Music as a window into real-world communication

Abstract

Communication has been studied extensively in the context of speech and language. While speech is tremendously effective at transferring ideas between people, music is another communicative mode that has a unique power to bring people together and transmit a rich tapestry of emotions, through joint music-making and listening in a variety of everyday contexts. Research has begun to examine the behavioral and neural correlates of the joint action required for successful musical interactions, but it has yet to fully account for the rich, dynamic, multimodal nature of musical communication. We review the current literature in this area and propose that naturalistic musical paradigms will open up new ways to study communication more broadly.

Keywords: communication; joint action; music; naturalistic; neuroimaging; social.

Figure 1

Our proposed framework for future studies of communication includes three methodological axes: behavioral to neuroimaging, perception to production, and single- to multi-person. Single-person behavioral studies of perception, which are already quite common, include psychophysical experiments or survey methods. Single-person neuroimaging studies of perception typically include EEG or fMRI experiments in which participants listen to music. Studying music production in a single person behaviorally involves examining the way a single musician communicates information as they play, whether by adjustments in tempo, dynamics, body sway, or other features. Finally, multi-person studies are essential for capturing the real- world dynamics of everyday musical communication. For example, we propose neuroimaging experiments in which a person’s brain responses are measured while they interact with a live partner or are made to believe they are. Such studies could examine the way musicians jointly attend to one another and adjust to musical partners, how they communicate emotion both to each other and to an audience, and how representations in brain areas involved in these joint actions dynamically change across the interaction. This figure contains icons from thenounproject.com: Activity by mikicon, Mri by Flowicon, Music Note by Nico Ilk, and Piano by Adrien Coquet.