Abstract
During the last decade, it has been argued that (1) music processing involves syntactic representations similar to those observed in language, and (2) that music and language share similar syntactic-like processes and neural resources. This claim is important for understanding the origin of music and language abilities and, furthermore, it has clinical implications. The Western musical system, however, is rooted in psychoacoustic properties of sound, and this is not the case for linguistic syntax. Accordingly, musical syntax processing could be parsimoniously understood as an emergent property of auditory memory rather than a property of abstract processing similar to linguistic processing. To support this view, we simulated numerous empirical studies that investigated the processing of harmonic structures, using a model based on the accumulation of sensory information in auditory memory. The simulations revealed that most of the musical syntax manipulations used with behavioral and neurophysiological methods as well as with developmental and cross-cultural approaches can be accounted for by the auditory memory model. This led us to question whether current research on musical syntax can really be compared with linguistic processing. Our simulation also raises methodological and theoretical challenges to study musical syntax while disentangling the confounded low-level sensory influences. In order to investigate syntactic abilities in music comparable to language, research should preferentially use musical material with structures that circumvent the tonal effect exerted by psychoacoustic properties of sounds.
Highlights
Music and language are two sophisticated communicative systems that show numerous similarities
We turn toward the processes that underlie musical syntax processing and we point out some main differences with language processing
As will be shown below, the musical syntactic features, which have been studied by current empirical research in the field of tonal music perception, lack the abstractness of linguistic syntax and may be parsimoniously accounted for by an auditory short-term memory (ASTM) model
Summary
Music and language are two sophisticated communicative systems that show numerous similarities. As will be shown below, the musical syntactic features, which have been studied by current empirical research in the field of tonal music perception, lack the abstractness of linguistic syntax and may be parsimoniously accounted for by an auditory short-term memory (ASTM) model. This finding leads us to claim that musical syntax processing, as studied up to now, tells us more about ASTM than about syntactic-like computations, and that further research should perform more rigorous methodological controls of the musical stimuli used
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