The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music

is termed anacrusis or upbeat). Another meta-relation illustrated by K0016 is the relation

between contour and beat. Consider phrase 4, where the highest tone (F) does notoccur on

a beat: thus this tone is melodically prominent (as a contour peak) but rhythmically weak.

This creates a syncopation (i.e. accent on an off-beat tone), which adds rhythmic interest

to the melody. As suggested by these two examples, beat is an important player in forming

meta-relations with other aspects of melody.

Summary: ‘relational richness’ in musical melody

This brief review illustrates that musical melodies are a prime example of‘rich relations

arising from modest means’,^38 and as such are of considerable interest for aesthetic theory

as well as for cognitive science. One way to appreciate this relational richness is to compare

musical melody to speech intonation. Speech intonation is often referred to as ‘speech

melody’by linguists and phoneticians.^39 This is reasonable because voice pitch in speech is

used in an orderly fashion to convey a variety of information, including semantic focus,

pragmatic category (e.g. marking statements vs questions), emotional valence, and even

lexical identity (in tone languages). Thus melody is not unique to music. Musical melody

is quite different from speech melody, however, as evidenced by the fact that people rarely

hum or whistle intonation contours (i.e. these contours seldom attract independent interest).g

In other words, speech melodies rarely draw attention to themselves and away from the

semantic message being conveyed. Indeed, one might think of speech melodies as pitch

sequences designed to carry out certain quotidian functions without themselves being

memorable auditory patterns. In contrast, musical melodies are designed to attract the

attention and interest of listeners, and as a result can remain in memory for decades. This

difference between musical and linguistic melodies arises from the nature of the perceptual

relations between the basic elements of pitch sequences. These relations are far more intric-

ate in musical melody. If a musical melody is ‘a group of tones in love with one another’,

then a speech melody is a loose affiliation of tones (or pitch movements) that work

together to get a job done.h

The cognitive neuroscience of melody

The many-faceted nature of melody means that even simple tunes (such as K0016) engage

a rich set of mental operations, which serve to structure the relations between tones.

Furthermore, these operations occur quite rapidly. For example, K0016 is approximately

10 s long, yet during this time at least 13 aspects of this melody are processed in parallel by

a listener. Clearly, then, one desideratum for the cognitive neuroscience of melody is the

ability to ‘tap into the moment-to-moment history of mental involvement with the

music’.^43 In this section I briefly review different approaches to the neural study of melody

332     

gThe Czech composer Leos Janáˇcek (1854–1928) is an interesting exception. He notated speech intonation
contours in music notation and incorporated ‘musicalized’versions of these contours into his compositions.^40
hI am referring to speech melody in non-tonal languages such as English. In languages with elaborate tone
systems (such as many African languages),41,42the organization of tones can be quite complex, though I would
argue that they still do not attain the relational richness of musical melodies.