Do you hear what I hear? Perceived narrative constitutes a semantic dimension for music

Music has attracted longstanding debate surrounding its capacity to communicate without words, but little empirical work has addressed the topic. Here, 534 participants in the US and a remote region of China participated in two experiments using a novel paradigm to investigate narrative perceptions...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mamidipaka, A. (Author), Margulis, E.H (Author), McAuley, J.D (Author), Phillips, N. (Author), Wong, P.C.M (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier B.V. 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
LEADER 02772nam a2200505Ia 4500
001 10.1016-j.cognition.2021.104712
008 220427s2021 CNT 000 0 und d
020 |a 00100277 (ISSN) 
245 1 0 |a Do you hear what I hear? Perceived narrative constitutes a semantic dimension for music 
260 0 |b Elsevier B.V.  |c 2021 
856 |z View Fulltext in Publisher  |u https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104712 
520 3 |a Music has attracted longstanding debate surrounding its capacity to communicate without words, but little empirical work has addressed the topic. Here, 534 participants in the US and a remote region of China participated in two experiments using a novel paradigm to investigate narrative perceptions as a semantic dimension of music. Participants listened to wordless musical excerpts and determined which of two presented stories was the correct match. Correct matches were stories previously imagined by individuals from the US or China in response to each of the excerpts, while foils were correct matches to one of the other tested excerpts. Results revealed that listeners from Arkansas and Michigan had no difficulty matching the music with stories generated by Arkansas listeners. Wordless music, then, far from an abstract stimulus, seems to engender shared, concrete narrative perceptions in listeners. These perceptions are stable and robust for within-culture participants, even at geographically distinct locales (e.g. Arkansas and Michigan). This finding refutes the notion that music is an asemantic medium. In contrast, participants in both the US and China had more difficulty determining correct story-music matches for stories generated by participants from another culture, suggesting that a sufficiently shared pool of experiences must exist for strong intersubjectivity to arise. © 2021 Elsevier B.V. 
650 0 4 |a adult 
650 0 4 |a Arkansas 
650 0 4 |a article 
650 0 4 |a Auditory Perception 
650 0 4 |a China 
650 0 4 |a China 
650 0 4 |a Cross-cultural comparison 
650 0 4 |a cultural factor 
650 0 4 |a female 
650 0 4 |a hearing 
650 0 4 |a Hearing 
650 0 4 |a human 
650 0 4 |a human experiment 
650 0 4 |a Humans 
650 0 4 |a Intersubjectivity 
650 0 4 |a major clinical study 
650 0 4 |a male 
650 0 4 |a Michigan 
650 0 4 |a music 
650 0 4 |a Music 
650 0 4 |a Music cognition 
650 0 4 |a Musical meaning 
650 0 4 |a narrative 
650 0 4 |a Narrative 
650 0 4 |a perception 
650 0 4 |a semantics 
650 0 4 |a Semantics 
700 1 |a Mamidipaka, A.  |e author 
700 1 |a Margulis, E.H.  |e author 
700 1 |a McAuley, J.D.  |e author 
700 1 |a Phillips, N.  |e author 
700 1 |a Wong, P.C.M.  |e author 
773 |t Cognition