Music Mind Machine - June Seminars

6th of June
Linguistic and cross-modal influences on the experience of sounds

Music, Mind, Machine in Sheffield invites you to attend an afternoon with research seminars on cross-modal interactions in the processing of sounds, examining how language influences thought structures, and how experiential concepts are coupled in cross-modal correspondences. The seminars are likely to be of interest to a diversity of people, including psychologists, linguists, and musicologists.

Schedule

1.30-2.45 Daniel Casasanto, Department of Psychology, New School, New York

Whorfian Psychophysics: Testing linguistic relativity without using language.

Since before Whorf, inquiries into effects of language on nonlinguistic cognition have been plagued by circularity: Patterns in language (or language processing) have been interpreted as both a source of hypotheses about cognitive differences between groups and a source of evidence for these differences. To avoid circularity, it is necessary to test for between-group differences predicted by language without using language in the test. How? In this talk, I’ll describe a psychophysical paradigm developed to ask Whorfian questions without using words -- explicitly or implicitly -- in the stimuli or responses. People who talk differently about time and musical pitch in their native languages form predictably different mental representations in these domains, according to their performance on nonlinguistic perceptuo-motor stimulus reproduction tasks. Unlike previously documented Whorfian effects, these effects persist under verbal interference, and do not depend on the use of language online during the tasks. Beyond showing correlations between language and thought, training interventions show that experience with language can play a causal role in shaping nonlinguistic mental representations.

Dolscheid, S., Shayan, S., Majid, A., & Casasanto, D. (2013). The Thickness of Musical Pitch: Psychophysical Evidence for Linguistic Relativity. Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/0956797612457374

3.00-4.15 Peter Walker, Department of Psychology, Lancaster University

The multisensory experience of sounds: A ‘thick’, ‘dull’, ‘slow’ bloke explains why lemons, white snooker balls, and Palatino Italic all make higher-pitched sounds.

Despite the marked idiosyncrasies characterising the experiences of synaesthetes of all types, an underlying set of core cross-sensory correspondences (feature associations) helps to shape these experiences. This set of correspondences has been revealed most clearly in the multisensory experiences linked to the pitch of sounds in visual-auditory synaesthesia. Importantly, the same correspondences have now been observed in non-synaesthetes, where their influence on behaviour can be marked and automatic. With one eye on an emerging theoretical framework within which to understand cross-sensory correspondences, and for which elementary stimulus features are assumed to have connotative meanings, I will sample the varied domains in which correspondences have been shown to influence behaviour. In doing so I will touch on recent evidence regarding their cross-cultural universality, their origins, their potential innateness, and their availability to support language acquisition. Given the richness of the multisensory experiences induced by the pitch of an isolated sound, considerable excitement awaits experimental work examining the different ways in which more conventional musical sequences can induce multisensory experiences.

Last updated: 14 May 2013