Definition of a "music" category
Across the globe, the phenomena and practices the English word music addresses have some common features (e.g., Savage et al., 2015), but music is also recognised as a construct that is sensitive to cultural and historical aspects as well as to individual differences. In line with the latter statement, the composer Luciano Berio referred to music as "everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music," which challenges the existence of a feature-based definition of music. In this project, we take an empirical approach “from below” (in the Fechner sense) to study what could be a "music" category, and investigate how both acoustic and perceptual features predict the listeners categorisation of wide range of stimuli.
The behavioral experiments of this project lay the groundwork for neuroimaging studies designed to explore whether the music category has a shared neural representation between individuals. Understanding this will help us gain insight on how the brain organizes ill-defined categories such as music. Additionally, this project investigates whether the neural representation of the stimulus is shaped by participants’ subjective evaluations or the stimulus’ inherent acoustic properties, thus answering long-lasting questions about how much of music perception is attributed to low-level versus top-down associative processes. In summary, the project combines behavioral and neuro imaging techniques to understand the development and strength of a cognitive "music" category.
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