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Can out‐of‐context musical sounds convey meaning? An ERP study on the processing of meaning in music
Author(s) -
Painter Julia Grieser,
Koelsch Stefan
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2010.01134.x
Subject(s) - timbre , psychology , n400 , meaning (existential) , musical , context (archaeology) , cognitive psychology , task (project management) , semantic memory , linguistics , communication , electroencephalography , cognition , event related potential , art , paleontology , philosophy , management , neuroscience , economics , visual arts , psychotherapist , biology , psychiatry
There has been much debate over whether music can convey extra‐musical meaning. The experiments presented here investigated whether low level musical features, specifically the timbre of a sound, have a direct access route to meaningful representations. Short musical sounds with varying timbres were investigated with regard to their ability to elicit meaningful associations, and the neural mechanisms underlying the meaningful processing of sounds were compared to those underlying the semantic processing of words. Two EEG experiments were carried out, and N400 effects were found for sound and word targets following sound and word primes in a semantic relatedness judgment task. No N400 effects were found in a memory task. The results show that even short musical sounds outside of a musical context are capable of conveying meaning information, but that sounds require more elaborate processing than other kinds of meaningful stimuli.