The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music

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(phonemes) and suprasegmental (prosody) information. Moreover, the speech continuum
is divided into discrete phonemes, the basic phonological unit. More generally, it is clear
that both language and music are conveyed by sounds, are ubiquitous elements in all cul-
tures, are specific to humans, and are cultural artifacts that do not correspond to natural
objects.^12 They are rule-based systems composed of basic elements (phonemes, words,
notes, and chords) that are combined into higher-order structures (musical phrases and
sentences, themes and topics) through the rules of harmony and syntax. Therefore, there
may be a musical grammar, and the experimental results to be described indeed point to
the similarity of the brain’s response to some specific violations of syntax in both language
and music.


Functional aspects From a functional perspective, several similarities also exist between
language and music. In this respect, it is interesting to examine the following citation from
Pinker^18 in his book,The Language Instinct: ‘Language is a complex, specialized skill, which
develops in the child spontaneously, without effort or formal instruction, is deployed with-
out awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is
distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently’ (p. 18).
Except for some constraints regarding music production, we could substitute ‘music’ for
‘language’ and the characteristics would apply as well. Both language and music rely on
intentionality: All music implies ‘an act of creation that actualizes an intention’,^17 and this
is true of language as well. In other words, both language and music require a theory of
mind.^19 Both develop with specific learning according to more or less standardized proce-
dures depending on the linguistic or musical culture. Even though perception precedes
production in both domains, children acquire musical and linguistic rules in a similar,
effortless way. Early on, children are able to create new musical and verbal sentences by
applying a rule system that they have been able to abstract without conscious intentions.
Both language and music involve memory; adults can recognize and reproduce learned
melodies, words, poetry, and songs.


Similarities or differences? A question of grain of analysis? It should be noted, however,
that the comparison between language and music might highlight either their similarities
or their differences depending on the grain chosen for analysis. Thus, similarities at one
level of processing may be interpreted as differences at another level. For example, while
temporal structure and rhythmic organization play a fundamental role in both language
and music, the metric structure is specific and consistent throughout a given musical piece,
but the suprasegmental prosodic structure of language is less specific and more variable.
Similarly, the segmentation of the sound continuum into discrete units (pitches or
phonemes) is found in all music and languages. However, if we can eventually make an
analogy between phonemes and intervals of a musical scale, we must also be aware of their
differences. In fact, although the number of pitches by octave (degrees of the scale) is very
similar across musical cultures (seven or fewer notes), the number of phonemes largely dif-
fers between languages (from 11 in Polynesian to 141 in the language of the Bushmen,^18
with 44 phonemes in English and 36 in French). Furthermore, some of the perceptual
properties of the basic elements in music have no equivalent in language, as, for instance,
the fact that octaves are perceived as equivalent in almost all cultures. This effect is linked
with the finding that two notes separated by an octave are related by a simple frequency


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