The Sweet Sounds of Syntax: Music, Language, and the Investigation of Hierarchical Processing

Abstract

Language and music are uniquely human faculties, defined by a level of sophistication found onlyin our species. The ability to productively combine contrastive units of sound, namely words inlanguage and notes in music, underlies much of the vast communicative and expressive capacities ofthese systems. Though the intrinsic rules of syntax in language and music differ in many regards,they both lead to the construction of complex hierarchies of interconnected, functional units. Muchresearch has examined the overlap, distinction, and general neuropsychological nature of syntaxin language and music but, in comparison to the psycholinguistic study of sentence processing,musical structure has been regarded at a coarse level of detail, especially in terms of hierarchicaldependencies. The current research synthesizes recent ideas from the fields of generative music theory,linguistic syntax, and neurolinguistics to outline a more detailed, hierarchy-based methodology forinvestigating the brain’s processing of structures in music.