Music & Language
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How does musical background affect absolute pitch ability?
Article of the day: Vanzella, P & Schellenberg, E.G (2010) Absolute Pitch: Effetcs of timbre of note naming ability. PLoS One, 5 (11), e15449. (FREE TO ACCESS!) Today I was alerted to a new article published in PloS One on the subject of Absolute Pitch (AP). I have always been interested in this musical skill – mostly because it is something I don’t seem to possess despite having started my music lessons at a very young age. Not that this torments me on a daily basis you understand! – But I would like to know more about why some people have it and some don’t, and how possession of this ability…
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Speech-specific brain regions?
Article cited: Dick, F., Lee, H.L., Nusbaum, H., & Price, C.J. (2010). Auditory-Motor Expertise Alters “Speech Selectivity” in Professional Musicians and Actors. Cerebral Cortex. There is a long-standing debate in the literature regarding how ‘specialised’ the brain is for speech processing. This is of particular relevance in my field where over the past few years I have seen growing comparisons made between the processing of speech and music in the brain. The most notable work for me being Ani Patel’s Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH) . This week I heard about the publication of a new related paper that looks directly at brain activation (fMRI) during language and music…
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Learn a new language by singing