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Space oddity: musical syntax is mapped onto visual space

ABSTRACT: Increasing evidence has uncovered associations between the cognition of abstract schemas and spatial perception. Here we examine such associations for Western musical syntax, tonality. Spatial metaphors are ubiquitous when describing tonality: stable, closural tones are considered to be spatially central and, as gravitational foci, spatially lower. We investigated whether listeners, musicians and nonmusicians, indeed associate tonal relationships with visuospatial dimensions, including spatial height, centrality, laterality, and size, implicitly or explicitly, and whether such mappings are consistent with established metaphors. In the explicit paradigm, participants heard a tonality-establishing prime followed by a probe tone and coupled each probe with a subjectively appropriate location (Exp.1) or size (Exp.4). The implicit paradigm used a version of the Implicit Association Test to examine associations of tonal stability with vertical position (Exp.2), lateral position (Exp3) and size (Exp.5). Tonal stability was indeed associated with perceived physical space: the spatial distances between the locations associated with different scale-degrees significantly correlated with the tonal stability differences between these scale-degrees. However, inconsistently with musical discourse, stable tones were associated with leftward (instead of central) and higher (instead of lower) spatial positions. We speculate that these mappings are influenced by emotion, embodying the “good is up” metaphor, and by the spatial structure of music keyboards. Taken together, the results demonstrate a new type of cross-modal correspondence and a hitherto under-researched connotative function of musical structure. Importantly, the results suggest that the spatial mappings of an abstract domain may be independent of the spatial metaphors used to describe that domain.

SUBMITTER: Maimon N

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8595729 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Objective: Perception of time as well as rhythm in musical structures rely on complex brain mechanisms and require an extended network of multiple neural sources. They are therefore sensitive to impairment. Several psychophysical studies have shown that patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have deficits in perceiving time and rhythms due to a malfunction of the basal ganglia (BG) network. Method: In this study we investigated the time perception of PD patients during music perception by assessing their just noticeable difference (JND) in the time perception of a complex musical Gestalt. We applied a temporal discrimination task using a short melody with a clear beat-based rhythm. Among the subjects, 26 patients under L-Dopa administration and 21 age-matched controls had to detect an artificially delayed time interval in the range between 80 and 300 ms in the middle of the musical period. We analyzed the data by (a) calculating the detection threshold directly, (b) by extrapolating the JNDs, (c) relating it to musical expertise. Results: Patients differed from controls in the detection of time-intervals between 220 and 300 ms (*p = 0.0200, n = 47). Furthermore, this deficit depended on the severity of the disease (*p = 0.0452; n = 47). Surprisingly, PD patients did not show any deficit of their JND compared to healthy controls, although the results showed a trend (*p = 0.0565, n = 40). Furthermore, no significant difference of the JND was found according to the severity of the disease. Additionally, musically trained persons seemed to have lower thresholds in detecting deviations in time and syntactic structures of music (*p = 0.0343, n = 39). Conclusion: As an explanation of these results, we would like to propose the hypothesis of a time-syntax-congruency in music perception suggesting that processing of time and rhythm is a Gestalt process and that cortical areas involved in processing of musical syntax may compensate for impaired BG circuits that are responsible for time processing and rhythm perception. This mechanism may emerge more strongly as the deficits in time processing and rhythm perception progress. Furthermore, we presume that top-down-bottom-up-processes interfere additionally and interact in this context of compensation.

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Space oddity: musical syntax is mapped onto visual space

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