The Listener Is Always Right: Why your taste in music is better than everyone else's

1. The Listener Is Always Right:Why your taste in music is better than everyone else's

2. Sounds heard throughout the day: - Traffic - Radio- Rain - Music from our headphones - Our housemates singing - The rustle of our clothes

3. Music Radio Music from headphones Housemate singing? Not Music Traffic Rain Rustle of clothing

4. Habituation The tendency of the brain to have a diminished response to a prolonged or frequently repeated stimuli e.g. The sound of an air-conditioner

5. Habituation The tendency of the brain to have a diminished response to a prolonged or frequently repeated stimuli e.g. The sound of an air-conditioner However, we are still passively processing the sound

6. Passive Processing Our brain is processing sounds we are not consciously paying attention to, or even remember hearing

7. We Learn Passively We can passively detect statistical regularities

8. Outline Passive Perception and Learning Tropes Schema Advantages of Schemata How Schemata Can Go Wrong Switching Between Schemata Schemata and Taste in Music Fun with Schemata

9. Outline Why Your Taste in Music is Better than Everyone Else's

10. Tropes A pattern in literature Found in all sorts of media such as films, books, games, comics, animations, and television shows Some are medium-specific the use of font size in a book to create certain effects A pattern relies on repetition to be classified as a pattern

11. tvtropes.org wiki Is a collection of tropes in a wide variety of media Contains numerous examples of each trope appearing in literature Lists tropes that appear in a specific piece of literature

12. Chekhov's Gun

13. Chekhov's Gun

14. Chekhov's Gun

15. Basic Trope Examples Chekhov's Gun Montage Big No And much, much, much more

16. Door Tropes Axe Before Entering Battering Ram Closed Door Rapport Door of Doom Door Roulette Key Under the Doormat Locked Door Ominously Open Door Oops I Dropped The Keys Open Say Me Skeleton Key Card Slow Doors Indy Hat Roll

17. Tropes Music has tropes of its own

18. Genre A pattern of patterns, a certain mixture of tropes to create an overall style

19. Schema Plural; Schemata Mental framework that organises mental data into a coherent system – data that is both pre-existing or newly processed

20. Schema Allows us to comprehend and appreciate the combination of musical elements Elements of music include: Temporal: rhythm, speed, beat Melodic: Linear progression of pitches Harmonic: The interaction of two or more pitches sounded concurrently Timbre: The qualities of the sound e.g. nasal, muffled, mellow, shrill, Guitar-like, Piano-like etc

21. Advantages of Schemata Spotting patterns allows us to anticipate future events Familiarity with these patterns reduce their Information Content, therefore simplifying data A mental framework assists Memory

22. Information Content Hick-Hyman Law: “with increased exposure to a particular stimulus, mental processing becomes faster” e.g. sights and smells

23. Information Content Hick-Hyman Law: “with increased exposure to a particular stimulus, mental processing becomes faster” e.g. sights and smells Greenberg and Larkin: “accurate expectation facilitates perception”

24. Information Content Expectation is created by pattern recognition as we are exposed to stimuli, and so familiarity plays a large role in our expectation It is reasonable for to Huron to state that the findings of Greenberg and Larkin are a restatement of the Hick-Hyman Law: “perception is more efficient for expected stimuli than for unexpected stimuli”

25. Information Content and Reaction Time Amount of Information Reaction Time

26. Schema and Memory Memory is not like a video-recorder Each recollection of a memory is also a reconstruction of the memory

27. Schema and Memory:Reconstruction of Elements Person's Face Person Furniture Environment

28. Schema and Memory:Reconstructed

29. TSLAIUARA

30. TSLAIUARA AUSTRALIA

31. Schema and Memory Remembering everything would take up too much space in our mental hard-drive Therefore we instead glean lessons from our experience i.e. find useful principles and patterns, simplifying data Schema gives memories coherence, structure and familiarity

32. Schema and Memory:Chess Players and Chess Memory Skilled chess players are better at remembering the location of each piece on a chessboard – if they are placed in a way that could occur during an actual game When the pieces were placed in random positions that were impossible to come across in a real game of chess, the success of the players' memory was greatly diminished

33. Schema and Memory:Savants and Musical Memory A similar thing happens with Savants – their phenomenal memory works best with musical styles they are familiar with, rather than music with unfamiliar rules

34. Schema and Memory:Expertise This increased capacity for memory in a specific field of knowledge is present in people that have expertise that field Actors memorising all the lines of a play A waiter remembering multiple orders A portrait artist remembering faces very well

35. How Schema Can Go Wrong The wrong schema can be applied Superstition and phobias Spotting non-existent patterns Distortion of stimuli to fit a schema

36. How Schema Can Go Wrong:Using the wrong schema Saying that 'Titanic' is a terrible comedy or mystery film Old person complaining about the music of today Failing to recognise a piece of music uses a different or more advanced schema than what you currently possess

37. Superstition and Phobias: NOT REALISTIC Distance from Clown Level of MORTAL DANGER

38. Spotting Non-Existent Patterns:Digits of Pi 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233 Pockets of patterns are guaranteed to occur in random data, this does not indicate there is in fact an overall pattern

39. Possible Lottery Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 45, 17, 39, 5, 71, 28 All three sets of numbers have an equal chance to being picked as the numbers are completely random The appearance of order is mere coincidence We cannot help but find patterns

40. Distortions of Stimuli to Fit a Schema We sometimes distort stimuli in order for it to adhere to a schema, imposing an incorrect order Hearing words where none exist: Hearing messages in music played backwards Hearing different words from the same stimulus: window, welcome, love me, run away, no brain, rainbow, raincoat, bueno, nombre, when oh when, mango, window pane, Broadway, Reno, melting, Rogaine From:http://www.philomel.com/phantom_words/example_phantom_words.php

41. Switching Between Schemata We are adept at identifying the genre of a piece after listening to only 250ms of the track This skill at identifying timbre does not significantly improve if we listen to more than one second This suggests that timbre plays a large part in the activation of our schema

42. Switching Between Schema:Speech and Song Repetition of speech tends to switch our schema from language to that of music 'Sometimes behave so strangely' example From:http://www.philomel.com/phantom_words/sometimes.php

43. Switching Between Schema:Speech and Song 'Why is the Rum Gone?' remix example

44. Our Taste in Music:Complexity and Preference Preference Complexity

45. Our Taste in Music:Complexity and Preference Woo! Meh Huh? I don't get it Preference Boring Boring Complexity

46. Our Taste in Music:Familiarity 'Familiarity breeds liking' The more we are exposed to a stimulus, the more we like it This effect continues unless the subject consciously recognises the repetition, where they may then begin to prefer something different

47. Our Taste in Music:Misattribution Attributing a state of excitement caused by something like a roller coaster ride, to another entity nearby e.g. our date

48. Our Taste in Music:Misattribution Huron posits that this effect is in play when we listen to music: as we predict music correctly, we attribute the pleasure caused from this prediction to the music itself, rather than our own predictive mechanisms Essentially, our brain does not give itself enough credit

49. Fun With Schemata Rearranging stimuli to activate a different schema Scary 'Mary Poppins' Recut Trailer example Song in original context vs Song in new terrifying context

50. Fun With Schemata Garden Path Sentences Example: 'Fat people eat accumulates'