3.8 Article

Mental Representations in Musical Processing and their Role in Action-Perception Loops

Journal

EMPIRICAL MUSICOLOGY REVIEW
Volume 9, Issue 3-4, Pages 161-176

Publisher

OHIO STATE UNIV, SCH MUSIC

Keywords

music imagination; predictive processing; embodied music cognition

Categories

Funding

  1. European Commission under the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship Programme [FP72010-PEOPLE-IEF 276529]
  2. SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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I address the diverging usage of the term imagery by delineating different types of imagery, each of which is supported by multimodal mental representations that are informed and modulated by the body and its in-and outputs, and that in turn modulate and inform perception and action through predictive processing. These multimodal representations, viewed here as mental models, underlie our individual perceptual experience of music, which is constructed in the listener as it is perceived and interpreted. While tracking incoming auditory information, mental representations of music unfold on multiple levels as we listen, from regularities detected across notes to the structure of entire pieces of music, generating predictions for different musical aspects. These predictions lead to specific percepts and behavioral outputs, illustrating a tight coupling of cognition, perception and action. This coupling and the prominence of predictive mechanisms in music processing are described in the context of the broader role of predictive processing in cognitive function, which is well suited to account for the role of mental models in musical perception and action. As a proxy for mental representations, investigating the cerebral correlates of constructive imagination may offer an experimentally tractable approach to clarifying how mental models of music are implemented in the brain.

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