Journal Week Fourteen

Temperly’s introduction to The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures is intriguing. It definitely explains a lot of his process, but does not begin to hint at what his findings were. I would like to read more of the work, and hopefully as the semester winds down, I will have a chance to.

I was struck by his comment about neurological study of the brain and its functions, especially in regards to music cognition. I have a friend who is a psychologist and have talked briefly to him about some of his work, and about the broader field. It appears to me that most of the studies are funded based on the funder’s criteria, whether it be a grant or institution. This means studies are subject to what the funder deems as critical or important. It’s expensive especially to conduct fMRIs or other imaging of the brain. So who pays for it to examine how the brain processes music? I imagine it would be hard to secure funding for this type of study. It is important, though, especially as it has been shown that studying music can aid students in other types of study, like math.

I liked that Temperly said that trained and untrained listeners share a lot in common in the way they process so much that I stopped reading mid paragraph to write a note about it. I was a little disappointed that he then went on to emphasis the differences, but nevertheless I think it’s an important piece. A lot of the reading I’ve been doing for my paper is about Absolute Pitch (AP) and many psychologists have researched it. One thing found is that though possessors of AP perform very differently in pitch identification tasks, non possessors may be closer to possessors than generally thought. Meaning, pitch memory and pitch identification may be better than previously thought in non-AP people.

I also thought it was interesting in this discussion that linguists ignore the more detailed and extensive education they have when considering their research. I wonder why the two fields have evolved in that way?

I am not sure I totally understand Temperly’s discussion of the piano roll representations but I like the idea of the visual representation of music outside of the standard staff. It’s always been a slightly sad thing for me to admit, but I’m really more of a visual than aural learner, and I’m fascinated by the way that music can be visually represented. My aunt has a player piano, and I used to love looking at the roll. Same for music boxes, I loved to see how the knobs on a canister could move the tines to make the noises that I liked so much.

I found it interesting that Temperly won’t be discussing timbre. Timbre was always a topic or word that my music theory teachers avoided discussing, either because they weren’t sure how to describe it or didn’t think it was important. However, in a reading by Levitin, he mentioned how those of us without AP don’t identify pitches, we identify timbre. We know, generally, a violin from a bassoon from a guitar. Sure, there is fuzziness, and maybe you don’t know the name of the instrument, but you know it’s different. When I read that, I realized how important timbre really is to us as auditory creatures.