The consonances we hear, the music we imagine

Date

Jan 24, 2017

Time

4:40 PM - 6:10 PM

Speaker

Tudor Popescu

Affiliation

TU Dresden

Language

en

Main Topic

Psychologie

Other Topics

Psychologie, Gesellschaft, Philos., Erzieh.

Description

What makes our experience of music possible – and seamless – is an intricate puzzle of cognitive processes, not all available to conscious awareness. One mode of acquiring musical knowledge is involuntary, by way of implicit learning, and this eventually shapes our preference for certain combinations of notes over others, e.g. for consonant over dissonant chords (or indeed, vice-versa – in the "right" contexts!). Importantly, such learning also shapes our expectations of what musical events might come next. These expectations form the core of a set of intuitions that have been formalised as models of musical structure, some of which (e.g. Schenkerian analysis) are able to make quantifiable predictions about the temporal nature of our expectation – for instance, with regards to the moment in time when we feel a piece is "beginning to end". The sum of these intuitions endows us with a template that on the one hand enables us to make sense of music that we hear – a process psychologists describe as "bottom-up"; but equally, also to (re)create music in our own minds – a "top-down" process known as musical imagery, which shares commonalities with music perception not only at the cognitive level (e.g. both stem from a single generative model) but also at the neuronal level. In this talk, I will present research from the Dresden Music Cognition Lab that has investigated separately several of these aspects of music perception and imagery; and will attempt to put the puzzle pieces back together in describing an overall picture of how the mind effortlessly processes music, and how the brain is wired to make these processes run smoothly in the background.

Links

• Series hompage

Last modified: Oct 17, 2016, 10:34:50 PM