Music syntactic processing

Abstract

Music Syntax refers to the principle of combining discrete key elements into hierarchical system. Organization of pitches based on tonality harmony is the most important music syntax which affects the expectation, the construction and the feedback on the music events of the audience from which aesthetic musical experience is finally produced. Lerdahl and Jackendoff proposed a musical tree-structure that parallel to linguistic syntax in their generative theory of tonal music (GTTM). And Rohrmeier further specified hierarchical generativerules of pitch syntax in the generative syntax model (GSM). Both the GTTM and the GSM put forward the analogy between music syntax and linguistic syntax. But what is obviously different from language processing is that the processing of music syntax of the audience reveals a cross-empiricalness effects. Whether in early studies of behavioristics or in recent studies of EPR, most evidences support that there is a syntax diagram guiding people’s musical expectations without much association with their musical experiences among western audience, at least in the sense of simple linear syntax. Therefore, the acquisition of music syntax under the non-explicit conditions arouses researchers’ thinking on music syntax processing mechanism. Current studies have not reached a consensus on processing of syntactic structure, and two antagonistic theories “Cognitivism” and “Physicalism” have generated. “Cognitivism” put forward that since pitch syntax reflects abstract cognitive structural relations between sounds and meanings, syntactic integration requires the help of scheme drive of long-term memory, of which MUSACT and the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (SSIRH) are the representative theories. While “Physicalism” considered that it only needs the help of short-term memory in perception drive because pitch syntax has a property of psychoacoustics derived from voice frequency. And the periodicity pitch model (PP) and its derivate, the auditory short-term memory (ASTM), are the representative theories. Both theories demonstrated their viewpoints respectively from the angle of theoretical model, behavioral studies and cognitive neuroscience.