What is the paper about?
The paper is an experiment that is designed to find out where exactly does the brain process the elements of music—specifically how it ‘expects’ a certain tone after hearing a previous harmony. It is assumed that music follows a certain syntax like language, where its ‘rightness’ is dictated by a certain set of rules. In order to do this, they used magnetoencephalography in mapping the part of the brain the is most active in hearing music. In the experiment, it was found out that the Broca’s area in the brain is not only responsible for determining the syntax in music, but it also processes this information in a manner unlike language processing.
What hypothesis was tested? How was it tested?
The main hypothesis in the study is that there is an area of the brain that is responsible for processing perceived incongruous in musical syntax. In order to do this, participants considered as non-musicians were made to listen to some chords, some of which are in-key, while some contain unexpected chords such as a Neapolitan sixth chord. The reactions of the listeners regarding these chords were recorded via MEG. It was further hypothesized that the effects of these Neapolitan chords were to be larger at the fifth position compared to the effect of these chords at the sixth position.
What is one thing you might do to improve the paper? For instance, would you improve any of the measures and/or manipulations?
All in all, the paper was done very smoothly and there are no major flaws that can be pointed out in the paper. However, if I were to make a major change in a part of a paper, I would not only limit the frequency of the Neapolitan chords on the third and fifth positions only. I would add another chord in which the Neapolitan chords was at a different position. In that way, a trend of the behavior of the brain regarding unexpected chords was given an overview in addition to the effect of unexpected chords have on the human brain.
Do you think the authors’ conclusions were justified by the results? Why or why not?
Since the researchers’ design is sufficiently understandable to answer the research question and the experiment was conducted as objectively as possible, it can be said that the results of the experiment are conclusive. Furthermore, the generalizations are directly based from the results themselves so it justifiable at best. An interesting part of the conclusion is that it does not only answer the research problem, but it also yields other information that can be used as topic for further research.
What was your favorite aspect of the paper?
Perhaps the most interesting part of the paper is the concept behind the paper itself. The concept implies that a concept such as music, which is mainly relegated to arts and humanities, can be understood and analyzed using scientific methods. There have been previous studies regarding musical syntax and perception such as Patel et al’s 1998 study, but this paper provides more information and insight on how the brain processes music. It is interesting to learn that music does not only follow a certain syntax, but its syntax is implicitly determined by the brain itself in a manner that is quite different in language processing.
Works Cited
Maess, Burkhard, Stefan Koelsch, Thomas C. Gunter, and Angela D. Friederici. "Musical Syntax Is Processed in Broca’s Area: An MEG Study." Neuroscience 4.5 (2001): 540-45. Web. 14 May 2016. <http://www.stefan-koelsch.de/papers/11_maess.pdf>
Patel, Aniruddh D., Edward Gibson, Jennifer Ratner, Mirielle Besson, and Phillip J. Holcomb. "Processing Syntactic Relations in Language and Music: An Event-Related Potential Study." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 10.6 (1998): 717-33. Web. 14 May 2016. <https://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Patel_et_al_1998_JoCN.pdf>
