Music syntactic processing

Abstract

Music Syntax refers to the principle of combining discrete key elements into hierarchical system. Organization of pitches based on tonality harmony is the most important music syntax which affects the expectation, the construction and the feedback on the music events of the audience from which aesthetic musical experience is finally produced. Lerdahl and Jackendoff proposed a musical tree-structure that parallel to linguistic syntax in their generative theory of tonal music (GTTM). And Rohrmeier further specified hierarchical generativerules of pitch syntax in the generative syntax model (GSM). Both the GTTM and the GSM put forward the analogy between music syntax and linguistic syntax. But what is obviously different from language processing is that the processing of music syntax of the audience reveals a cross-empiricalness effects. Whether in early studies of behavioristics or in recent studies of EPR, most evidences support that there is a syntax diagram guiding people's musical expectations without much association with their musical experiences among western audience, at least in the sense of simple linear syntax. Therefore, the acquisition of music syntax under the non-explicit conditions arouses researchers' thinking on music syntax processing mechanism. Current studies have not reached a consensus on processing of syntactic structure, and two antagonistic theories "Cognitivism" and "Physicalism" have generated. "Cognitivism" put forward that since pitch syntax reflects abstract cognitive structural relations between sounds and meanings, syntactic integration requires the help of scheme drive of long-term memory, of which MUSACT and the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (SSIRH) are the representative theories. While "Physicalism" considered that it only needs the help of short-term memory in perception drive because pitch syntax has a property of psychoacoustics derived from voice frequency. And the periodicity pitch model (PP) and its derivate, the auditory short-term memory (ASTM), are the representative theories. Both theories demonstrated their viewpoints respectively from the angle of theoretical model, behavioral studies and cognitive neuroscience. It is necessary for future study to move on in the following aspects: (i) Investigations on the processing capability and mechanism of large scale nested syntactic hierarchical structure and it has to focus on what factors and mechanism affect the integration of syntactic hierarchical structure of the audience. It is especially essential to discuss the effect of working memory on how it works to integrate scheme drive mechanism and perception drive mechanism. (ii) Discussions on the controversy of scheme drive and perception drive should be conducted under conditions of different hierarchical syntactic levels and time windows. Meanwhile, experiments and statistics can be used to separate the mechanism effect of perception drive and scheme drive and to study the possible interaction. (iii) The application of EEG and FMRI can be further implemented to disclose functions of ERP by integrating statistics of time-domain analysis and frequency-domain analysis. Besides, FMRI, PET and MEG need to be extended from orientation studies to dynamic connection mode of brain function. (iv) Discussions on the relationship of syntax and emotions should also be carried out under conditions of different hierarchical syntax structure levels under which the effect and mechanism of induced emotion may be different. All in all, the exploration of music syntactic processing could be used to reveal the characteristics of human advanced cognitive wisdom. Meanwhile, it has an important clinical value. It is expected our study can further reveal the mechanism of music syntax and promote the understanding of it, which can be helpful for clinical practices.