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.

I nfants and children are able to track statistical regularities in perceptual input, which allows them to acquire structural aspects of language and music, such as syntax. However, much more is known about the development of linguistic compared to musical syntax. In the present study, we examined 3.5-year-olds’ implicit knowledge of Western musical pitch structure using electroencephalography (EEG). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured while children listened to chord sequences that either 1) followed Western harmony rules, 2) ended on a chord that went outside the key, or 3) ended on an in-key but less expected chord harmonically. Whereas adults tend to show an early right anterior negativity (ERAN) in response to unexpected chords ( Koelsch, 2009 ), 3.5-year-olds in our study showed an immature response that was positive rather than negative in polarity. Our results suggest that very young children exhibit implicit knowledge of the pitch structure of Western music years before they have been shown to demonstrate that knowledge in behavioral tasks.

Listeners frequently talk about music in terms of imagined stories, but little empirical research has investigated this tendency. In this study, 47 participants listened to eight 90-second musical excerpts—four of which featured programmatic music composed between 1857-1935 and were selected by music theorists to feature high contrast, and four of which featured Baroque and minimal music and were selected by music theorists to feature low contrast. After each one, they answered a variety of questions intended to assess their narrative engagement with the music. Brief assessments of personality and general listening tendencies were administered at the end of the session. Results showed qualified support for the notion that contrast makes people likelier to hear music in terms of narrative, with stylistic familiarity and enjoyment seeming to play a greater role. The most striking aspect of the results was the emergence of broad areas of consensus among the free descriptions of imagined narratives. People with high AIMS scores also tended to experience more narrative engagement with the music, as did people low in Extraversion and Conscientiousness.

Major-minor and consonance-dissonance are two profound elements of Western tonal music, and have strong affective connotations for Western listeners. This review summarizes recent evidence on the neurocognitive basis of major-minor and consonance-dissonance by presenting studies on their processing and how it is affected by maturation, musical enculturation, and music training. Based on recent findings in the field, it is proposed that both classifications, particularly consonance-dissonance, have partly innate, biologically hard-wired properties. These properties can make them discriminable even for newborn infants and individuals living outside the Western music culture and, to a small extent, reflect their affective connotations in Western music. Still, musical enculturation and active music training drastically modify the sensory/acoustical as well as affective processing of major-minor and consonance-dissonance. This leads to considerable variance in psychophysiological and behavioral responses to these musical classifications.

Adults can extract the underlying beat from music, and entrain their movements with that beat. Although infants and children are poor at synchronizing their movements to auditory stimuli, recent findings suggest they are perceptually sensitive to the beat. We examined five-year-old children’s perceptual sensitivity to musical beat alignment (adapting the adult task of Iversen & Patel, 2008). We also examined whether sensitivity is affected by metric complexity, and whether perceptual sensitivity correlates with cognitive skills. On each trial of the complex Beat Alignment Test (cBAT) children were presented with two successive videos of puppets drumming to music with simple or complex meter. One puppet’s drumming was synchronized with the beat of the music while the other had either incorrect tempo or incorrect phase, and children were asked to select the better drummer. In two experiments, five-year-olds were able to detect beat misalignments in simple meter music significantly better than beat misalignments in complex meter music for both phase errors and tempo errors, with performance for complex meter music at chance levels. Although cBAT performance correlated with short-term memory in Experiment One, the relationship held for both simple and complex meter, so cannot explain the superior performance for culturally typical meters.

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.