Music perception and musical cultures

Claire Pelofi, New York University*Max Planck Institute

Abstract

Most humans spontaneously engage with and enjoy the music from their own culture, that they have been exposed to on a daily basis throughout their lives. And yet, despite the astonishing diversity in melodic, harmonic, timbral and rhythmic structure across musical cultures, they are also able to process and rapidly learn music they were never exposed to before. Learning --and enjoying-- music implies acquiring an implicit knowledge, or an internal model, of the statistical rules governing sequences of musical events (e.g., sequences of notes, rhythms, timbral variations etc.). Reciprocally, the internal model used by listeners to make musical predictions reflect the musical cultures to which they were exposed to: it determines which musical events they find unexpected during music listening. I will present a general framework, based on the predictive coding theory and modeling expectations during musical listening, that accounts for behavioral, computational, and neurophysiological evidence of learning musical sequences. Specifically, I will discuss how behavioral and neural data can be modeled to test hypotheses on the cognitive constraints that shape musical scales, and how computational frameworks can unfold the neuro-cognitive processes underlying musical enculturation. This interdisciplinary approach contributes to novel perspectives on the stability and diversity of musical structures across cultures.