Abstract
The vast amount of information in multimedia presentations ought to place inordinate demands on perceptual and cognitive systems. Yet there seems to be a superfluity of resources for processing music in the midst of processing information from visual and verbal sources. Research of the author and others reveals the remarkable ability of listeners to accomplish three kinds of musical processing in multimedia contexts: picking up cross-modal structural similarities, generating meanings and associations, and establishing cross-modal linkages in memory. Emphasizing principles of structural congruence and semantic association [S. E. Marshall and A. J. Cohen, Music Perc. 6, 95–112 (1988)], a framework is described for examining these musical processes in the context of simultaneous visual and verbal input streams [A. J. Cohen, Proc. 5th International Conf. on Music Perc. and Cog. (1998), pp. 13–20]. The present paper highlights how music transports different types of information (e.g., acoustic, temporal-structural, semantic). These different types of information carried by the music can be selectively exploited to accomplish such functions as masking, focusing attention, disambiguation, reminiscence, suspension of disbelief, and creation of aesthetic experience. [Work supported by SSHRC.]
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