How would the brain process alien music?
What does alien music sound like?Would it be hierarchically structured if our music is with verses and a chorus?Could we even appreciate it?Vincent Cheung, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, thinks the answer would be yes, assuming it was based on local and non-local dependencies.His research, published in Scientific Reports, explains exactly what that means.
Brain music
Vincent Cheung, together with Angela Friederici, Stefan Koelsch and Lars Meyer, have researched non-local dependencies in music and are trying to find out how the human brain processes them.In language and music, dependencies are conceptual threads that bind two things together.Non-local dependencies bind non-adjacent items.For example, in pop music, the second instance of a verse following a chorus would have a non-local dependency with the first instance of the verse.Experimentally, it's clear to us that we're hearing a sequence that we've heard before.According to Cheung, composers use such devices to build our expectations and elicit strong emotional responses to the music.But how does the brain recognize these patterns and what does this have to do with Paul Broca?
