DO, 16.11.23, im KW Abteilungskolloquium: Tudor Popescu (Uni Wien, Österreich)- The role of transmission and shared resources in the music-language relationship

Zeit: 14:15-15:45

Ort: Hebelstr. 10, Raum 03013

Abstract: Music and language can be regarded as the outcome of a multitude of cognitive traits overlapping to a great extent, some of which, like vocal learning, we share with other species. Both tend to exploit the spectrotemporal acoustic space by partitioning it into characteristic elements rearranged according to certain rules. This results in canonical feature differences between linguistic and musical sequences that have been termed design features of music and language. Social interaction and cultural transmission impact feature emergence in linguistic or musical sequences. Thus, feature differences between the musical and language domain could be a response to different goals of socially interacting agents, mediated by different predictability requirements of the temporally unfolding sequences. In this talk I will describe the motivation, present endeavours, and future directions of an inter-disciplinary programme of research that aims to explore both the cultural-evolutionary as well as the neurocognitive aspects of the "special relationship" between language and music, at different temporal and conceptual levels of analysis. A first line of studies examines the notion of "tension" in music with lyrics (focusing specifically on the case of Western choral music), and how tension arises through seamless processes of (possibly superadditive) integration, in the context of finite, partly-shared neural resources. A second line of studies examines the possible emergence of features of tonal music in transmission contexts, and in particular, the emergence of design features under choric (simultaneous mode) or dialogic (turn-taking mode) goals of interacting agents, typical of music- and language-like outputs respectively. Overall, the described research agenda aspires to link social interaction, predictive processes, and biocultural evolutionary processes, insofar as they concern the music-language duet.