Universals in music processing : entrainment, acquiring expectations, and learning

Music—those temporally structured human activities involving the production and perception of sound organized in patterns that can acquire nonlinguistic meaning—is apparently present in all human cultures cross-culturally and historically (Nettl, 2005). However, this universality disguises the striking differences between musics from different cultures; some musical cultures avoid logarithmic pitch relations (Will and Ellis, 1994), some musical cultures include dance in their definition of music, while the Islamic call to prayer, which sounds like music to educated Westerners, is generally not defined as music by the people who grow up hearing it (Nettl, 2005). The diversity of music from different cultures is a challenge to psychologists who seek to discover general mechanisms in how humans come to know the world. What is it that a commuter listening to a Mahler symphony through white earbuds shares with people participating in the performance of dance-songs in the Lirrga genre in Wadeye in Australia’s Northern Territory? It is the aim of this chapter to: (a) consider the psychological processes involved in music perception and cognition, (b) discuss the problems inherent in psychological research which limits our ability to accurately discern universality, (c) detail the various psychological and neural processes that likely play a role in the human experience of music in general, and (d) emphasize the need for investigating diverse samples, settings, and stimuli.