Jamshed Bharucha

• Ph.D.
• Researcher at Harvard University

SCIENCE SINCE ANTIQUITY HAS ASKED WHETHER mathematical relationships among acoustic frequencies govern musical relationships. Psychophysics rejected frequency ratio theories, focusing on sensory phenomena predicted by linear analysis of sound. Cognitive psychologists have since focused on long-term exposure to the music of one's culture and short-t...

SCIENCE SINCE ANTIQUITY HAS ASKED WHETHER mathematical relationships among acoustic frequencies govern musical relationships. Psychophysics rejected frequency ratio theories, focusing on sensory phenomena predicted by linear analysis of sound. Cognitive psychologists have since focused on long-term exposure to the music of one's culture and short-t...

This chapter presents a response to the commentaries in Chapters 17-19. It focuses on the commentary written by Wiggins, who provides a spirited critique of network models, and the MUSACT model in particular - drawing extensively on the philosophy of science.

The future of a people is best predicted by the education of its youth. What South Asia looks like in 2060 will be determined by its ability to transform the educational profile of its people. A range of factors will influence what happens over the next 50 years, but education is a prerequisite for all of them. If there is one factor that could mak...

There is a long history of attempts to explain why music is perceived as expressing emotion. The relationship between pitches serves as an important cue for conveying emotion in music. The musical interval referred to as the minor third is generally thought to convey sadness. We reveal that the minor third also occurs in the pitch contour of speech...

The goal of this article is to highlight recent work examining how culture affects neural activation. We suggest a framework for cultural neuroscience in which there are two objectives: culture mapping—or the mapping function from patterns characteristic of cultures to their neural processing—and source analysis—or the attempt to determine the sour...

This article addresses the modelling of harmony and pitch, highlighting the parallels across these two domains. The harmony model involves mapping from tone classes to chords and keys using self-organisation, and accounts for a range of psychological data. The pitch model involves mapping from frequency spectra to pitch (spectral and virtual) using...

We explored how musical culture shapes one's listening experience. Western participants heard a series of tones drawn from either the Western major mode (culturally familiar) or the Indian thaat Bhairav (culturally unfamiliar) and then heard a test tone. They made a speeded judgment about whether the test tone was present in the prior series of ton...

We propose three extensions of the theory developed by Juslin & Västfjäll (J&V). First, motion should be considered as an additional mechanism. Second, synchronization plays a role in eliciting emotion. And, third, the spectrum of musical affect or feelings is denser and broader than the spectrum of emotions, suggesting an expansion of the scope of...

Harmonic priming studies have shown that a musical context with its tonal center influences target chord processing. In comparison with targets following baseline contexts, which do not establish a specific tonal center, processing is facilitated for a strongly related target functioning as the tonic, but inhibited for unrelated (out-of-key) and le...

In this paper, we argue that music cognition involves the use of acoustic and auditory codes to evoke a variety of conscious experiences. The variety of domains that are encompassed by music is so diverse that it is unclear whether a single domain of structure or experience is defining. Music is best understood as a form of communication in which f...

This chapter summarizes the applications of artificial neural networks to music cognition, notably to the learning and perceiving of musical structures. It presents a hierarchical self-organizing model that learns basic regularities of the Western tonal system by mere exposure and simulates tonal acculturation. After learning, the model simulates a...

Harmonic priming studies have shown that a musical context, with its established tonal center, influences target chord processing. This study investigated costs and benefits of priming tonal centers for target processing by adding a baseline condition (sequences without a specific tonal center). Results confirmed harmonic priming, with faster proce...

Behavioral studies have provided evidence that the processing of a musical target is faster and more accurate when it is harmonically related to the preceding prime context. We investigated the neural correlates of processing related and unrelated musical targets that were presented at the end of musical sequences. Participants were scanned with fu...

We investigated the spontaneous detection of "wrong notes" in a melody that modulated continuously through all 24 major and minor keys. Three variations of the melody were composed, each of which had distributed within it 96 test tones of the same pitch, for example, A2. Thus, the test tones would blend into some keys and pop out in others. Partici...

Western tonal music relies on a formal geometric structure that determines distance relationships within a harmonic or tonal space. In functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments, we identified an area in the rostromedial prefrontal cortex that tracks activation in tonal space. Different voxels in this area exhibited selectivity for different...

Music perception and cognition is the area of cognitive psychology devoted to determining the mental mechanisms underlying our appreciation of music, and in this chapter we review the major findings. We begin with the perception and cognition of pitch, which is the most thoroughly researched area in the field. We then consider perceptual organizati...

Polyphonic music combines multiple auditory streams to create complex auditory scenes, thus providing a tool for investigating the neural mechanisms that orient attention in natural auditory contexts. Across two fMRI experiments, we varied stimuli and task demands in order to identify the cortical areas that are activated during attentive listening...

Speeded intonation judgments of a target chord are facilitated when the chord is preceded by a harmonically related prime chord. The present study extends harmonic priming to temporal asynchrony judgments. In both tasks, the normative target chords (consonant, synchronous) are processed more quickly and accurately after a harmonically related prime...

This chapter describes the neural nets, temporal composites, and tonality. The chapter outlines a framework in which aspects of cognition can be understand as the result of the neural association of patterns. Subsequent advances helps in understanding that how these neural associations can be learned. Models based on these mechanisms are called neu...

Three experiments investigated the modularity of harmonic expectations that are based on cultural schemata despite the availability of more predictive veridical information. Participants were presented with prime-target chord pairs and made an intonation judgment about each target. Schematic expectation was manipulated by the combination of prime a...

Western tonal music is a highly structured system whose regularities are implicitly learned in everyday life. A hierarchical self-organizing network simulates learning of tonal regularities by mere exposure to musical material. The trained network provides a parsimonious account of empirical findings on perceived tone, chord and key relationships a...

Tonal music is a highly structured system that is ubiquitous in our cultural environment. We demonstrate the acquisition of implicit knowledge of tonal structure through neural self-organization resulting from mere exposure to simultaneous and sequential combinations of tones. In the process of learning, a network with fundamental neural constraint...

A chord-priming paradigm was used to test predictions of a neural net model (MUSACT). The model makes a nonintuitive prediction: Following a prime chord, expectations for the target chord are based on psychoacoustic similarity at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) but on implicit knowledge of conventional relationships at longer SOAs. In a cr...

The study of auditory and music cognition provides opportunities to explore general cognitive mechanisms in a specific, highly structured domain We discuss two problems with implications for other domains of perception the self-organization of perceptual categories and invariant pattern recognition The perceptual category we consider is the octave...

Unstable tones in a tonal context demand resolution to stable pitch neighbors. The stable tones serve to anchor unstable tones in their pitch neighborhood. Two constraints characterize this process of melodic anchoring: the anchor and the anchored tones are close in pitch (proximity), and the anchor always follows the anchored tone (asymmetry). Giv...

Psychological research in auditory perception has been polarized into psychoacoustics and cognitive psychology. Yet segregating “low level” and “high level” processing prevents us from exploring the existence of common principles. In this paper I will briefly sketch how similar principles of learning and processing may underlie auditory phenomena a...

The time course of chord priming was explored in four experiments. In chord priming, a chord (a typical combination of simultaneously sounded tones) primes other chords that are musically related. In the present study, the prime duration and the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the prime chord and the chord to be judged were varied. Priming...

The time course of chord priming was explored in four experiments. In chord priming, a chord (a typical combination of simultaneously sounded tones) primes other chords that are musically related. In the present study, the prime duration and the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the prime chord and the chord to be judged were varied. Priming...

The hemispheric representation of auditory functions mediating the perception of harmony in music was investigated in two split-brain patients using a musical chord priming task. Previous experiments in normal subjects had demonstrated that the harmonic context established by a prime chord influences the accuracy of target chord intonation judgemen...

Considerable work has been done on mapping out the mental organization of pitch in music (e.g., Dowling, 1978; Krumhansl, 1990). Studies suggest that much of this psychological structure exists even for subjects who have had no explicit musical training (Bharucha & Stoeckig, 1986). Furthermore, the data that point to such mental structures cannot b...

We present experimental and anatomical data from a case study of impaired auditory perception following bilateral hemispheric strokes. To consider the cortical representation of sensory, perceptual, and cognitive functions mediating tonal information processing in music, pure tone sensation thresholds, spectral intonation judgments, and the associa...

Neural netlearning algorithms permit the development of physiologically plausible computational models of learning in the auditory domain. Supervised learning algorithms are applicable when the acoustic environment provides target vectors that can guide learning. Musical sequences can be learned in this manner if each successive element in a sequen...

We discuss a class of computational models that provide promising explanations of the processes underlying music cognition. These models, called neural net, connectionist, or parallel distributed models, are suited to music cognition because they can learn from passive exposure to the structural regularities of a musical culture. They have the pote...

The acquisition of scale schemas through cultural exposure was modeled with neural net simulations. Associative networks employing the back‐propagation learning rule were exposed repeatedly to scale sets of one culture and were then tested for their ability to complete scale subsets of either the same culture or a different culture. The scales were...

The judged vanishing point of a target traveling along a vertical or horizontal trajectory at uniform velocity was examined. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects indicated the vanishing point by positioning a cross hair. Judged vanishing point was displaced forward in the direction of motion, and the magnitude of the displacement increased with the app...

The mind internalizes persistent structural regularities in music and recruits these internalized representations to facilitate subsequent perception. Facilitation underlies the generation of musical expectations and implications and the influence of a musical context on consonance and memory. Facilitation is demonstrated in experiments showing pri...

A chord generates expectancies for related chords to follow. Expectancies can be studied by measuring the time to discriminate between a target chord and a mistuned foil as a function of the target’s relatedness to a preceding prime chord. This priming paradigm has been employed to demonstrate that related targets are processed more quickly and are...

We present a radically user-friendly Macintosh laboratory, MindLab, for instruction in perception and cognition. MindLab’s forte is its ability to display pictorial stimuli, including digitized photographs, transferred via the clipboard from Macintosh graphics applications. An experiment is programmed by specifying sequences of event primitives, re...

The cognitive processes underlying musical expectation were explored by measuring reaction time in a priming paradigm. Subjects made a speeded true/false decision about a target chord following a prime chord to which it was either closely or distantly related harmonically. Using a major/minor decision task in Experiment 1, we found that major targe...

Subjects were presented with two musical chords in succession, called the prime and target, respectively. The prime and target were either related (e.g., C and D major, respectively, sharing a parent key) or unrelated (e.g., C and F♯ major, respectively, sharing no parent key). Subjects judged, as quickly as possible, whether the target was in tune...

Recognition memory for equitone sequences was tested as a function of whether the pattern of stimulus onsets mapped easily onto an isochronous grid (rhythmic) or did not (disrupted). In a same-different task, discrimination between a rhythmic sequence and its disrupted variant was better when the rhythmic sequence was presented first and the disrup...

In a study phase, subjects were presented with sentence pairs which were either coherent or anomalous. In a subsequent recognition test, each sentence pair was presented either in its original form or with one word changed. The changed word either disrupted the coherence of a previously coherent sentence pair or conferred coherence on a previously...

Used the probe tone method to quantify the perceived hierarchy of tones of North Indian music. Indian music is tonal and has many features in common with Western music. However, the primary means of expressing tonality in Indian music is through melody, whereas in Western music it is through harmony (the use of chords). Probe tone ratings were give...

Most pieces of music induce in the listener a sense that some pitches sound consonant, stable, or final, while others sound more dissonant, unstable, or transient. A psychological account of the intuition that the dissonance of an unstable tone is sometimes “resolved” by following it by a stable tone that is close in pitch is provided. The perceive...

Attempts to tie together some of the issues raised by D. Deutsch and W. J. Dowling (see PA, Vol 72:16425 and 16426, respectively) in their comments on the author's Indian music study (see M. A. Castellano et al; PA, Vol 72:16424). A distinction is made between 2 kinds of hierarchical representations of musical stability. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database...

Used the probe tone method to quantify the perceived hierarchy of tones of North Indian music. Indian music is tonal and has many features in common with Western music. However, the primary means of expressing tonality in Indian music is through melody, whereas in Western music it is through harmony (the use of chords). Probe tone ratings were give...

The ability to appreciate most Western music presupposes cognitive structures capable of abstracting an underlying harmonic structure from a complex string of musical events. In this paper we provide a description of the listener's knowledge of hierarchies of harmonic stability. The organization of harmonic information may be summarized by six prin...

Investigated with 10 undergraduates the perceived harmonic relationships between a major key, the major key built on its dominant, and the relative minor key. Multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering techniques applied to judgments of 2-chord progressions showed a central core consisting of chords that play primary harmonic functions in...

Two experiments provide convergent evidence for the hypothesis that listeners interpret chords in terms of their harmonic functions in a system of interrelated keys. The perceived associations between chords undergo significant changes depending on the broader tonal framework in which they are embedded. Three independent context effects are identif...

Investigated with 10 undergraduates the perceived harmonic relationships between a major key, the major key built on its dominant, and the relative minor key. Multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering techniques applied to judgments of 2-chord progressions showed a central core consisting of chords that play primary harmonic functions in...

Actinomycin D, when encapsulated within liposomes, has been previously shown to be less toxic to mice than nonencapsulated actinomycin D, but to retain its tumoricidal activity. We have compared the toxic effects of Act D encapsulated either in the aqueous phase or in the lipid phase of liposomes (APL and LPL, respectively), and the nonencapsulated...

Behavioral studies have provided evidence that the processing of a musical target is faster and more accurate when it is harmonically related to the preceding prime context. We investigated the neural correlates of processing related and unrelated musical targets that were presented at the end of musical sequences. Participants were scanned with fu...

There is a sense of urgency in America today, reminiscent of the "space race" rhetoric of the cold-war era, that we must get our act together in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education because the Asians are coming. Many people believe that higher-education institutions in countries like China and India produce professionals in...