Sandra Trehub

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at University of Toronto

Musical behaviours are universal across human populations and, at the same time, highly diverse in their structures, roles and cultural interpretations. Although laboratory studies of isolated listeners and music-makers have yielded important insights into sensorimotor and cognitive skills and their neural underpinnings, they have revealed little a...

The origin of the Western preference for consonance remains unresolved, with some suggesting that the preference is innate. In Experiments 1 and 2 of the present study, 6-month-old infants heard six different consonant/dissonant pairs of stimuli, including those tested in previous research. In contrast to the findings of others, infants in the pres...

We explored the possibility of a unique cross-modal signature in maternal speech and singing that enables adults and infants to link unfamiliar speaking or singing voices with subsequently viewed silent videos of the talkers or singers. In Experiment 1, adults listened to 30-s excerpts of speech followed by successively presented 7-s silent video c...

Across species, there is considerable evidence of preferential processing for biologically significant signals such as conspecific vocalizations and the calls of individual conspecifics. Surprisingly, music cognition in human listeners is typically studied with stimuli that are relatively low in biological significance, such as instrumental sounds....

Intrinsic perceptual biases for simple duration ratios are thought to constrain the organization of rhythmic patterns in music. We tested that hypothesis by exposing listeners to folk melodies differing in metrical structure (simple or complex duration ratios), then testing them on alterations that preserved or violated the original metrical struct...

The present review summarizes the available evidence on musicality, or music-related abilities, in infants (birth to 3 years). In the early months of life, infants are responsive to the pitch and temporal patterns of music. Their perceptual skills are similar, in many respects, to those of adults, presumably because of the nature of the human audit...

When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. Here, we show acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations acro...

We examined pitch-error detection in well-known songs sung with or without meaningful lyrics. In Experiment 1, adults heard the initial phrase of familiar songs sung with lyrics or repeating syllables ( la) and judged whether they heard an out-of-tune note. Half of the renditions had a single pitch error (50 or 100 cents); half were in tune. Listen...

I challenge Mehr et al.'s contention that ancestral mothers were reluctant to provide all the attention demanded by their infants. The societies in which music emerged likely involved foraging mothers who engaged in extensive infant carrying, feeding, and soothing. Accordingly, their singing was multimodal, its rhythms aligned with maternal movemen...

The original paper’s sampling criteria involved selecting lullabies that adults rated as most likely to soothe a baby and non-lullabies rated as least likely to do so. Our analysis shows that lullabies in the stimulus set had systematically higher recording quality than non-lullabies, and those differences in recording quality were substantially gr...

I review two recent books on music, both inspired by cognitive neuroscience but di ering in most other respects. Isabelle Peretz, an expert in the cognitive neuroscience of music, describes how we perceive and produce music, as re ected in neural and behavioral responsiveness. Her book is intended for general readers who are interested in music and...

Adults and children with typical development (TD) remember vocal melodies (without lyrics) better than instrumental melodies, which is attributed to the biological and social significance of human vocalizations. Here we asked whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who have persistent difficulties with communication and social interac...

I review two recent books on music, both inspired by cognitive neuroscience but differing in most other respects. Isabelle Peretz, an expert in the cognitive neuroscience of music, describes how we perceive and produce music, as reflected in neural and behavioral re­sponsiveness. Her book is intended for general readers who are interested in music...

Pairing high-intensity interval training (HIIT) with motor skill acquisition may improve learning of some implicit motor sequences (albeit with some variability), but it is unclear if HIIT enhances explicit learning of motor sequences. We asked whether a single bout of HIIT after non-musicians learned to play a piano melody promoted better retentio...

Across taxa, the forms of vocal signals are shaped by their functions. In humans, a salient context of vocal signaling is infant care, as human infants are altricial. Humans often produce "parent-ese", speech and song for infants that differ acoustically from ordinary speech and song, in fashions that are thought to support parent-infant communicat...

Infants typically experience music through social interactions with others. One such experience involves caregivers singing to infants while holding and bouncing them rhythmically. These highly social interactions shape infant music perception and may also influence social cognition and behavior. Moving in time with others-interpersonal synchrony-c...

Many scholars consider preferences for consonance, as defined by Western music theorists, to be based primarily on biological factors, while others emphasize experiential factors, notably the nature of musical exposure. Cross-cultural experiments suggest that consonance preferences are shaped by musical experience, implying that preferences should...

Parents commonly vocalize to infants to mitigate their distress, especially when holding them is not possible. Here we examined the relative efficacy of parents’ speech and singing (familiar and unfamiliar songs) in alleviating the distress of 8- and 10-month-old infants (n = 68 per age group). Parent–infant dyads participated in 3 trials of the St...

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant...

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant...

Parents commonly vocalize to infants to mitigate their distress, especially when holding them is not possible. Here we examined the relative efficacy of parents' speech and singing (familiar and unfamiliar songs) in alleviating the distress of 8- and 10-month-old infants (n = 68 per age group). Parent-infant dyads participated in 3 trials of the St...

Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategie...

Many scholars consider preferences for consonance, as defined by Western music theorists, to be based primarily on biological factors, while others emphasize experiential factors, notably the nature of musical exposure. Cross-cultural experiments suggest that consonance preferences are shaped by musical experience, implying that preferences should...

Introduction: Memory is affected by stimulus salience. For example, vocal melodies are remembered better than instrumental melodies, presumably because of their status as biologically significant signals. We asked whether the memorability of inherently salient vocal melodies is affected by local factors such as contextual distinctiveness. Methods:...

Primary caregivers throughout the world provide infants with life-sustaining care such as nutrition and protection from harm as well as life-enhancing care such as affection, contingent responsiveness, and mentoring of various kinds. They nurture infants musically by means of one-on-one (i.e., infant-directed) singing accompanied by movement in som...

Rhythmic movement to music, whether deliberate (e.g., dancing) or inadvertent (e.g., foot-tapping), is ubiquitous. Although parents commonly report that infants move rhythmically to music, especially to familiar music in familiar environments, there has been little systematic study of this behavior. As a preliminary exploration of infants' movement...

Mothers around the world sing to infants, presumably to regulate their mood and arousal. Lullabies and playsongs differ stylistically and have distinctive goals. Mothers sing lullabies to soothe and calm infants and playsongs to engage and excite infants. In this study, mothers repeatedly sang Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star to their infants (n = 30...

Mothers around the world sing to infants, presumably to regulate their mood and arousal. Lullabies and playsongs differ stylistically and have distinctive goals. Mothers sing lullabies to soothe and calm infants and playsongs to engage and excite infants. In this study, mothers repeatedly sang Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star to their infants (n = 30...

Musicality, a uniquely human and spontaneously developing trait that enables us to perceive music, move to it, and sing, is influenced by biological, cognitive, and cultural factors (Honing, ten Cate, Peretz & Trehub, 2015; Trehub, Becker, & Morley, 2015). Not surprisingly, it is expressed differently across the lifespan. In this chapter, we focus...

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, appreciate, and make music. Research shows that all humans have a predisposition for music, just as they do for language. All of us can perceive and enjoy music, even if we can't carry a tune and consider ourselves “unmusical.” This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the capac...

Infants typically experience music through social interactions with others. One such experience involves caregivers singing to infants while holding and bouncing them rhythmically. These highly social interactions shape infant music perception and may also influence social cognition and behavior. Moving in time with others—interpersonal synchrony—c...

Infants are highly selective in their help to unfamiliar individuals. For example, they offer more help to partners who move synchronously with them rather than asynchronously and to partners who interact with them in a “nice” rather than “mean” manner. Infant-directed song and speech may also encourage infant helping by signaling caregiver quality...

Across cultures, aspects of music and dance contribute to everyday life in a variety of ways that do not depend on artistry, aesthetics, or expertise. In this chapter, we focus on precursors to music and dance that are evident in infancy: the underlying perceptual abilities, parent–infant musical interactions that are motivated by nonmusical goals,...

Infants' music perception skills are similar to those of adults in their sensitivity to musical pitch and rhythm patterns and their long-term memory for melodies. At times, infants outperform adults, as with pitch and rhythm patterns that are foreign or unconventional. By 12 months of age, infants are sensitive to some culture-specific aspects of m...

Mothers throughout the world vocalize to infants in the course of caregiving. This chapter describes (1) mothers’ speech and singing to infants, including differences arising from cultural practices and individual circumstances, and (2) the impact of maternal speech and singing on infants. Vocalizations to infants are more expressive than vocalizat...

The present study explored the singing ability of toddlers 16 months to 3 years of age by examining North American adults’ ability to identify toddlers’ renditions of familiar tunes sung with foreign lyrics. After listening to each toddler’s song, half with familiar melodies and half with unfamiliar melodies, adults attempted to name the songs. The...

The present study compared children's and adults' identification and discrimination of declarative questions and statements on the basis of terminal cues alone. Children (8–11 years, n = 41) and adults (n = 21) judged utterances as statements or questions from sentences with natural statement and question endings and with manipulated endings that f...

Western music is characterized primarily by simple meters, but a number of other musical cultures, including Turkish, have both simple and complex meters. In Experiment 1, Turkish and American adults with and without musical training were asked to detect metrical changes in Turkish music with simple and complex meter. Musicians performed significan...

Terminal changes in fundamental frequency provide the most salient acoustic cues to declarative questions, but adults sometimes identify such questions from pre-terminal cues. In the present study, adults and 7- to 10-year-old children judged a single speaker’s adult- and child-directed utterances as questions or statements in a gating task with wo...

From 7 years of age, listeners exhibit better memory for vocal melodies (without lyrics) than for instrumental melodies even when they have extensive instrumental training (Weiss et al., 2012, 2015a, b, 2016). In the present study, we compared adults’ memory for vocal and instrumental melodies, as before, but with two additional singers, one female...

Young children are slow to master conventional intonation patterns in their yes/no questions, which may stem from imperfect understanding of the links between terminal pitch contours and pragmatic intentions. In Experiment , five- to ten-year-old children and adults were required to judge utterances as questions or statements on the basis of inton...

The available evidence indicates that the music of a culture reflects the speech rhythm of the prevailing language. The normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) is a measure of durational contrast between successive events that can be applied to vowels in speech and to notes in music. Music–language parallels may have implications for the acqui...

This study investigates the oral gestures of 8-month-old infants in response to audiovisual presentation of lip and tongue smacks. Infants exhibited more lip gestures than tongue gestures following adult lip smacks and more tongue gestures than lip gestures following adult tongue smacks. The findings, which are consistent with predictions from Arti...

Co-speech gestures, which include facial expressions, posture, head and limb movements, and eye gaze, are influenced by language and cultural conventions as well as by individual differences. A few studies report that observers can distinguish one language from another on the basis of visual cues alone. Because these studies provided full access to...

Previous research reveals that vocal melodies are remembered better than instrumental renditions. Here we explored the possibility that the voice, as a highly salient stimulus, elicits greater arousal than nonvocal stimuli, resulting in greater pupil dilation for vocal than for instrumental melodies. We also explored the possibility that pupil dila...

The present study examined the influence of infant visual cues on maternal vocal and facial expressiveness while speaking or singing and the influence of maternal visual cues on infant attention. Experiment 1 asked whether mothers exhibit more vocal emotion when speaking and singing to infants in or out of view. Adults judged which of each pair of...

Much is known about the efficacy of infant-directed (ID) speech and singing for capturing attention, but little is known about their role in regulating affect. In Experiment 1, infants 7–10 months of age listened to scripted recordings of ID speech, adult-directed speech, or singing in an unfamiliar language (Turkish) until they met a criterion of...

Singing, rhythmic movement to music, and musical instruments, blown or struck, are pervasive, with a deep history (1). Ethnomusicologists do not dispute the existence of core abilities that support a variety of musical activities across cultures, but they are generally averse to notions of universals involving musical structure or form (2). In thei...

Nonmusicians remember vocal melodies (i.e., sung to la la) better than instrumental melodies. If greater exposure to the voice contributes to those effects, then long-term experience with instrumental timbres should elicit instrument-specific advantages. Here we evaluate this hypothesis by comparing pianists with other musicians and nonmusicians. W...

Musicality can be defined as a natural, spontaneously developing trait based on and constrained by biology and cognition. Music, by contrast, can be defined as a social and cultural construct based on that very musicality. One critical challenge is to delineate the constituent elements of musicality. What biological and cognitive mechanisms are ess...

Music cognition is typically studied with instrumental stimuli. Adults remember melodies better, however, when they are presented in a biologically significant timbre (i.e., the human voice) than in various instrumental timbres (Weiss, Trehub, & Schellenberg, 2012). We examined the impact of vocal timbre on children's processing of melodies. In Stu...

Adolescents and adults commonly use music for various forms of affect regulation, including relaxation, revitalization, distraction, and elicitation of pleasant memories. Mothers throughout the world also sing to their infants, with affect regulation as the principal goal. To date, the study of maternal singing has focused largely on its acoustic f...

and Keywords We can learn much about music and its ontogenetic origins by examining infants ' initial musical abilities and how these abilities change with age and musical exposure. Caregivers typically provide a wealth of music or music-like stimulation by means of melodious speech and multimodal singing . Their singing is highly engaging to infan...

Mothers sing expressively while caring for infants . Initially, such singing is for emotion regulation: for promoting tranquility, sleep, playful engagement, or stress reduction, depending on the context. Infants ' responsiveness to such singing encourages further maternal singing . Mothers act as singing mentors even though their mentoring is init...

The goal of the present study was to ascertain whether children with normal hearing and prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants could use pitch or timing cues alone or in combination to identify familiar songs. Children 4–7 years of age were required to identify the theme songs of familiar TV shows in a simple task with excerpts that pres...

O ouvido absoluto não facilita a memorização de melodias! ! Resumo: Um estudo recente investigou o desempenho de adultos em uma tarefa de memória musical e mostrou que melodias vocais são mais lembradas que melodias instrumentais. Usando uma tarefa semelhante, o presente estudo buscou investigar a memória musical de músicos e de não-músicos e, em s...

Although the spectrally degraded input provided by cochlear implants (CIs) is sufficient for speech perception in quiet, it poses problems for talker identification. The present study examined the ability of normally hearing (NH) children and child CI users to recognize cartoon voices while listening to spectrally degraded speech. In Experiment 1,...

Commentary

The current study investigates whether long-term music training and practice are associated with enhancement of general cognitive abilities in late middle-aged to older adults. Professional musicians and non-musicians who were matched on age, education, vocabulary, and general health were compared on a near-transfer task involving auditory processi...

This chapter captures extensive discussions between people with different forms of expertise and viewpoints. It explores the relationships between language and music in evolutionary and cultural context. Rather than trying to essentialize either, they are characterized pragmatically in terms of features that appear to distinguish them (such as lang...

Music, as considered here, is a mode of communication, one that has particular reso-nance for preverbal infants. Infants detect melodic, rhythmic, and expressive nuances in music as well as in the intonation patterns of speech. They have ample opportunity to use those skills because mothers shower them with melodious sounds, both sung and spoken. I...

THE PRESENT STUDY INTRODUCES A NOVEL TOOL FOR ASSESSING MUSICAL ABILITIES IN CHILDREN: The Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Musical Abilities (MBEMA). The battery, which comprises tests of memory, scale, contour, interval, and rhythm, was administered to 245 children in Montreal and 91 in Beijing (Experiment 1), and an abbreviated version was admi...

The origin of the Western preference for consonance remains unresolved, with some suggesting that the preference is innate. In Experiments 1 and 2 of the present study, 6-month-old infants heard six different consonant/dissonant pairs of stimuli, including those tested in previous research. In contrast to the findings of others, infants in the pres...

A presentation of music and language within an integrative, embodied perspective of brain mechanisms for action, emotion, and social coordination. This book explores the relationships between language, music, and the brain by pursuing four key themes and the crosstalk among them: song and dance as a bridge between music and language; multiple level...

Infants prefer speech to non-vocal sounds and to non-human vocalizations, and they prefer happy-sounding speech to neutral speech. They also exhibit an interest in singing, but there is little knowledge of their relative interest in speech and singing. The present study explored infants' attention to unfamiliar audio samples of speech and singing....

Cochlear implants have enabled many congenitally or prelingually deaf children to acquire their native language and communicate successfully on the basis of electrical rather than acoustic input. Nevertheless, degraded spectral input provided by the device reduces the ability to perceive emotion in speech. We compared the vocal imitations of 5- to...

We examined the influence of incidental exposure to varied metrical patterns from different musical cultures on the perception of complex metrical structures from an unfamiliar musical culture. Adults who were familiar with Western music only (i.e., simple meters) and those who also had limited familiarity with non-Western music were tested on thei...

This study examined the ability of prelingually deaf children with bilateral implants to identify emotion (i.e. happiness or sadness) in speech and music. Participants in Experiment 1 were 14 prelingually deaf children from 5-7 years of age who had bilateral implants and 18 normally hearing children from 4-6 years of age. They judged whether lingui...

This paper outlines the principal behavioral methods used to study music processing in infancy. The advantages of conditioning procedures are offset by high attrition rates and restrictions on the stimuli that can be used. The head-turn preference procedure is more user-friendly but poses greater interpretive challenges. In view of the multidimensi...

Japanese 5- to 13-yr-olds who used cochlear implants (CIs) and a comparison group of normally hearing (NH) Japanese children were tested on their perception and production of speech prosody. For the perception task, they were required to judge whether semantically neutral utterances that were normalized for amplitude were spoken in a happy, sad, or...

Temporal information provided by cochlear implants enables successful speech perception in quiet, but limited spectral information precludes comparable success in voice perception. Talker identification and speech decoding by young hearing children (5-7 yr), older hearing children (10-12 yr), and hearing adults were examined by means of vocoder sim...

The term connoisseur is generally reserved for experts in matters of taste, especially with reference to the expressive or culinary arts. In the case of music, a connoisseur would be a discerning listener in a narrow or literal sense - having keen perceptual skills - and in a broader, more important sense - distinguishing musical compositions and p...

Expressive variations in timing and dynamics were examined in infant-directed performances of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star by mothers and in non-infant-directed performances by non-mothers. Mothers sang to their infants, and non-mothers sang informally on their own. Acoustic analyses revealed that infant-directed performances had fewer expressive...

Canadian and Japanese 4- and 5-yearold children were asked to create a happy song or a sad song. Approximately 60% of Canadian preschoolers produced a song under these circumstances in contrast to roughly 40% of Japanese preschoolers. Of the Japanese children who produced a song, most simply reproduced a familiar song. By contrast, Canadian childre...

The special volume of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind & Brain (PMMB) takes its inspiration from the AIRS (Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing) Major Collaborative Research Initiative, which is generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Although the work of only some of the AIRS collabora...

Conventional views of musicality involve sensitivity, knowledge or talent for music. One would therefore expect communicative musicality to involve the sharing of this sensitivity, knowledge or talent with others. For the editors of this volume, however, communicative musicality is consid-erably broader in scope. Malloch and Trevarthen define music...

The study of infant music perception began in the 1970s-a time when young infants were considered incapable of holistic processing of auditory sequences. These limitations were reconsidered with the demonstration of infants' configural processing of pitch and timing patterns, which presaged the vibrant field of study that unfolded over subsequent d...