The pleasurable desire to move to a beat is known as groove and is partly explained by rhythmic syncopation. While many contemporary groove-directed genres originated in the African diaspora, groove music psychology has almost exclusively studied European or North American listeners. While cross-cultural approaches can help us understand how different populations respond to music, comparing African and Western musical behaviors has historically tended to rely on stereotypes. Here we report on two studies in which sensorimotor and groove responses to syncopation were measured in university students and staff from Cape Coast, Ghana and Williamstown, MA, United States. In our experimental designs and interpretations, we show sensitivity towards the ethical implications of doing cross-cultural research in an African context. The Ghanaian group showed greater synchronization precision than Americans during monophonic syncopated patterns, but this was not reflected in synchronization accuracy. There was no significant group difference in the pleasurable desire to move. Our results have implications for how we understand the relationship between exposure and synchronization, and how we define syncopation in cultural and musical contexts. We hope our critical approach to cross-cultural comparison contributes to developing music psychology into a more inclusive and culturally grounded field.

The pleasurable desire to move to a beat is known as groove and is partly explained by rhythmic syncopation. While many contemporary groove-directed genres originated in the African diaspora, groove music psychology has almost exclusively studied European or North American listeners. While cross-cultural approaches can help us understand how different populations respond to music, comparing African and Western musical behaviors has historically tended to rely on stereotypes. Here we report on two studies in which sensorimotor and groove responses to syncopation were measured in university students and staff from Cape Coast, Ghana and Williamstown, MA, United States. In our experimental designs and interpretations, we show sensitivity towards the ethical implications of doing cross-cultural research in an African context. The Ghanaian group showed greater synchronization precision than Americans during monophonic syncopated patterns, but this was not reflected in synchronization accuracy. There was no significant group difference in the pleasurable desire to move. Our results have implications for how we understand the relationship between exposure and synchronization, and how we define syncopation in cultural and musical contexts. We hope our critical approach to cross-cultural comparison contributes to developing music psychology into a more inclusive and culturally grounded field.

Tonal schemata are shaped by culture-specific music exposure. The acquisition process of tonal schemata has been delineated in Western mono-musical children, but cross-cultural variations have not been explored. We examined how Japanese children acquire tonal schemata in a bi-musical culture characterized by the simultaneous, and unbalanced, appearances of Western (dominant) music along with traditional Japanese (non-dominant) music. Progress of this acquisition was indexed by gauging children’s sensitivities to musical scale membership (differentiating scale-tones from non-scale-tones) and differences in tonal stability among scale tones (differentiating the tonic from another scale tone). Children (7-, 9-, 11-, 13-, and 14-year-olds) and adults judged how well two types of target tones (scale tone vs. non-scale tone; tonic vs. non-tonic) fit a preceding Western or traditional Japanese tonal context. Results showed that even 7-year-olds showed sensitivity to Western scale membership while sensitivity to Japanese scale membership did not appear until age nine. Also, sensitivity to the tonic emerged at age 13 for both types of melodies. These results suggest that even though they are exposed to both types of music simultaneously from birth, Japanese children begin by acquiring the tonal schema of the dominant Western music and this age of acquisition is not delayed relative to Western mono-musical peers.

THIS EXPLORATIVE STUDY INVESTIGATES THE PERCEPTION of clash of keys in music. It is a replication and extension of an earlier study by Wolpert (2000) on the perception of a harmonic (bitonal) manipulation of a melody and accompaniment. We investigated (a) how reliable results were, (b) how results would change if listeners' attention changed from nondirected (NDL) to directed listening (DL), and (c) whether the perception of clash of keys is influenced by the musical style of the particular composition. Participants included 101 expert listeners and 147 nonexpert listeners who evaluated music of four different styles in two versions each (original and with a pitch difference of 200 cents between melody and accompaniment). On the whole, expert listeners noticed the clash of keys significantly more often than did nonexperts (NDL: 49.30% vs. 9.30%; DL: 78.00% vs. 46.90%). For NDL, the perception of clash of keys differed between musical styles and decreased from classical to rock 'n' roll and from pop to jazz. Differences in responses are mainly explained by acculturation effects (listening expertise, attention, musical style, and familiarity with the particular piece).

The influence of musical experience on children's perception of culturally familiar (native) and culturally unfamiliar (nonnative) musical scales was studied. Western musician and nonmusician 10- to 13-year olds were tested in detection of mistunings in a melody based on either the Western major, Western minor, or Javanese pelog scales. In the Javanese scale context, the performance of the musicians was not different from that of the nonmusicians, and neither group detected mistunings in this context significantly better than chance. The child musicians' performance in the Western contexts, however, was better than in the Javanese context and also was better than that of the child nonmusicians. In contrast, the child nonmusicians' performance in the Western contexts was significantly better than chance, but these children did not have significantly greater success at detecting mistunings in the Western than Javanese contexts. These findings suggest that informal musical acculturation results in somewhat better perception of native than nonnative scales by 10-13 years of age but that formal musical experience can facilitate the acculturation process. These results are compared with other published data on infants and adults tested with the same stimuli.

Numerous experiments have demonstrated the effects of acculturation to a tonal scale system among Western listeners. Programmed instruction methods for the teaching of music can take advantage of this acculturation. Here I report several studies demonstrating the effectiveness of such programs. Both nonmusicians and musicians benefitted from training, although the greatest improvement was among students with some initial capacity. Interestingly, training with tonal materials led to improved test performance with both tonal and atonal items.

Previous psychological research investigating the perceptual and cognitive processes involved when listening to complex sound sequences is reorganized into a framework composed of four types of processes: two basic processes (segmentation into groups and regularity extraction) and two hierarchical organizations (hierarchical segmentation organization and hierarchical metrical organization). This framework allows us to propose hypotheses about the way these processes are acquired: the basic processes may be universal (functional from an early age and common to everyone), whereas the integration of these building blocks into hierarchical organizations may be acquired (through acculturation and specific training). We present illustrations from our recent work in support of these hypotheses.

Modulation, a shift in mode (rĀgam), is important in South Indian classical (Carnātic) music. Here we investigate the sensitivity of Carnātic and Western listeners to such shifts. Carnātic music has two kinds of shifts: rāgamālikā (retaining tonal center, resembling a shift from C major to C minor in Western music) and grahabēdham (shifting tonal center, resembling a shift from C major to A minor). Listeners heard modulating pieces of music and indicated the point of modulation, and were measured for accuracy and latency. Indians were more accurate than Westerners with both types of modulation but Westerners were faster with grahabēdhams. Cues could explain performance differences between nationalities: Indians were more familiar with rāgamālikā-type modulations whereas Westerners’ culture made them more familiar with grahabēdham-type modulations. Increased caution toward the less familiar grahabēdhams for Indians could explain their slower response time compared to rāgamālikās. With grahabēdhams, hit rates for both groups were comparably high, but Westerners’ lower level of accuracy was due to higher false-alarm rates to lures that were superficially similar to actual modulations. This indicated their dependence on surface-level cues in the absence of familiarity and culture-specific information. Music training helped teachers in both groups make fewer errors when compared to students. Older listeners’ performance was comparable to that of younger listeners.

WE EXPLORED HOW MUSICAL CULTURE SHAPES ONE'S listening experience.Western participants heard a series of tones drawn from either the Western major mode (culturally familiar) or the Indian thaat Bhairav (culturally unfamiliar) and then heard a test tone. They made a speeded judgment about whether the test tone was present in the prior series of tones. Interactions between mode (Western or Indian) and test tone type (congruous or incongruous) reflect the utilization of Western modal knowledge to make judgments about the test tones. False alarm rates were higher for test tones congruent with the major mode than for test tones congruent with Bhairav. In contrast, false alarm rates were lower for test tones incongruent with the major mode than for test tones incongruent with Bhairav. These findings suggest that one's internalized cultural knowledge may drive musical expectancies when listening to music of an unfamiliar modal system.

Discussions of music performance often stress diversity and artistic freedom, yet there is general agreement that interpretation is not arbitrary and that there are standards that performances can be judged by. However, there have been few objective demonstrations of any extant constraints on music performance and judgment, particularly at the level of expressive microstructure. This study illustrates such a constraint in one specific case: the expressive timing of a melodic gesture that occurs repeatedly in Robert Schumann's famous piano piece, "Traumerei." Tone onset timing measurements in 28 recorded performances by famous pianists suggest that the most common " temporal shape" of this (nominally isochronous) musical gesture is parabolic and that individual variations can be described largely by varying a single degree of freedom of the parabolic timing function. The aesthetic validity of this apparent constraint on local performance timing was investigated in a perceptual experiment. Listeners judged a variety of timing patterns (original parabolic, shifted parabolic, and nonparabolic) imposed on the same melodic gesture, produced on an electronic piano under control of a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). The original parabolic patterns received the highest ratings from musically trained listeners. (Musically untrained listeners were unable to give consistent judgments.) The results support the hypothesis that there are classes of optimal temporal shapes for melodic gestures in music performance and that musically acculturated listeners know and expect these shapes. Being classes of shapes, they represent flexible constraints within which artistic freedom and individual preference can manifest themselves.

We used Toiviainen and Krumhansl’s (2003) concurrent probe-tone technique to track Indian and Western musicians’ tonal-hierarchy profiles through modulations in Carnātic (South Indian classical) music. Changes of mode (rāgam) are particularly interesting in Carnātic music because of the large number of modes (more than 300) in its tonal system. We first had musicians generate profiles to establish a baseline for each of four rāgams in isolation. Then we obtained dynamic profiles of two modulating excerpts, each of which incorporated two of the four baseline rāgams. The two excerpts used the two techniques of modulation in Carnātic music: grahabēdham (analogous to a Western shift from C major to A minor), and rāgamālikā (analogous to a shift from C major to C minor). We assessed listeners’ tracking of the modulations by plotting the correlations of their response profiles with the baseline profiles. In general, the correlation to the original rāgam declined and the correlation to the new rāgam increased with the modulation, and then followed the reverse pattern when the original rāgam returned. Westerners’ responses matched those of the Indians on rāgams with structures similar to Western scales, but differed when rāgams were less familiar, and surprisingly, they registered the shifts more strongly than Indian musicians. These findings converged with previous research in identifying three types of cues: 1) culture-specific cues—schematic and veridical knowledge—employed by Indians, 2) tone-distribution cues—duration and frequency of note occurrence—employed by both Indians and Westerners, and 3) transference of schematic knowledge of Western music by Western participants.

Findings from a number of investigations into the role of memory in children's performance on musical tests are summarized. The influence of musical structure, musical acculturation, and temporal organization on discriminative capacities is reviewed.

polyphonic timbre perception was investigated in a cross-cultural context wherein Indian and Western nonmusicians rated short Indian and Western popular music excerpts (1.5 s, n = 200) on eight bipolar scales. Intrinsic dimensionality estimation revealed a higher number of perceptual dimensions in the timbre space for music from one's own culture. Factor analyses of Indian and Western participants' ratings resulted in highly similar factor solutions. The acoustic features that predicted the perceptual dimensions were similar across the two participant groups. Furthermore, both the perceptual dimensions and their acoustic correlates matched closely with the results of a previous study performed using Western musicians as participants. Regression analyses revealed relatively well performing models for the perceptual dimensions. The models displayed relatively high cross-validation performance. The findings suggest the presence of universal patterns in polyphonic timbre perception while demonstrating the increase of dimensionality of timbre space as a result of enculturation.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO TEST THE cross-cultural musical understanding of trained and untrained listeners from two distinct musical cultures by exploring the influence of enculturation on musical memory performance. Trained and untrained participants (N = 150) from the United States and Turkey listened to a series of novel musical excerpts from both familiar and unfamiliar cultures and then completed a recognition memory task for each set of examples. All participants were significantly better at remembering novel music from their native culture and there were no performance differences based on musical expertise. In addition, Turkish participants were better at remembering Western music, a familiar but nonnative musical culture, than Chinese music. The results suggest that our cognitive schemata for musical information are culturally derived and that enculturation influences musical memory at a structural level.

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OFTEN does not sufficiently document the innate constr aint and domain specificity required for strong adaptationist argument. We develop these criteria within the domain of music. First, we advocate combining computational, developmental, cross-cultural, and neuroscience research to address the ways in which a domain is innately constrained. Candidate constraints in music include the importance of the octave and other simple pitch ratios, the categorization of the octave into tones, the importance of melodic contour, tonal hierarchies, and principles of grouping and meter. Second, we advocate combining psychological, neuroscience, and genetic research across cognitive domains to address the domain specificity of such constraints. Currently available evidence suggests that the innate constraints in music are not specific to that domain, making it unclear which domain(s) provided the relevant selection pressures.

THE ORIGINS and adaptive significance of music, long an elusive target, are now active topics of empirical study, with many interesting developments over the past few years. This article reviews research in anthropology, ethnomusicology, developmental and comparative psychology, neuropsychology, and neurophysiology that bears on questions concerning the origins and evolution of music. We focus on the hypothesis that music perception is constrained by innate, possibly human- and musicspecific principles of organization, as these are candidates for evolutionary explanations. We begin by discussing the distinct roles of different fields of inquiry in constraining claims about innateness and adaptation, and then proceed to review the available evidence. Although research on many of these topics is still in its infancy, at present there is converging evidence that a few basic features of music (relative pitch, the importance of the octave, intervals with simple ratios, tonality, and perhaps elementary musical preferences) are determined in part by innate constraints. At present, it is unclear how many of these constraints are uniquely human and specific to music. Many, however, are unlikely to be adaptations for music, but rather are probably side effects of more general-purpose mechanisms. We conclude by reiterating the significance of identifying processes that are innate, unique to humans, and specific to music, and highlight several possible directions for future research.

Even within equitonal isochronous sequences, listeners report perceiving differences among the tones, reflecting some grouping and accenting of the sound events. In a previous study, we explored this phenomenon of �subjective rhythmization� physiologically through brain event-related potentials (ERPs). We found differences in the ERP responses to small intensity deviations introduced in different positions of isochronous sequences, even though all sound events were physically identical. These differences seemed to follow a binary pattern, with larger amplitudes in the response elicited by deviants in odd-numbered than in even-numbered positions. The experiments reported here were designed to test whether the differences observed corresponded to a metrical pattern, by using a similar design in sequences of a binary (long-short) or a ternary (long-short-short) meter. We found a similar pattern of results in the binary condition, but a significantly different pattern in the ternary one. Importantly, the amplitude of the ERP response was largest in positions corresponding to strong beats in all conditions. These results support the notion of a binary default metrical pattern spontaneously imposed by listeners, and a better processing of the first (accented) event in each perceptual group. The differences were mainly observed in a late, attention-dependent component of the ERPs, corresponding to rather high-level processing.

Current musicology demands opposing explanations of pitch structure, a styles-driven approach that ignores both the kinetics common to diverse musics and the broadly shared bases of human perception. To establish a unified theory, a ““from-bit-to-whole”” path is argued, noting sensory, neural, and cognitive domains as they are relevant and empirically confirmed. After preliminary discussion of the most elemental dynamics of tone bunching into wholes, an extensive examination of melodic pitch framing ensues. The tonality frame is observed in melodies from a broad sampling of eras and cultures; thus is confirmed a conception of organization that ties the spectral content of the single tone to the chord and to melody, both bearing in common the properties of sonance and root. Such an explanation helps link current musical practice with conceptualizations and practices of both ancient and exotic cultures.

This study addresses the perception of Arabic improvised music. The modal musical system (maqāām) as well as the model par excellence of instantaneous musical exposition and composition——instrumental improvisation (taqsīīm)——are presented. The classical Arabic maqāām (plural maqāāmāāt) is defined in terms of other fundamental interactive elements. The role of modal perception in the mental organization of a taqsīīm performed on the ``ūūd was explored with tasks involving the identification of musical elements, the segmentation of the musical work, and verbal descriptions and performed melodic ““reductions”” of the segments. Strong differences in identifications and segmentations are found between listeners of European and Arabic cultural origins. Both groups make segmentations on the basis of salient surface features such as pauses and register changes, but Arab listeners make segmentations that are defined by subtle modal changes that often go unnoticed by the Europeans. However, not all of the Arab listeners agree on where such changes take place or even sometimes on which maqāāmāāt are being played. One major ambiguity in maqāām identification in the taqsīīm studied is discussed in detail. The melodic reductions of segments in a given maqāām reveal the nature of Arabic modes as involving not just a tuning system, but also essential melodico-rhythmic configurations that are emblematic of the maqāām. A music-analytic approach to the deployment of the maqāāmāāt within the form of the taqsīīm that is informed by the perceptual results is developed. This approach involves the factors that lead to implicit recognition of maqāāmāāt, including ambiguities in identification, and those that inform the hierarchical organization of the form on the basis of larger-scale movements among maqāāmāāt.

Much applied research into musical performance requires a method of quantifying differences and changes between performances; for this purpose, researchers have commonly used performance assessment schemes taken from educational contexts. This article considers some conceptual and practical problems with using judgments of performance quality as a research tool. To illustrate some of these, data are reported from a study in which three experienced evaluators watched performances given by students at the Royal College of Music, London, and assessed them according to a marking scheme based on that of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. Correlations between evaluators were only moderate, and some evidence of bias according to the evaluators' own instrumental experience was found. Strong positive correlations were found between items on the assessment scheme, indicating an extremely limited range of discrimination between categories. Implications for the use of similar assessment systems as dependent measures in empirical work are discussed, and suggestions are made for developing scales with greater utility in such work.