What do you see when you listen to music?
Music isn't a truly universal language, it turns out.

Date:
April 13, 2022
Source:
Princeton University
Summary:
Music isn't a truly universal language, it turns out. A team of
researchers has found that culture and background influence what
we visualize when we listen to instrumental music we've never
heard before.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
Are we all imagining the same thing when we listen to music, or are
our experiences hopelessly subjective? In other words, is music a truly universal language?

==========================================================================
To investigate those questions, an international team of researchers
(including a classical pianist, a rock drummer and a concert bassist)
asked hundreds of people what stories they imagined when listening to instrumental music. The results appeared recently in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers, led by Princeton's Elizabeth Margulis and Devin McAuley
of Michigan State University, discovered that listeners in Michigan
and Arkansas imagined very similar scenes, while listeners in China
envisioned completely different stories.

"These results paint a more complex picture of music's power," said
Margulis, a professor of music who uses theoretical, behavioral and neuroimaging methodologies to investigate the dynamic experience of
listeners. "Music can generate remarkably similar stories in listeners'
minds, but the degree to which these imagined narratives are shared
depends on the degree to which culture is shared across listeners."
The 622 participants came from three regions across two continents: two suburban college towns in middle America -- one in Arkansas and the other
in Michigan -- and a group from Dimen, a village in rural China where
the primary language is Dong, a tonal language not related to Mandarin,
and where the residents have little access to Western media.

All three groups of listeners -- in Arkansas, Michigan and Dimen --
heard the same 32 musical stimuli: 60-second snippets of instrumental
music, half from Western music and half from Chinese music, all
without lyrics. After each musical excerpt, they provided free-response descriptions of the stories they envisioned while they listened.



==========================================================================
The results were striking. Listeners in Arkansas and Michigan described
very similar stories, often using the same words, while the Dimen
listeners envisioned stories that were similar to each other but very
different from those of American listeners.

For example, a musical passage identified only as W9 brought to mind
a sunrise over a forest, with animals waking and birds chirping for
American listeners, while those in Dimen pictured a man blowing a leaf
on a mountain, singing a song to his beloved. For musical passage C16,
Arkansas and Michigan listeners described a cowboy, sitting alone in the
desert sun, looking out over an empty town; participants in Dimen imagined
a man in ancient times sorrowfully contemplating the loss of his beloved.

Quantifying similarities between free-response stories required huge
amounts of natural language data processing. The tools and strategies
that they developed will be useful in future studies, said Margulis,
who is also the director of Princeton's Music Cognition lab. "Being
able to map out these semantic overlaps, using tools from natural
language processing, is exciting and very promising for future studies
that, like this one, straddle the border between the humanities and the sciences." "It's amazing," said co-author Benjamin Kubit, a drummer and a postdoctoral research associate previously in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and now in the Department of Music. "You can take two random
people who grew up in a similar environment, have them listen to a song
they haven't heard before, ask them to imagine a narrative, and you'll
find similarities. However, if those two people don't share a culture
or geographical location, you won't see that same kind of similarity
in experience. So while we imagine music can bring people together,
the opposite can also be true -- it can distinguish between sets of
people with a different background or culture." Though the researchers
had carefully ensured that the pieces they chose had never appeared in
a movie soundtrack or any other setting that would prescribe visuals,
the same music sparked very similar visuals in hundreds of listeners -
- unless they had grown up in a different cultural context.

"It's stunning to me that some of these visceral, hard-to-articulate,
imagined responses we have to music can actually be widely shared,"
said Margulis.

"There's something about that that's really puzzling and compelling,
especially because the way we encounter music in 2022 is often solitary,
over headphones.

But it turns out, it's still a shared experience, almost like a shared
dream. I find it really surprising and fascinating -- with the caveat,
of course, that it's not universally shared, but depends on a common set
of cultural experiences." Co-author Cara Turnbull, a concert bassist
turned graduate student in musicology, said: "It's just fascinating
how much our upbringings shape us as individuals while also giving us
enough common experiences that we relate to this media in ways that are simultaneously unique and shared."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Princeton_University. Original written
by Liz Fuller- Wright. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Elizabeth H. Margulis, Patrick C. M. Wong, Cara Turnbull,
Benjamin M.

Kubit, J. Devin McAuley. Narratives imagined in
response to instrumental music reveal culture-bounded
intersubjectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
2022; 119 (4) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2110406119 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220413131135.htm

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