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Improvisation is a novel tool to study musicality

Humans spontaneously invent songs from an early age. Here, we exploit this natural inclination to probe implicit musical knowledge in 33 untrained and poor singers (amusia). Each sang 28 long improvisations as a response to a verbal prompt or a continuation of a melodic stem. To assess the extent to...

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Autores principales: Weiss, Michael W., Peretz, Isabelle
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9307610/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35869086
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-15312-5
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author Weiss, Michael W.
Peretz, Isabelle
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Peretz, Isabelle
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description Humans spontaneously invent songs from an early age. Here, we exploit this natural inclination to probe implicit musical knowledge in 33 untrained and poor singers (amusia). Each sang 28 long improvisations as a response to a verbal prompt or a continuation of a melodic stem. To assess the extent to which each improvisation reflects tonality, which has been proposed to be a core organizational principle of musicality and which is present within most music traditions, we developed a new algorithm that compares a sung excerpt to a probability density function representing the tonal hierarchy of Western music. The results show signatures of tonality in both nonmusicians and individuals with congenital amusia, who have notorious difficulty performing musical tasks that require explicit responses and memory. The findings are a proof of concept that improvisation can serve as a novel, even enjoyable method for systematically measuring hidden aspects of musicality across the spectrum of musical ability.
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spelling pubmed-93076102022-07-24 Improvisation is a novel tool to study musicality Weiss, Michael W. Peretz, Isabelle Sci Rep Article Humans spontaneously invent songs from an early age. Here, we exploit this natural inclination to probe implicit musical knowledge in 33 untrained and poor singers (amusia). Each sang 28 long improvisations as a response to a verbal prompt or a continuation of a melodic stem. To assess the extent to which each improvisation reflects tonality, which has been proposed to be a core organizational principle of musicality and which is present within most music traditions, we developed a new algorithm that compares a sung excerpt to a probability density function representing the tonal hierarchy of Western music. The results show signatures of tonality in both nonmusicians and individuals with congenital amusia, who have notorious difficulty performing musical tasks that require explicit responses and memory. The findings are a proof of concept that improvisation can serve as a novel, even enjoyable method for systematically measuring hidden aspects of musicality across the spectrum of musical ability. Nature Publishing Group UK 2022-07-22 /pmc/articles/PMC9307610/ /pubmed/35869086 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-15312-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Weiss, Michael W.
Peretz, Isabelle
Improvisation is a novel tool to study musicality
title Improvisation is a novel tool to study musicality
title_full Improvisation is a novel tool to study musicality
title_fullStr Improvisation is a novel tool to study musicality
title_full_unstemmed Improvisation is a novel tool to study musicality
title_short Improvisation is a novel tool to study musicality
title_sort improvisation is a novel tool to study musicality
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9307610/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35869086
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-15312-5
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