Seminar Artificial Intelligence - Dr. Claire Pelofi New York University

Titel: Universals in music: The case for asymmetric scales

Abstract:

Despite the remarkable variability music displays across cultures, certain recurrent musical features motivate the hypothesis that fundamental cognitive principles constrain the way music is produced. One such feature concerns the structure of musical scales---the vast majority of musical cultures use asymmetric scales, that is, scales containing notes that are spread unevenly across the octave. Here we present evidence that the structure of musical scales has a substantial impact on how listeners learn new musical systems. We present behavioral data from three experiments that tested the hypothesis that scale asymmetry facilitates the processing of melodies. Novel melodic stimuli were composed based on order-1 Markov chains, using scales with different degrees of asymmetry. Listeners were tested on their ability to encode syntactic regularities in different scale contexts. The results show that performance is significantly enhanced under asymmetric scale conditions. Neural data echoed this finding as decoding grammatical structure was enhanced in the case of asymmetric scales. Altogether, this study suggests that learning novel musical systems is facilitated by the asymmetric structure of scales, which in turn may explain their prevalence across musical cultures.