Spontaneous Production Rates in Music and Speech

Individuals typically produce auditory sequences, such as speech or music, at a consistent spontaneous rate or tempo. We addressed whether spontaneous rates would show patterns of convergence across the domains of music and language production when the same participants spoke sentences and performed melodic phrases on a piano. Although timing plays a critical role in both domains, different communicative and motor constraints apply in each case and so it is not clear whether music and speech would display similar timing mechanisms. We report the results of two experiments in which adult participants produced sequences from memory at a comfortable spontaneous (uncued) rate. In Experiment 1, monolingual pianists in Buffalo, New York engaged in three production tasks: speaking sentences from memory, performing short melodies from memory, and tapping isochronously. In Experiment 2, English-French bilingual pianists in Montréal, Canada produced melodies on a piano as in Experiment 1, and spoke short rhythmically-structured phrases repeatedly. Both experiments led to the same pattern of results. Participants exhibited consistent spontaneous rates within each task. People who produced one spoken phrase rapidly were likely to produce another spoken phrase rapidly. This consistency across stimuli was also found for performance of different musical melodies. In general, spontaneous rates across speech and music tasks were not correlated, whereas rates of tapping and music were correlated. Speech rates (for syllables) were faster than music rates (for tones) and speech showed a smaller range of spontaneous rates across individuals than did music or tapping rates. Taken together, these results suggest that spontaneous rate reflects cumulative influences of endogenous rhythms (in consistent self-generated rates within domain), peripheral motor constraints (in finger movements across tapping and music), and communicative goals based on the cultural transmission of auditory information (slower rates for to-be-synchronized music than for speech).

Multifunctionality of vehicles adapted for people with disabilities

The aim of the article is to show how important factor is the functionality of the interior of the car. The right choice of car and the selection of matching equipment for a person with motor constraints is a very important process. Buying one vehicle for drivers who have different needs and driving abilities is a difficult challenge. A well-made decision can significantly improve the safety conditions while driving. The content provides an overview of the problems related to making such a decision and discusses preliminary guidelines regarding the selection of adaptive devices for the type of vehicle body.

Motor Constraints Shaping Musical Experience

In recent decades, we have seen a surge in published work on embodied music cognition, and it is now broadly accepted that musical experience is intimately linked with experiences of body motion. It is also clear that music performance is not something abstract and without restrictions, but something traditionally (i.e., before the advent of electronic music) constrained by our possibilities for body motion. The focus of this paper is on these various constraints of sound-producing body motion that shape the emergent perceptual features of musical sound, as well as on how these constraints may enhance our understanding of agency in music perception.

Automated comparison of children’s and adult songs supports the vocal mistuning theory of scale origins

Human music uses diverse scales, but there are some commonalities shared throughout much of the world’s scales. The “vocal mistuning” hypothesis proposes that cross-cultural regularities in musical scales arise from imprecision in vocal tuning. In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted automatic comparative analysis of 70 matched children’s and adult songs from 35 areas around the world. We found that children’s songs tend to have fewer scale degrees than adults and narrower melodic ranges than adult songs, consistent with motor limitations due to their earlier developmental stage. These results suggest that some universal aspects of musical scales may be caused by motor constraints rather than evolutionary adaptations for music perception.

Perceptual-motor constraints on sound-to-meaning correspondence in language

The proposal that language has evolved to conform to general cognitive and learning constraints inherent in the human brain calls for specification of these mechanisms. We propose that just as cognition appears to be grounded in cross-modal perceptual-motor capabilities, so too must language. Evidence for perceptual-motor grounding comes from non-arbitrary sound-to-meaning correspondences and their role in word learning.