Listeners-regardless of formal musical training-can track complex tonal structures, offering a unique look at how the brain processes context.
There is a long-standing debate in the field of music cognition about the impact of musical training and whether formal training is needed to pick up higher-order tonal structures-the overarching harmonic framework of a piece of music.
New research from the University of Rochester, published in Psychological Science, offers fresh insight into that discussion. The findings suggest that nonmusicians have a surprisingly sophisticated ear when it comes to music.
"Formal training in music-including music theory-fine-tunes the ear to pick up tonal patterns in music, like tonic, dominant, and cadences," says Elise Piazza, an assistant professor in the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Neuroscience and the senior author of the study. "But it turns out that with zero training, people are actually picking up on those structures just from listening to music over the lifespan."
Music's hidden structure
Like language, music is organized hierarchically into notes, phrases, and sections. But until now, relatively little was known about how expert performers and complete novices process these layers.
The study team-co-led by Riesa Cassano-Coleman, a PhD candidate in brain and cognitive sciences, and Sarah Izen, a former postdoc in brain and cognitive sciences-used a novel method to scramble music at different timescales to provide participants with different amounts of tonal context.
Context is crucial in daily life and decision-making. In music, it's especially critical-in film soundtracks, for example, the build-up of context creates a strong sense of suspense, or romantic anticipation.
When asked to perform tasks that required them to use context, such as predicting upcoming notes or remembering previously heard notes, it appeared nonmusicians were using music theory knowledge, but fully unconsciously.
"Across a variety of tasks," says Piazza, "nonmusicians performed similarly to musicians."
Putting context to the test
The study consisted of four experiments-memory, prediction, event segmentation, and categorization-in which participants responded to scrambled music from Tchaikovsky's collection of piano pieces Album for the Young.
In the prediction experiment, for example, participants listened to context prompts scrambled at three timescales: 8B (eight bars, or measures, of intact context), 2B (scrambled every two bars), and 1B (scrambled every bar). After each sequence, they were asked to predict which measure should come next.
The results from this experiment suggest that musicians and nonmusicians integrate increasing amounts of context at similar rates to enhance prediction. Both groups became more accurate as the information about the tonal structures increased. And the amount of musical training did not predict better overall performance.
Where music meets language
The URochester study is analogous to a recent line of research that investigates the neural mechanisms of scrambled language, in which words, sentences, or paragraphs are reordered to test how much context the brain can process.
We know from cognitive science that context helps the brain forecast upcoming events, informing our next action. For instance, prediction helps us catch a ball, navigate around people in front of us on the sidewalk, or finish a friend's sentence.
"In the neuroscience of language, there are different brain areas in charge of considering context that is either very short or very long," says Piazza. "This is an exciting new field that has potential for revealing how context processing changes across the lifespan and how it might interact with aging and cognitive decline."
The URochester study is one of the first to investigate this phenomenon in music. Together, the findings raise new questions about how the brain integrates and deploys context-not only during listening, but amid the complex motor and memory demands of performance.
"I think there is a lot of potential to look at, for example, how highly trained musicians are doing this while they play," Piazza says. "A lot of musicians feel like they hold their memory of a piece in their fingers. What are the motor processes for having that whole context stored up as they play? This research could have broader implications about how the brain uses this sort of context."
