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How Music and Our Faculty for Music Are Made for Each Other
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2024
Abstract
This study relies on the prevalence of certain structures that largely distinguish the creation and reception of music from that of language – namely, temporal grids, scalar grids, and segments with their repetitions – to construct a model of the human cognitive faculty for music that allows humans to make music the way they do. The study draws on research and thought in philosophy (including phenomenology), linguistics, psychology, and neurology, coupled with musicology, to produce a model of a human capacity to make complex comparisons between ongoing sound sequences and those simultaneously reconstructed from memory by registering the relativities within their flow. This model is then used in a consideration of how the faculty for music interacts with the faculty for language in the experience of song and a consideration of how a similar cognitive capacity for music might be identified in other species.
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association
Footnotes
I thank Jeremy Day-O’Connell, Gina Fatone, Mary Hunter, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Ralph Locke, and the reviewers for this journal, all of whom have given me valuable responses and suggestions.
References
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39 The scheme proposed here agrees in large part with the ‘separable components’ that Sonja Kotz and colleagues specify as ‘underlying rhythm cognition’. What I am calling ‘abstracting the grid’, for example, they call ‘beat extraction from complex auditory patterns’. But their scheme lacks the prior stage I describe as ‘accumulating the sounds into measured rhythmic “figures”’. See S. A. Kotz and others, ‘The Evolution of Rhythm Processing’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22.10 (October 2018), 896–97. Edward Large by contrast does account for the ‘pulse and meter’ to emerge from the complex sounding sequence of note-lengths through a process he calls induction; at the same time, he considers pulse and metre to be ‘intrinsic to the physics of neural oscillation. All that is then required is coupling to a rhythmic stimulus.’ Large, ‘Resonating to Musical Rhythm’, 193, 223.
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41 The study of musical entrainment was greatly advanced by the publication of Martin Clayton and others’ ‘In Time with the Music: The Concept of Entrainment and its Significance for Ethnomusicology’, European Meetings in Ethnomusicology, 11 (2005), ESEM Counterpoint 1, 1–82, now on Durham Research Online: https://dro.dur.ac.uk/8713/. The present study benefits, for instance, from these authors’ recognition (p. 15) that ‘the motor system is not only responsible for producing a rhythm, but is also involved in the perception of rhythm’. A similar recognition of the role of memory has been less apparent so far in the work of these and other authors investigating musical entrainment.
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53 It is precisely for disorienting effects that musicians sometimes adopt equal-step scales (e.g., the chromatic and whole-tone scales in Western music).
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72 Jackendoff, ‘What Is the Human Language Faculty’, 599. On p. 587, n. 3, he notes that Hauser and others, in ‘The Faculty of Language’, p. 1571, ‘specifically exclude memory from [the language faculty, in the broad sense], for reasons unclear to me’.
73 The vast lexicon of words in any language is of course built from a much smaller set of phonemes.
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79 See Salimpoor and others, note 64 above.
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94 Further research has shown that this ‘evolution’, in which the content of a song grows steadily more complex, is supplanted at times by ‘revolutionary’ events, in which songs are ‘always completely replaced with a simpler song’. Allen, Jenny and others, ‘Cultural Revolutions Reduce Complexity in the Songs of Humpback Whales’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 285 (2018), 3.Google ScholarPubMed
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97 A kind of comparison across time is found even in bacteria, in which, according to Peter Godfrey-Smith, ‘one mechanism registers what conditions are like right now, and another records how things were a few moments ago’. Godfrey-Smith, Peter, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 17 Google Scholar. But that capacity does not involve anything like the comparison of simultaneously remembered and perceived sound sequences required in musical processing.