Date and time: Tuesday, 22 Febuary 2022, 17:00-19:10 (JST), 8:00-10:10 (GMT)

Venue: The symposium will be held online through Zoom (ID/Passcode will be provided to registered participants).

Language: English

Organizer: Tatsuya Yoshizawa (Leader of a research team supported by Kanagawa University Grant for Joint Research)

Co-organizer：Research group ‘Universality and Diversity of Perceptual and Cognitive Systems’ at The Institute for Humanities Research, Kanagawa University

Speakers

• Emi Hasuo (Hiroshima University/Japan Society for the Promotion of Science)
• Haruka Shoda (Ritsumeikan University)
• Rie Matsunaga (Kanagawa University)

Program

Talks

"Music as confluence of perceptual, cultural, and aesthetic plausibility"

1.Effects of beat on the occurrence of the time-shrinking illusion

Emi Hasuo (Hiroshima University/Japan Society for the Promotion of Science), Yuu Masuda (Taisho University), & Hiroshi Arao (Taisho University)

Rhythm and beat are both temporal aspects related to perceptual plausibility in music. Rhythm refers to the more ‘local’ aspect of temporal perception, and is said to be based on the durations of neighboring time intervals between successive sounds. Beat, on the other hand, refers to a more ‘global’ aspect of temporal perception, and is a sense of steady pulse in a sound sequence. Although rhythm and beat are potentially related, they have been conventionally considered as distinct time structures that engage different perceptual processes. Here, we focus on an illusion in rhythm perception (‘local’ time perception) called “time-shrinking”, and examined whether the occurrence of this illusion is influenced by beat (‘global’ context). Experiments showed that time-shrinking is diminished when the beginning of the time-shrinking pattern does not coincide with the beat induced by the preceding sounds, suggesting a clear influence of beat (‘global’ context) on rhythm perception (‘local’ time perception).

2. How do we acquire the sense of culture-specific musical plausibility?

Rie Matsunaga (Kanagawa University)

Similar to the language-syntactic schemas, listeners implicitly acquire the music-syntactic schemas (related to keynote and musical scale) through mere exposure to their native music. The music-syntactic schemas underlie the sense of melodic Gestalt (including melodic coherence, well-formdness, and plausibility) for pitch structure of music. In this talk, I start with explaining what music-syntactics schemas adult listeners have in their brains and the extent to which listeners from different cultures are similar in the sense of melodic Gestalt. Then, I introduce my computer simulation work that reveals how children rapidly start off learning the culture-specific schemas in spite of no direct or explicit teacher signals about the keynote and scale of each musical piece.

3. Understanding audience effects in musical performance

Haruka Shoda (Ritsumeikan University)

In the Western art tradition, musical performance is intended to deliver the performer’s own artistic/musical interpretations to the audience. The performer manipulates musical sounds (i.e., motor control) by regulating their psychophysiological states to achieve this purpose. In the presence of an audience, the performance sometimes sounds better (social facilitation) and at other times sounds worse (social inhibition). In this talk, I will introduce empirical research exploring the mechanism of audience effects in musical performance. The methodologies involve measurements of acoustic performance parameters, body movements, electrocardiograms, and the audience’s psychological evaluation. The presence of an audience broadly affects the performer’s psychological (e.g., state anxiety) and physiological states (e.g., autonomic nervous system). When the performer’s psychophysiological state levels, probably modulated by task difficulty, are optimized, the quality of the performance increases due to the presence of an audience.