Sandra Trehub

Abstract

The chapter considers the possibility of human predispositions for processing

music,and speculates about the broader question of musical universals.A number

of similarities in musical pattern perception between adults with extensive expo-

sure to music and infants with minimal exposure suggest a biological basis for

several aspects of music processing.For example,infants and adults focus largely

on the pitch contour and rhythm of novel melodies,reflecting a disposition to

attend to relational pitch and timing cues rather than to specific pitches and dura-

tions.Moreover,infants and adults retain more information from sequences whose

component tones are related by small-integer ratios (2:1, 3 :2) than by large-

integer ratios (45:32).Infants remember the component tones of scales more

readily when the scale steps are of unequal size (e.g.,tones and semitones),as in

the major scale,rather than of equal size.Furthermore,they encode more details

of a melody when its rhythmic arrangement is conventional rather than uncon-

ventional.Although music may seem irrelevant to the lives of infants,it is not.

Caregivers throughout the world sing to infants,using distinctive musical materi-

als and expressive variations that are finely tuned to infants’ ability and mood.

Indeed,these informal musical performances have important attentional and

affective consequences for the infant audience.Finally,universals of musical

pattern processing have provocative parallels in universals or near-universals of

musical structure.Musics of the world reveal greater emphasis on global structure

than on local details and on small-integer frequency ratios than on large ratios.

Other cross-cultural similarities include the ubiquity of unequal steps in scales,

preferred rhythms,and a special genre of music for infants.

The prevailing wisdom is that long-term exposure to the music of a par-

ticular culture is largely responsible for adults’ implicit knowledge of

music (Jones 1982;Bharucha 1987;Krumhansl 1990).Several lines of evi-

dence are consistent with this view.First,children exhibit better percep-

tion and retention of music with increasing age (e.g.,Krumhansl and

Keil 1982;Trainor and Trehub 1994).Second,adults and children show

superior memory for melodies that are structured in conventional rather

than unconventional ways (Cuddy,Cohen,and Mewhort 1981;Trehub

et al.1986).Third,formal musical training is associated with enhanced

perception and retention of music by children as well as by adults

(Krumhansl and Kessler 1982;Oura and Hatano 1988;Morrongiello and

Roes 1990;Lynch and Eilers 1991;Lynch et al.1991).Nevertheless,basic

principles of auditory pattern perception may still lie at the heart of

mature music processing (Handel 1989),which would explain why the

skills of trained and untrained listeners are more similar than different

(Bharucha and Stoeckig 1986,1987;Cuddy and Badertscher 1987).What

is unclear,however,is whether the similarities stem from processing

dispositions that are common to all members of the species or from

long-term exposure to similar kinds of music.

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Human Processing Predispositions and Musical Universals