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Musical Enculturation

Recent evidence suggests that infants rapidly learn the structures that are most important in their own culture, and that they do this within the first year after birth. For example, young babies (less than 6 months) can distinguish speech sounds (such as /ra/ vs. /la/) in languages they have never heard, but they lose this ability by 12 months of age presumably because they learn that some distinctions are useful in their native languages and others are not. Another example comes from research on face perception: young infants can discriminate individual human and monkey faces, whereas older infants and adults only discriminate human faces. In our research we have shown that a similar perceptual tuning process may operate in music.

1. 1.We want to better understand the mechanisms that underlie responses to musical rhythm early in infancy. To this end, we have examined whether infants can discriminate melodies having highly irregular meters. So far, we have found that infants are much better at detecting subtle changes to a rhythmic pattern previously labeled as good than one labeled as bad by adult listeners. We have also created rhythmic patterns that are highly irregular and much more rare in the worlds music. We have found that young infants cannot detect 200-ms disruptions to these patterns even though they readily detect such disruptions in regular or irregular patterns that are simpler and common in other cultures.
   

2. 2.How does the strength of culture-specific musical knowledge change over the course of development? The fact that 12-month-olds but not adults learn to discriminate foreign, irregular meters after brief exposure to such structures suggests that infants knowledge is weaker and more malleable. To understand how this knowledge becomes stronger and less malleable, we have extended the same training paradigm to children ages 4-12. So far our results suggest that children easily learn from relatively brief exposure to foreign music just as older infants do.
   

3. 3.We have recently started to examine whether infants prefer listening to culturally familiar over unfamiliar meters. Many studies have shown that babies prefer familiar auditory structures, such as their own language or a familiar poem, but it is not known whether they prefer music on the basis of abstract properties such as meter. So far we have completed a study comparing listening preferences in American and Turkish babies, showing that each group exhibits a distinct pattern of preferences based on the distribution of different meters in their respective cultures.
   

Parallels Between Music and Speech

As infants knowledge becomes increasingly specific to their native culture, so too might their processing of sound becoming increasingly domain-specific. We know that adults have specialized perceptual and neural processes for speech, and recent evidence suggests that the same may be true for music. In our lab, we are investigating the extent to which infants early perceptual abilities are specific to music or speech.

1. 1.If an infants auditory environment contains a high degree of overlap between structures in music and speech, this might suggest that there is overlap in early representations of sound. To investigate this question we have been examining language-specific rhythmic differences found in both the speech and music of a given culture. Specifically, English speech and music tends to be more rhythmically variable than French speech and music. We have found that such differences not only exist in music and speech, but that they are perceived by adult listeners. Specifically, adults can categorize either French or English instrumental songs on the basis of their language-specific rhythmic properties. Concurrently we are analyzing folk music aimed at adults and children to see if language-specific rhythmic differences are exaggerated in music for children.
   

2. 2.We are examining the kinds of rules that adults infer from sequences of novel sound patterns that could be heard as either speech or music. We want to examine whether adults will default to particular types of rules depending on whether they perceive novel patterns as primarily speech or as music, and whether such default rules will also be used by infants and children.
   

Intermodal Perception of Music

1. 1.Even though young infants cannot yet dance in precise time with music, our previous work has shown that they can infer the underlying beat in simple rhythmic patterns. In current work we are investigating whether infants can detect audiovisual asynchronies in real musical contexts, such as when a dancer is moving in synchrony or out-of-synchrony with real music. If infants can succeed at this task, it would suggest that basic metrical perceptions emerge early in life and can guide temporal expectations in both the auditory and visual domains.
   

2. 2.When adults have to learn a novel, difficult rhythmic structure, do they benefit from having redundant information from multiple sensory modalities? We are conducting a training study with adults examining their perception and production of irregular rhythmic patterns before and after training in three conditions: 1. audio training alone (i.e. listening to music with the target structure), 2. audio and visual training (i.e., watching a person dance to music with the target structure) and 3. audio and sensory-motor training (i.e., listening to music with the target structure while attempting to tap the beat).

   

   
   

3. 3.People of all ages are quite adept at noticing audio-visual asynchronies in speech perception-- for example, most of us find it quite irritating when a movie characters voice is not properly synched with his or her lip movements. In a musical context, however, we are quite poor at detecting such audiovisual asynchronies, presumably because the auditory system dominates in such contexts. We are currently investigating the conditions under which audiovisual perception of music can be made more or less challenging for adults.