems to be conveyed nearly exclusively by timbre. Similarities between aggressive vocalizations and angry music (e.g., roughness) may contribute to the salience of timbre in anger assessments.
Stereotype theory of emotion in music
The stereotype theory of emotion in music (STEM) suggests that cultural stereotyping may affect emotion perceived in music. STEM argues that for some listeners with low expertise, emotion perception in music is based on stereotyped associations held by the listener about the encoding culture of the music (i.e., the culture representative of a particular music genre, such as Brazilian culture encoded in Bossa Nova music).
STEM is an extension of the cue-redundancy model because in addition to arguing for two sources of emotion, some cultural cues can now be specifically explained in terms of stereotyping. Particularly, STEM provides more specific predictions, namely that emotion in music is dependent to some extent on the cultural stereotyping of the music genre being perceived.
Complexity
Because musical complexity is a
psychophysical dimension, the cue-redundancy model predicts that complexity is perceived independently of experience. However, South African and
Finnish
Finnish may refer to:
* Something or someone from, or related to Finland
* Culture of Finland
* Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland
* Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people
* Finnish cuisine
See also ...
listeners assign different complexity ratings to identical
African
African or Africans may refer to:
* Anything from or pertaining to the continent of Africa:
** People who are native to Africa, descendants of natives of Africa, or individuals who trace their ancestry to indigenous inhabitants of Africa
*** Ethn ...
folk songs. Thus, the cue-redundancy model may be overly simplistic in its distinctions between structural feature detection and cultural learning, at least in the case of complexity.
Repetition
When listening to music from within one's own cultural tradition, repetition plays a key role in emotion judgments. American listeners who hear
classical or
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...
excerpts multiple times rate the elicited and conveyed emotion of the pieces as higher relative to participants who hear the pieces once.
Methodological limitations
Methodological limitations of previous studies preclude a complete understanding of the roles of psychophysical cues in emotion recognition. Divergent
mode
Mode ( la, modus meaning "manner, tune, measure, due measure, rhythm, melody") may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* '' MO''D''E (magazine)'', a defunct U.S. women's fashion magazine
* ''Mode'' magazine, a fictional fashion magazine which is ...
and
tone cues elicit "mixed affect", demonstrating the potential for mixed emotional percepts. Use of dichotomous scales (e.g., simple happy/sad ratings) may mask this phenomenon, as these tasks require participants to report a single component of a multidimensional affective experience.
Memory
Enculturation is a powerful influence on music memory. Both
long-term and
working memory
Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold information temporarily. It is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior. Working memory is often used synonymously with short-term memory, ...
systems are critically involved in the appreciation and comprehension of music. Long-term memory enables the listener to develop musical expectation based on previous experience while working memory is necessary to relate
pitches to one another in a phrase, between phrases, and throughout a piece.
Neuroscience
Neuroscientific evidence suggests that
memory
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...
for music is, at least in part, special and distinct from other forms of memory.
The neural processes of
music memory retrieval share much with the neural processes of
verbal memory
Verbal memory is a term used in cognitive psychology which refers to memory of words and other abstractions involving language.
Verbal encoding
Verbal encoding refers to the interpretation of verbal stimuli. Verbal encoding appears to be strongly ...
retrieval, as indicated by
functional magnetic resonance imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area o ...
studies comparing the brain areas activated during each task.
Both musical and verbal memory retrieval activate the left inferior
frontal cortex
The frontal lobe is the largest of the four major lobes of the brain in mammals, and is located at the front of each cerebral hemisphere (in front of the parietal lobe and the temporal lobe). It is parted from the parietal lobe by a groove betwe ...
, which is thought to be involved in executive function, especially executive function of verbal retrieval, and the posterior middle
temporal cortex
The temporal lobe is one of the four major lobes of the cerebral cortex in the brain of mammals. The temporal lobe is located beneath the lateral fissure on both cerebral hemispheres of the mammalian brain.
The temporal lobe is involved in proc ...
, which is thought to be involved in semantic retrieval.
However, musical semantic retrieval also bilaterally activates the superior temporal
gyri
In neuroanatomy, a gyrus (pl. gyri) is a ridge on the cerebral cortex. It is generally surrounded by one or more sulci (depressions or furrows; sg. ''sulcus''). Gyri and sulci create the folded appearance of the brain in humans and other ma ...
containing the primary
auditory cortex
The auditory cortex is the part of the temporal lobe that processes auditory information in humans and many other vertebrates. It is a part of the auditory system, performing basic and higher functions in hearing, such as possible relations to ...
.
Effect of culture
Memory for music
Despite the universality of music,
enculturation
Enculturation is the process by which people learn the dynamics of their surrounding culture and acquire values and norms appropriate or necessary to that culture and its worldviews.Grusec, Joan E.; Hastings, Paul D. ''Handbook of Socialization: ...
has a pronounced effect on individuals' memory for music. Evidence suggests that people develop their
cognitive
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...
understanding of music from their cultures.
People are best at recognizing and remembering music in the style of their native culture, and their music recognition and memory is better for music from familiar but nonnative cultures than it is for music from unfamiliar cultures.
Part of the difficulty in remembering culturally unfamiliar music may arise from the use of different neural processes when listening to familiar and unfamiliar music. For instance, brain areas involved in attention, including the right angular gyrus and middle frontal gyrus, show increased activity when listening to culturally unfamiliar music compared to novel but culturally familiar music.
Development
Enculturation affects music memory in early
childhood
A child (plural, : children) is a human being between the stages of childbirth, birth and puberty, or between the Development of the human body, developmental period of infancy and puberty. The legal definition of ''child'' generally refers ...
before a child's cognitive schemata for music is fully formed, perhaps beginning at as early as one year of age.
Like
adult
An adult is a human or other animal that has reached full growth. In human context, the term ''adult'' has meanings associated with social and legal concepts. In contrast to a " minor", a legal adult is a person who has attained the age of major ...
s, children are also better able to remember novel music from their native culture than from unfamiliar ones, although they are less capable than adults at remembering more complex music.
Children's developing music cognition may be influenced by the language of their native culture.
For instance, children in English-speaking cultures develop the ability to identify pitches from familiar songs at 9 or 10 years old, while Japanese children develop the same ability at age 5 or 6.
This difference may be due to the Japanese language's use of
pitch accent
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ( ...
s, which encourages better pitch discrimination at an early age, rather than the stress accents upon which English relies.
Musical expectations
Enculturation also biases listeners' expectations such that they expect to hear tones that correspond to culturally familiar
modal traditions.
For example, Western participants presented with a series of pitches followed by a test tone not present in the original series were more likely to mistakenly indicate that the test tone was originally present if the tone was derived from a Western
scale than if it was derived from a culturally unfamiliar scale.
Recent research indicates that deviations from expectations in music may prompt out-group derogation.
[Maher, Van Tilburg & Van den Tol, 2013]
Limits of enculturation
Despite the powerful effects of music enculturation, evidence indicates that cognitive comprehension of and affinity for different cultural modalities is somewhat plastic. One long-term instance of plasticity is bimusicalism, a musical phenomenon akin to bilingualism. Bimusical individuals frequently listen to music from two cultures and do not demonstrate the biases in
recognition memory
Recognition memory, a subcategory of declarative memory, is the ability to recognize previously encountered events, objects, or people.Medina, J. J. (2008)The biology of recognition memory. ''Psychiatric Times''. When the previously experienced eve ...
and
perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...
s of tension displayed by individuals whose listening experience is limited to one musical tradition.
Other evidence suggests that some changes in music appreciation and comprehension can occur over a short period of time. For instance, after half an hour of passive exposure to original
melodies
A melody (from Greek language, Greek μελῳδία, ''melōidía'', "singing, chanting"), also tune, voice or line, is a Linearity#Music, linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most liter ...
using familiar Western pitches in an unfamiliar
musical grammar or harmonic structure (the
Bohlen–Pierce scale
The Bohlen–Pierce scale (BP scale) is a musical tuning and scale, first described in the 1970s, that offers an alternative to the octave-repeating scales typical in Western and other musics, specifically the equal-tempered diatonic scale.
The ...
), Western participants demonstrated increased recognition memory and greater affinity for melodies in this grammar.
This suggests that even very brief exposure to unfamiliar music can rapidly affect music perception and memory.
See also
*
Cognitive musicology
Cognitive musicology is a branch of cognitive science concerned with computationally modeling musical knowledge with the goal of understanding both music and cognition.
Cognitive musicology can be differentiated from other branches of music psy ...
*
Cognitive neuroscience of music The neuroscience of music is the scientific study of brain-based mechanisms involved in the cognitive processes underlying music. These behaviours include music listening, performing, composing, reading, writing, and ancillary activities. It also i ...
*
Embodied music cognition
Embodied music cognition is a direction within systematic musicology interested in studying the role of the human body in relation to all musical activities.
It considers the human body as the natural mediator between mind (focused on musical in ...
*
Music therapy
Music therapy, an allied health profession, "is the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music th ...
*
Psychology of music preference The psychology of music preference is the study of the psychological factors behind peoples' different music preferences. Music is heard by people daily in many parts of the world, and affects people in various ways from emotion regulation to cogni ...
References
{{Music topics
Music cognition
Music psychology
Musical culture