Understanding Design Features of Music and Language: The Choric/Dialogic Distinction

Beyond perfect synchrony: shared interpersonal rhythmic timing enhances self-other merging judgements

Perfect synchrony is highly prosocial, yet interpersonal rhythms globally exhibit rich variation. In two online experiments, we tested the effect of varying interpersonal rhythms on self-other merging. First, we hypothesized that shared temporal features, acting as attentional frameworks to track and integrate self-other actions, would drive combined representations. Participants viewed and rated self-other pairs producing simple rhythms, polyrhythms and irregular rhythms, at three complexity levels. Merging was unsurprisingly highest for perfect synchrony and declined with other rhythmic ratios. Crucially, simpler polyrhythms were rated higher than irregular rhythms, supporting our tracking-and-integration hypothesis. Second, we tested whether interpersonal rhythmic variation specifically affected self-other merging versus aesthetic judgements, by collecting liking ratings for the identical stimuli. We hypothesized that liking would be driven by overall perceptual features versus interpersonal features. While ratings were unaffected by simple rhythms' ratios, polyrhythms showed a sharp decrease, suggesting that social individuation inherent in polyrhythms additionally affected aesthetic judgements. The distinct liking pattern suggested that self-other merging judgements were specifically linked to the interpersonal nature of rhythmic variation, and not mere aesthetic preferences. Our data are consistent with the hypothesis that interpersonal rhythmic variation evolved to support prosocial bonds by signalling shared intentions and aiding clear self-other distinctions.

Music's ability to foster prosocial behavior: a teleofunctionalist perspective

Drawing on recent interdisciplinary music research-biologically or developmental psychologically oriented-which conceptualizes music as a communicative toolkit primarily serving affiliative communicative interaction, this paper investigates the question of whether and to what extent music is capable of fostering prosocial behavior within the framework of teleofunctionalism-a philosophical theory of mind. A teleofunctionalist perspective allows us to specify this question as follows: To what extent might a function of establishing affiliative socio-interactional relationships be considered a proper function of music, a concept suggested by philosopher Ruth Millikan? From an ontogenetic perspective, musical activities are considered to be rooted in protoconversational communication in early infancy, characterized as interpersonal coordination without involving propositional understanding. These activities develop into coordinated, non-representational forms of vitality, involving basic empathy, shared intentionality, and forms of understanding allowing for shared experiences. This effect of musical activities-establishing shared experiences-can be considered a proper function of music. A teleofunctional explanation of why musical practices that foster cooperation and prosocial behavior are reproduced is provided by the participants' positive evaluation of shared experiences structured by musical activities. By discussing a proper function of a musical activity, the author refines her own considerations concerning the minimal necessary conditions of music and musicality that can be conceived in a broader sense.

A behavioural exploration of language aptitude and experience, cognition and more using Graph Analysis

Language aptitude has recently regained interest in cognitive neuroscience. Traditional language aptitude testing included phonemic coding ability, associative memory, grammatical sensitivity and inductive language learning. Moreover, domain-general cognitive abilities are associated with individual differences in language aptitude, together with factors that have yet to be elucidated. Beyond domain-general cognition, it is also likely that aptitude and experience in domain-specific but non-linguistic fields (e.g. music or numerical processing) influence and are influenced by language aptitude. We investigated some of these relationships in a sample of 152 participants, using exploratory graph analysis, across different levels of regularisation, i.e. sensitivity. We carried out a meta cluster analysis in a second step to identify variables that are robustly grouped together. We discuss the data, as well as their meta-network groupings, at a baseline network sensitivity level, and in two analyses, one including and the other excluding dyslexic readers. Our results show a stable association between language and cognition, and the isolation of multilingual language experience, musicality and literacy. We highlight the necessity of a more comprehensive view of language and of cognition as multivariate systems.

Isochrony as ancestral condition to call and song in a primate

Animal songs differ from calls in function and structure, and have comparative and translational value, showing similarities to human music. Rhythm in music is often distributed in quantized classes of intervals known as rhythmic categories. These classes have been found in the songs of a few nonhuman species but never in their calls. Are rhythmic categories song-specific, as in human music, or can they transcend the song-call boundary? We analyze the vocal displays of one of the few mammals producing both songs and call sequences: Indri indri. We test whether rhythmic categories (a) are conserved across songs produced in different contexts, (b) exist in call sequences, and (c) differ between songs and call sequences. We show that rhythmic categories occur across vocal displays. Vocalization type and function modulate deployment of categories. We find isochrony (1:1 ratio, like the rhythm of a ticking clock) in all song types, but only advertisement songs show three rhythmic categories (1:1, 1:2, 2:1 ratios). Like songs, some call types are also isochronous. Isochrony is the backbone of most indri vocalizations, unlike human speech, where it is rare. In indri, isochrony underlies both songs and hierarchy-less call sequences and might be ancestral to both.

Signatures of speech and song: "Universal" links despite cultural diversity

Equitable collaboration between culturally diverse scientists reveals that acoustic fingerprints of human speech and song share parallel relationships across the globe.

Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and (ii) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six preregistered predictions, five were strongly supported: Relative to speech, songs use (i) higher pitch, (ii) slower temporal rate, and (iii) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar (iv) pitch interval size and (v) timbral brightness. Exploratory analyses suggest that features vary along a "musi-linguistic" continuum when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Our study provides strong empirical evidence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech.

Spectrotemporal cues and attention jointly modulate fMRI network topology for sentence and melody perception

Speech and music are two fundamental modes of human communication. Lateralisation of key processes underlying their perception has been related both to the distinct sensitivity to low-level spectrotemporal acoustic features and to top-down attention. However, the interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes needs to be clarified. In the present study, we investigated the contribution of acoustics and attention to melodies or sentences to lateralisation in fMRI functional network topology. We used sung speech stimuli selectively filtered in temporal or spectral modulation domains with crossed and balanced verbal and melodic content. Perception of speech decreased with degradation of temporal information, whereas perception of melodies decreased with spectral degradation. Applying graph theoretical metrics on fMRI connectivity matrices, we found that local clustering, reflecting functional specialisation, linearly increased when spectral or temporal cues crucial for the task goal were incrementally degraded. These effects occurred in a bilateral fronto-temporo-parietal network for processing temporally degraded sentences and in right auditory regions for processing spectrally degraded melodies. In contrast, global topology remained stable across conditions. These findings suggest that lateralisation for speech and music partially depends on an interplay of acoustic cues and task goals under increased attentional demands.

Biological principles for music and mental health

Efforts to integrate music into healthcare systems and wellness practices are accelerating but the biological foundations supporting these initiatives remain underappreciated. As a result, music-based interventions are often sidelined in medicine. Here, I bring together advances in music research from neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry to bridge music's specific foundations in human biology with its specific therapeutic applications. The framework I propose organizes the neurophysiological effects of music around four core elements of human musicality: tonality, rhythm, reward, and sociality. For each, I review key concepts, biological bases, and evidence of clinical benefits. Within this framework, I outline a strategy to increase music's impact on health based on standardizing treatments and their alignment with individual differences in responsivity to these musical elements. I propose that an integrated biological understanding of human musicality-describing each element's functional origins, development, phylogeny, and neural bases-is critical to advancing rational applications of music in mental health and wellness.

Is song processing distinct and special in the auditory cortex?

Is the singing voice processed distinctively in the human brain? In this Perspective, we discuss what might distinguish song processing from speech processing in light of recent work suggesting that some cortical neuronal populations respond selectively to song and we outline the implications for our understanding of auditory processing. We review the literature regarding the neural and physiological mechanisms of song production and perception and show that this provides evidence for key differences between song and speech processing. We conclude by discussing the significance of the notion that song processing is special in terms of how this might contribute to theories of the neurobiological origins of vocal communication and to our understanding of the neural circuitry underlying sound processing in the human cortex.