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March 2 - April 4, 2021
The third problem states that objects, although different in presentation, are of the same natural kind.
This seemed like the death of any record-keeping theory; if prototypes are stored in memory, memory must be constructive.
We can change all of the pitches used in the song (transposition), the tempo, and the instrumentation, and the song is still recognized as the same song. We can change the intervals, the scales, even the tonality from major to minor or vice versa.
“Psychoacoustics and Cognitive Psychology for Musicians,”
Why is absolute pitch (AP) so rare? People with AP can name notes as effortlessly as most of us name colors.
Well, most of us can identify sounds as effortlessly as we identify colors; it’s simply not the pitch we identify, but rather, the timbre.
the real question isn’t “Why do only a few people have AP?” but “Why don’t we all?”
The subjects were overwhelmingly able to reproduce or recognize “their” note. This suggested to us that ordinary people could remember notes with arbitrary names.
Pitch training.
They asked trained singers with absolute pitch to “sight-read” from a musical score; that is, the singers had to look at music they had never seen before and sing it using their knowledge of absolute pitch and their ability to read music.
The surprising finding was that their muscle memory didn’t do very well. On average, it only got them to within a third of an octave of the correct tone.
This was convincing evidence that people were storing absolute pitch information in memory; that their memory representation did not just contain an abstract generalization of the song, but details of a particular performance.
Surveys have revealed that it is rarely an entire song that gets stuck, but rather a piece of the song that is typically less than or equal in duration to the capacity of auditory short-term (“echoic”) memory: about 15 to 30 seconds.
Quite apart from the melody, the specific pitches and rhythms, some songs simply have an overall sound, a sonic color.
This suggests that our memory for music involves hierarchical encoding—not all words are equally salient, and not all parts of a musical phrase hold equal status.
musicians learn music according to a hierarchical phrase structure. Groups of notes form units of practice, these smaller units are combined into larger units, and ultimately into phrases; phrases are combined into structures such as verses and choruses or movements, and ultimately everything is strung together as a musical piece.
The convergence of exemplar theory and memory theory comes in the form of a relatively new group of theories, collectively called “multiple-trace memory models.”
Leslie Ungerleider, and her colleagues performed fMRI studies showing that representations of categories are located in specific parts of the brain. Faces, animals, vehicles, foods, and so on have been shown to occupy specific regions of the cortex.
There is now an emerging consensus among memory researchers that neither the record-keeping nor the constructivist view is correct, but that a third view, a hybrid of sorts, is the correct theory: the multiple-trace memory model.
According to the multiple-trace memory models, every experience is potentially encoded in memory.
The barrier to being able to recall everything we might want to is not that it wasn’t “stored” in memory, then; rather, the problem is finding the right cue to access the memory and properly configure our neural circuits.
Music is organized sound, but the organization has to involve some element of the unexpected or it is emotionally flat and robotic.
Isabelle Peretz discovered that the right hemisphere of the brain contains a contour processor that in effect draws an outline of a melody and analyzes it for later recognition, and this is dissociable from rhythm and meter circuits in the brain.
In popular language, it has sometimes been referred to as the reptilian brain. Although it weighs only 10 percent as much as the rest of the brain, it contains 50 to 80 percent of the total number of neurons.
The cerebellum appears to be involved in tracking the beat.
To continue to function after a brain injury requires that a blow to a single part of the brain doesn’t shut down the whole system. Important brain systems evolved additional, supplementary pathways.
A vestigial or supplementary auditory system also appears to be in place involving the cerebellum. This preserves our ability to react quickly—emotionally and with movement—to potentially dangerous sounds.
Related to the startle reflex, and to the auditory system’s exquisite sensitivity to change, is the habituation circuit.
Habituation is an important and necessary process to separate the threatening from the nonthreatening.
Williams syndrome
Balint’s syndrome, in which people can recognize only one or two features of an object but cannot hold them together.
It also invokes some of the same neural regions that language does, but far more than language, music taps into primitive brain structures involved with motivation, reward, and emotion.
How do people become expert musicians? And why is that of the millions of people who take music lessons as children, relatively few continue to play music as adults?
Several years later, the students who achieved the highest performance ratings were those who had practiced the most, irrespective of which “talent” group they had been assigned to previously.
This suggests that practice is the cause of achievement, not merely something correlated with it.
Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years.
The strength of a memory is related to how many times the original stimulus has been experienced.
But like many scientific theories, the ten-thousand-hours theory has holes in it, and it needs to account for counterarguments and rebuttals.
There may also be a cluster of genes that work together to create the component skills that one must have to become a successful musician:
good eye-hand coordination, muscle control, motor control, tenacity, patience, memory for certain kinds of structures and patterns, a sense of rhythm and timing.
However, their exceptional memory for chess extends only to legal positions of the chess pieces.
their knowledge of chess-piece positions is schematized, and relies on knowledge of the legal moves and positions that pieces can take.
The point is that musicians don’t typically learn new pieces one note at a time once they have reached a certain level of experience, knowledge, and proficiency. They can scaffold on the previous pieces they know, and just note any variations from the standard schema.
The auditory system of the fetus is fully functional about twenty weeks after conception.
Posner has shown that certain exercises adapted from attention and concentration games used by NASA can help accelerate the development of the child’s attentional ability.
Researchers point to the teen years as the turning point for musical preferences. It is around the age of ten or eleven that most children take on music as a real interest, even those children who didn’t express such an interest in music earlier.
in general, we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to “tag” the memories as something important.
There doesn’t seem to be a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music, but most people have formed their tastes by the age of eighteen or twenty.
During our teenage years, we begin to discover that there exists a world of different ideas, different cultures, different people. We experiment with the idea that we don’t have to limit our life’s course, our personalities, or our decisions to what we were taught by our parents, or to the way we were brought up.
As a way of externalizing the bond, we dress alike, share activities, and listen to the same music. Our group listens to this kind of music, those people listen to that kind of music.
The brain’s synapses are programmed to grow for a number of years, making new connections. After that time, there is a shift toward pruning, to get rid of unneeded connections.
