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Sketchpad Series

Influence of social context and musical structure in processing musical conversations

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Etienne Abassi¹ (etienne.abassi@mcgill.ca), Jesse Chittock¹, Christopher Robert Vaughan Soden¹, Robert Zatorre¹; ¹McGill

This study explores the cognitive mechanisms underlying auditory scene analysis, focusing on the influence of social context and musical structure in musical conversations. Building on prior research in speech, we hypothesize that music and speech share overlapping features for social communication. To test this idea, we use stimuli consisting of two-instrument exchanges (to mimic conversation) or one-instrument sequences (manipulating social context) arranged in intact or phrase-scrambled order (manipulating musical structure). Each stimulus comprises five musical phrases, with the fifth phrase embedded in multi-instruments babble noise. This fifth phrase is then repeated without noise, with a single note either altered or unchanged. Healthy young adults judged whether the repeated phrase matched or differed from the previous in-noise phrase. This design, adapted from the validated Music-In-Noise task, also mirrors our previous study on social and semantic contexts in speech processing which showed that conversational context boosts speech perception. We hypothesize improved recognition of musical phrases in two-instrument exchanges compared to one-instrument sequences, reflecting the effect of social context. Additionally, better performance is anticipated for intact versus phrase-scrambled sequences, highlighting the role of musical structure. These findings aim to extend the framework of social cognition, demonstrating how music functions not only as an artistic expression but also as a medium for social exchange. By examining parallels between music and speech, this project seeks to uncover domain-general principles of auditory social communication, thus positioning music as a key tool for understanding social and cognitive processes and advancing applications in neuroscience and auditory technologies.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Audition