Expectations for tonal cadences: Sensory and cognitive priming effects

Studies examining the formation of melodic and harmonic expectations during music listening have repeatedly demonstrated that a tonal context primes listeners to expect certain (tonally related) continuations over others. However, few such studies have (1) selected stimuli using ready examples of expectancy violation derived from real-world instances of tonal music, (2) provided a consistent account for the influence of sensory and cognitive mechanisms on tonal expectancies by comparing different computational simulations, or (3) combined melodic and harmonic representations in modelling cognitive processes of expectation. To resolve these issues, this study measures expectations for the most recurrent cadence patterns associated with tonal music and then simulates the reported findings using three sensory–cognitive models of auditory expectation. In Experiment 1, participants provided explicit retrospective expectancy ratings both before and after hearing the target melodic tone and chord of the cadential formula. In Experiment 2, participants indicated as quickly as possible whether those target events were in or out of tune relative to the preceding context. Across both experiments, cadences terminating with stable melodic tones and chords elicited the highest expectancy ratings and the fastest and most accurate responses. Moreover, the model simulations supported a cognitive interpretation of tonal processing, in which listeners with exposure to tonal music generate expectations as a consequence of the frequent (co-)occurrence of events on the musical surface.

An Integrated Repainting System for Digital Restoration of Vijayanagara Murals

An integrated repainting system is proposed in this paper for digital restoration of images of heritage murals, which have historical significance in their painting styles and ritualistic contents. The repainting system uses an ensemble of conventional image processing tools, in tandem with some state-of-the-art image rendition techniques, such as scaled bilateral filtering, source-constrained inpainting, tonal processing, and texture mapping based on gradient fusion. Murals that are old by nearly four centuries, have been imaged in situ from the walls of temples under a controlled environment, and then they have been fed to our repainting system. As the work of mural art is highly subjective, and so is its interpretation, a battery of tests for subjective evaluation has been performed to compare the different stages of restoration. Three different tournament strategies have been followed to make the test result devoid of any subjective bias as far as possible. The overall evaluation result is quite encouraging, as the restored images exhibit a gradually improving quality through the different stages of restoration.

Influence of Musical Expertise on Segmental and Tonal Processing in Mandarin Chinese

A same–different task was used to test the hypothesis that musical expertise improves the discrimination of tonal and segmental (consonant, vowel) variations in a tone language, Mandarin Chinese. Two four-word sequences (prime and target) were presented to French musicians and nonmusicians unfamiliar with Mandarin, and event-related brain potentials were recorded. Musicians detected both tonal and segmental variations more accurately than nonmusicians. Moreover, tonal variations were associated with higher error rate than segmental variations and elicited an increased N2/N3 component that developed 100 msec earlier in musicians than in nonmusicians. Finally, musicians also showed enhanced P3b components to both tonal and segmental variations. These results clearly show that musical expertise influenced the perceptual processing as well as the categorization of linguistic contrasts in a foreign language. They show positive music-to-language transfer effects and open new perspectives for the learning of tone languages.