Are we “experienced listeners”? A review of the musical capacities that do not depend on formal musical training

Abstract

The present paper reviews a set of studies designed to investigate different aspects of the capacity for processing Western music. This includes perceiving the relationships between a theme and its variations, perceiving musical tensions and relaxations, generating musical expectancies, integrating local structures in large-scale structures, learning new compositional systems and responding to music in an emotional (affective) way. The main focus of these studies was to evaluate the influence of intensive musical training on these capacities. The overall set of data highlights that some musical capacities are acquired through exposure to music without the help of explicit training. These capacities reach such a degree of sophistication that they enable untrained listeners to respond to music as “musically experienced listeners” do.

Introduction

The origins of musical competence have been largely debated and even today it remains an open question (Deliège and Sloboda, 1997, Peretz and Zatorre, 2003, Wallin et al., 1999). In this paper, we will argue that studying the influence of intensive musical training on the perception of music contributes to highlight the very nature of human capacity for processing and understanding music. If this capacity is rooted in innate predispositions (Trehub, 2003) that have been selected through evolution for adaptation (social bonding, for example, Cross, 2003), musical competence should be largely shared in the general population. Moreover, given the richness of musical stimulations in everyday life, and given the remarkable ability of human beings to internalize regularities of the auditory environment through implicit learning processes (Saffran et al., 1996, Saffran et al., 1999, Saffran et al., 1996), it is likely that this initial predisposition could become considerably sophisticated in adulthood. Along this line, listeners without musical training but with sufficient exposure to a given musical idiom may be viewed as “experienced listeners” who use the same principles as musically trained listeners when listening to music and structuring what they hear, “but in a more limited way” (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983, p. 3). How this learning takes place in the general public remains an open issue, which we will return to in the last section of the paper.

A quite opposite approach to the implicit learning hypothesis stipulates that musical competence is mostly determined by an intensive musical training and remains rather rough in untrained listeners (see Levinson, 1997 for a debate; Wolpert, 1990, Wolpert, 2000). Some authors have argued that musical abilities develop naturally up to 10 years but do not longer evolve without explicit musical training (Francès, Zenatti, & Imberty, 1979). Verbal reports provided after the experiments by our participants (both musically trained or untrained) usually support this view. Explicit training is supposed to have a deep impact on both the cognitive and neural architectures, notably when training starts early in life (Pantev & Lütkenhöner, 2000). Recent studies showing that musicians’ and nonmusicians’ brains differ from both anatomical and functional ways argue along this line (Elbert et al., 1995, Gaser and Schlaug, 2003, Pantev et al., 2003, Schlaug, 2001). In a recent study, Seung, Kyong, Woo, Lee, and Lee (2005) provided evidence that comparable musical tasks performed with the same stimuli differently activated the brain on prior musical training of participants. For some authors, an important issue is thus to understand whether these brain differences result from training or correspond to genetic differences that predispose some individuals to become musicians (Schneider et al., 2002, Thompson et al., 2001). In cognitive psychology, the influence of intensive training on the processing capacities of experts has been well established in several fields, such as chess (Chase & Simon, 1973), mathematics (Schoenfeld & Herrmann, 1982), physics (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981) or more recently wine expertise (Chollet and Valentin, 2000, Hughson and Boakes, 2002). Training lead experts to develop skills, processing strategies and declarative knowledge that are not found in novices. These skills influence the way experts attend to and encode stimuli from their field of expertise by comparison to novices. The effect of expertise stands similarly in music. Musical training is very demanding since it requires several hours of training per week and several hours of practice per day for a very long period (from 10 to 15 years in French conservatories). During this period musicians learn specific perceptual skills in ear training, and music analysis and acquire a lot of declarative knowledge about the structure of Western music. Moreover, they develop motor skills to be able to play music. All of these skills are likely to deeply influence the way they process musical stimuli. For example, the motor skills that are activated during music listening influences the processing of musical stimuli (Haueisen and Knösche, 2001, Janata and Grafton, 2003). In a related vein, the possibility to use the linguistic labels of musical events enable musically trained listeners to encode musical structures in a more relevant way than “musically illiterate persons” can (Francès, 1958). As a consequence, it is reasonable to expect important differences between musically trained and untrained listeners (see Levinson, 1997 for a debate; Wolpert, 1990, Wolpert, 2000).

Delineating the musical abilities that are specifically linked to an intensive and formal training from those that emerge through mere exposure to music is a key issue for music cognition. Nonmusicians do not learn a formal system with which they can describe and think about musical structures but they have a considerable amount of experience with music: they hear music every day of their lives, they all sung as children and sung in school, they have moved and danced to musical rhythms, and most of them have attended concerts. How sophisticated are the emergent abilities to process music that result from this exposure when compared to those caused by an intensive formal musical training? Given the huge difference in training, finding differences between musically trained and untrained listeners would not be really surprising. However, showing that some elaborated musical capacities do not strongly differ as a function of musical expertise, would be critical to further our understanding of the human aptitude for music. The aim of the present paper is to survey several findings collected in our laboratory on that issue. The initial goal of the research program was to identify the type of structures untrained listeners were unable to process by contrast to trained listeners.¹ This issue was addressed by considering several aspects of Western music perception, ranging from melodic and harmonic processing to emotional responses to music. Before explaining these studies in detail, two methodological considerations deserve attention.