An Introduction to Musical Interactions

The article presents a contextual survey of eight contributions in the special issue Musical Interactions (Volume I) in Multimodal Technologies and Interaction. The presentation includes (1) a critical examination of what it means to be musical, to devise the concept of music proper to MTI as well as multicultural proximity, and (2) a conceptual framework for instrumentation, design, and assessment of musical interaction research through five enabling dimensions: Affordance; Design Alignment; Adaptive Learning; Second-Order Feedback; Temporal Integration. Each dimension is discussed and applied in the survey. The results demonstrate how the framework provides an interdisciplinary scope required for musical interaction, and how this approach may offer a coherent way to describe and assess approaches to research and design as well as implementations of interactive musical systems. Musical interaction stipulates musical liveness for experiencing both music and technologies. While music may be considered ontologically incomplete without a listener, musical interaction is defined as ontological completion of a state of music and listening through a listener’s active engagement with musical resources in multimodal information flow.

Group behaviors as music

A framework for thinking about group behaviors in music as a compositional strategy is set out, drawing on research in social psychology and game studies to explore how different aspects of group behaviors can be explicitly explored in musical compositions. Using Forsyth’s notion of group dynamics as “the influential interpersonal processes that occur in and between groups over time,” the chapter considers how behavioral–musical systems use rules to govern interaction between people, how decisions are enacted through the ways players make choices, and how values are suggested by the outcome of these decisions. Forsyth suggests five processes that influence the behavior of groups: formative, influence, performance, conflict, and contextual processes. These are discussed in relation to some of the author’s recent work and the strategies evident in work by others.

Melodic Universals Emerge or Are Sustained Through Cultural Evolution

To understand why music is structured the way it is, we need an explanation that accounts for both the universality and variability found in musical traditions. Here we test whether statistical universals that have been identified for melodic structures in music can emerge as a result of cultural adaptation to human biases through iterated learning. We use data from an experiment in which artificial whistled systems, where sounds produced with a slide whistle were learned by human participants and transmitted multiple times from person to person. These sets of whistled signals needed to be memorised and recalled and the reproductions of one participant were used as the input set for the next. We tested for the emergence of seven different melodic features, such as discrete pitches, motivic patterns, or phrase repetition, and found some evidence for the presence of most of these statistical universals. We interpret this as promising evidence that, similarly to rhythmic universals, iterated learning experiments can also unearth melodic statistical universals. More, ideally cross-cultural, experiments are nonetheless needed. Simulating the cultural transmission of artificial proto-musical systems can help unravel the origins of universal tendencies in musical structures.

Asymmetry in scales enhances learning of new musical structures

Despite the remarkable variability music displays across cultures, certain recurrent musical features motivate the hypothesis that fundamental cognitive principles constrain the way music is produced. One such feature concerns the structure of musical scales. The vast majority of musical cultures use scales that are not uniformly symmetric—that is, scales that contain notes spread unevenly across the octave. Here we present evidence that the structure of musical scales has a substantial impact on how listeners learn new musical systems. Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that nonuniformity facilitates the processing of melodies. Novel melodic stimuli were composed based on artificial grammars using scales with different levels of symmetry. Experiment 1 tested the acquisition of tonal hierarchies and melodic regularities on three different 12-tone equal-tempered scales using a finite-state grammar. Experiments 2 and 3 used more flexible Markov-chain grammars and were designed to generalize the effect to 14-tone and 16-tone equal-tempered scales. The results showed that performance was significantly enhanced by scale structures that specified the tonal space by providing unique intervallic relations between notes. These results suggest that the learning of novel musical systems is modulated by the symmetry of scales, which in turn may explain the prevalence of nonuniform scales across musical cultures.

Universality and cross-cultural variation in mental representations of music revealed by global comparison of rhythm priors

Music is present in every known society, yet varies from place to place. What is universal to the perception of music? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 923 participants from 39 participant groups in 15 countries across 5 continents, spanning urban societies, indigenous populations, and online participants. Listeners reproduced random ‘‘seed’’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of “telephone”), such that their biases (the prior) could be estimated from the distribution of reproductions. Every tested group showed a prior with peaks at integer ratio rhythms, suggesting that discrete rhythm “categories” at small integer ratios are universal. The occurrence and relative importance of different integer ratio categories varied across groups, often reflecting local musical systems. However, university students and online participants in non-Western countries tended to resemble Western participants, underrepresenting the variability otherwise evident across cultures. The results suggest the universality of discrete mental representations of music while showing their interaction with culture-specific traditions.

The Work of the Words

Composers of homophonic partsongs developed formulaic text-setting schemas that translated poetic meter into musical meter: line lengths determine phrase lengths, poetic accents establish musical accents, and poetic form controls cadences and formal boundaries. Consequently, text-setting establishes an increasingly deep mensural hierarchy. At the same time, schematic text-setting codifies an organizational framework that parallels the way the mind constructs musical meter. According to dynamic attending theory, listener attention peaks in response to environmental regularities; this theory suggests that regular metrical frameworks like those in homophonic partsongs facilitate tonal expectation by drawing listener attention toward metrically accented harmonic events. Regular text-setting contributes to musical meter in a period when mensural structures are giving way to metrical ones. A new metrical style and a new tonal language emerge in tandem in the early seventeenth century, and the balletto repertoire highlights the close relationship between these evolving musical systems.

Speech and Music Acoustics, Rhythms of the Brain and their Impact on the Ability to Accept Information

Introduction. A radical tendency in modern approaches to understanding the mechanisms of the brain is the tendency of some scientists to believe that the brain is a receptor capable of capturing thoughts; the nature of the occurrence of the thoughts themselves, however, is not to be clarified. However, speech expressing thoughts is undoubtedly the result of the work of the brain, so studies of the frequency structure of speech can be the basis for considering the material structure of the brain as a kind of “antenna”. In this approach, the problem of noise protection against the background of the undeniable frequency similarity of speech and music appears to us from somewhat different positions. This study raises the question of how essential the overall height of the musical system is to the perception of music (are there musical systems that are harmful or useful, in terms of their effects on the psyche). This question is also relevant to speech perception.Methodology and sources. The main sources in which the work of the brain and the essence of consciousness are considered from the positions indicated above were for us the work of American and British neurophysiologists and psychiatrists (Sam Parnia, Peter Fenwick). These scientists are studying the phenomena that accompany clinical death, and argue that at these moments the brain functions to the greatest extent as a receiving “antenna”. Assuming that any antenna is to be tuned, we are trying to identify possible ways to “tune” the brain. To do this, we propose to study the frequency characteristics of speech (in the simplest case, when singing vowels in a calm state) for their belonging to a particular musical system, as well as the peculiarities of music perception depending on the musical system (on the height of the note “la”). Varying the frequency characteristics of speech in a particular musical system can be considered, in our opinion, the main way to “tune” the brain. The methodology of the method is based on the use of frequency analysis of sound and the basic provisions of the elementary theory of music.Results and discussion. The main conclusion made by Western psychiatrists is the brain is not an organ of thought, consciousness exists independently from outside, the work of consciousness cannot be explained by the functioning of the brain – it requires a hardware check. If the neural network is an “antenna” that captures thoughts, and its “adjustment” at the physical level can be carried out (and is carried out) through sensory systems (including the hearing organ), the study of the frequency structure of speech will answer a number of important questions, including including related and higher brain functions (insight, creativity). Our experiments (Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University, FIBS, department of EUT) showed that the influence of the “increased” or “lowered” musical-speech system on brain activity is insignificant. The study revealed the equiprobability of the frequency structure of speech. Since our brain lacks some characteristic set of frequencies – elements of a uniformly temperamental system, it is not necessary to talk about the harmful (or any other noise) effect of the “raised” and “lowered” systems due to deviation from the “internal standard”.Conclusion. In response to the assumptions made by Western experts, we proposed a frequency interpretation of the processes occurring in the brain, which, perhaps, will explain in more detail such phenomena as inspiration, discovery, etc., which occur with minimal activity of consciousness. Despite the limited methods of hardware study of factors that influence the activity of the brain and largely determine its higher functions (for example, creativity), the results of the brain's work in relation to music (both in terms of its creation and in terms of our reaction to it) are quite analyzable , which was shown in this study. The “musicality” of speech is extremely vividly represented in its frequency structure and allows one to reveal, to one degree or another, the features of the brain.

Introduction

THOUGHT AND PLAY IN MUSICAL RHYTHM seeks to explore representations, ideal types, and implicit theorizing of rhythm in relation to aspects of performance that “play”—that pull against these ideal types, resist objectification, and/or are elastic. Our aim has been to incorporate a diversity of musical traditions and scholarly approaches, embracing those of performers, music theorists, and music ethnographers. The performance dynamic implicit in “thought and play” can, with some imagination, be recast in terms of a larger dynamic in scholarly discourse on rhythm and music more generally—that between “universalizing” and “local” approaches. The former include efforts to create overarching models that accommodate the diversity of music and to gain insight into human cognition generally, as well as craft terminologies (meter, beat, etc.) that apply cross-culturally. Local, by contrast, signals attention to musical systems and practices as they are constituted in one region, however narrowly or broadly defined; attention focuses on the specifics of musical interaction, uses of language, and regional histories. Most music scholars attempt to bring out the historical and regional specificity of what they study while also contributing to general knowledge about musical process....

Functional connectivity in human auditory networks and the origins of variation in the transmission of musical systems

Music producers, whether original composers or performers, vary in their ability to acquire and faithfully transmit music. This form of variation may serve as a mechanism for the emergence of new traits in musical systems. In this study, we aim to investigate whether individual differences in the social learning and transmission of music relate to intrinsic neural dynamics of auditory processing systems. We combined auditory and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with an interactive laboratory model of cultural transmission, the signaling game, in an experiment with a large cohort of participants (N=51). We found that the degree of interhemispheric rs-FC within fronto-temporal auditory networks predicts—weeks after scanning—learning, transmission, and structural modification of an artificial tone system. Our study introduces neuroimaging in cultural transmission research and points to specific neural auditory processing mechanisms that constrain and drive variation in the cultural transmission and regularization of musical systems.