In fourth grade, I learned to play the trumpet. Although my very musically inclined father attempted to teach me piano before then, my band director gets the credit for teaching me to read the music. Two key mnemonics were instrumental in my success in remembering the treble clef notes. Treble clef notes are the upper […]
Music Cognition
Music and language share many cognitive features. Not surprisingly, it has been argued that they may have shared evolutionary origins and are present in every culture. I have a soft spot for cognitive studies in these two areas. When reading my earlier posts, you may notice that I covered topics such as bilingualism, the acoustics of emotions in the voice, […]
Many a child has had the pleasure of entertaining their families and close neighbors with their musical stylings when learning a new musical instrument. I first enjoyed playing the recorder and then to the sheer delight of my parents, the clarinet. My musical training lasted the duration of the requirements of the educational system in […]
Do you have a friend who’s surprisingly good at recognizing songs? Someone whose ear for melodies is uncanny? Who at concerts cringes if one of the musicians is playing slightly out of tune? What if that person had an even more uncanny ability—that they could tell you, hearing only a single note, that the note […]
Certain songs have a way of getting into your head and staying there for a while. We’ve covered the cognitive side of earworms before. These songs that haunt us tend to have a recognizable tempo or beat—usually one that we can move to. Lady Gaga has given us a number of earworms, including Poker Face, […]
There are only a handful of things in life that have the ability to cross social, generational, cultural, and economic boundaries. Music is one of them! Whether you are on stage in a symphony hall, a sold-out concert arena, or in the bathroom shower, there is likely a musician in all of us. But what […]
Musical training encompasses a broad range of skills, which likely rely on a similarly large range of cognitive abilities. Consider the act of sight-reading, in which a musician plays from a piece of sheet music they have never seen before. The musician must read the upcoming notes (a feat of translating visual information into a […]
Language and music unfold in time in similar ways. Just like we do not produce an arbitrary sequence of words, music follows a set of principles, and notes that fail to follow them can sound “ungrammatical.” Both language and music also often show hierarchical structure, with the pace of speech and music often having what […]
Music is powerful. It can make our attention turn away from external stimuli and redirect it to our inner thoughts. Sometimes we become so inward-focused after we bring a piece of music to mind, that this “earworm” stays with us long past the point where we’d rather forget that tune. In addition, one of the […]
Most of us can’t tell one musical note from another – but is it because we can’t really hear the difference, or because our knowledge of musical structure is implicit? Recent evidence suggests that we can take advantage of a lifetime of experience with musical categories to identify whether a musical note sounds wrong. Being […]