between strong and weak beats, is not a broad notion of rhythm. He indicates that musical forms that
are widespread in the world lack one or both of these features. His examples are the Ch’in music of
China, Balkan folk music, and drumming patterns from Ghana (2008:97-99, 149-151).
Advances in neuroscience do not presuppose complete agreement on the question of music univer-
sals. It can be noted that investigations of movement perception and perception-action processes,
as suggested by Stevens and Byron, are currently in the focus of research in the neurosciences and
music. Future studies of the music of Non-European cultures and art music from the 20th and 21st
Centuries can provide fruitful new insight into music processing in the brain.
3.5. The Neurosciences and Music IV: Learning and Memory
Conference 2011 in Edinburgh. A preliminary report
The conference themes were the following:
Workshops: 1. Experimental methods.
- Social / real world methods.
Symposiums: 1. Mechanisms of rhythm and meter learning over the life span.
- Impact of musical experience on cerebral language processing.
- Cultural neuroscience of music.
- Memory and learning in music performance.
- Mind and brain in musical imagery.
- Plasticity and malplasticity in health and disease.
- The role of music in stroke rehabilitation:
Neural mechanisms and therapeutic techniques. - Music: A window into the world of autism.
- Learning and memory in musical disorders.
The proceedings of the 2011 conference were not published at the time of writing the present chap-
ter. Appendix 3.04 provides a survey of the conference presentations based on the conference
abstracts. Appendix 3.06 includes an overview of categories of investigation in NM IV. The following
summarizes three presentations which are documented in articles published elsewhere.
Workshop 2: Social / Real World Methods
Shared Affective Motion Experience
Katie Overy and Istvan Molnar-Szakacs (NM IV no. 7) have proposed that music is perceived not
only as an auditory signal, but also as intentional, hierarchically organized sequences of expressive
motor acts behind the signal (Molnar-Szakacs & Overy 2006; Overy & Molnar-Szakacs 2009). They
suggest that the human mirror neuron system (MNS) allows for corepresentation and sharing of a
musical experience between agent and listener, and present a model of Shared Affective Motion Ex-
perience (SAME).
In accordance with Fadiga et al. (above, NM III no. 66), they identify the MNS as a network
consisting of the posterior inferior frontal gyrus, the ventral premotor cortex, and the inferior parietal
lobule. They hypothesize that the perceptions of action, language and music share this network, and
propose that humans may comprehend all communicative signals in terms of their understanding of
the motor action behind that signal, and furthermore, in terms of the intention behind that motor ac-
tion (2006:238). Referring to a study of empathy by Carr et al. (2003), they suggest that the anterior
insula in the brain may serve as a relay from action representation in the MNS to emotion processing