The Processing Of The External Meaning Of Music

Music is an important communicative system in human society. Music listening has thus become one of life style in modern society. However, whether or not music comprehension is universal remains unclear. Congenital amusia refers to a disorder in processing pitches. Using electrophysiological technique, the present study investigated the processing of extramusical meaning in congenital amusia.Adopting a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, target pictures were primed by semantically congruent or incongruent musical excerpts. Using implicit recognition and explicit semantic congruency judgment tasks, the processing of musical meaning was tested in an implicit and an explicit manners. Experiment 1investigated the implicit processing of musical meaning represented by pitch directions. The results found that, the semantically incongruent target images elicited larger N400 amplitude than the congruent target images in controls, but not in amusics. Using the explicit task, Experiment 2 required participants to make semantic congruency judgment for music-image pairs. Similarly, the N400 effect was only found in controls. To further investigate whether the amusics are capable of activating the musical meaning represented by non-pitch factors, Experiment 3 investigated the implicit processing of musical meaning represented by natural musical excerpts. The results found that the semantically incongruent target pictures elicited larger N400 amplitude than the congruent target pictures for both the two groups. Experiment 4investigated the explicit processing of musical meaning represented by natural musical excerpts, and the N400 effects were found for both the two groups, indicating that amusics are capable of activating the representations of iconic musical meaning in natural musical excerpts.These findings suggest that the amusics cannot activate the iconic representations purely based on pitch direction, no matter in an implicit or an explicit investigation.However, they are capable of activating musical meaning represented by naturalmusical excerpts. The current findings further support the universality of music comprehension in human beings.