Reddit reviews Music, Language, and the Brain
We found 2 Reddit comments about Music, Language, and the Brain. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
We found 2 Reddit comments about Music, Language, and the Brain. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
The guy who wrote this book was the keynote speaker at a conference I attended last year. I haven't read the book and the handouts have been taken down from the website but I assume that the book covers most of what he talked about.
Tons of interesting stuff, including that early music training may be protective against dyslexia and other language processing issues because, until about the time kids start to read, music and language are processed identically in the brain. This is why those kids who grow up in a musical household have such an easier time becoming "fluent" musicians--because it's literally a second language to them.
Edit:
So far as the language music connection, as I recall they basically analyzed the underlying pattern of stress and unstressed syllables--that English does this by keeping stressed syllables in a relatively metronomic rhythm, fitting other syllables around this. "I want to go to the store," for instance, where "to the" are crammed into a small space to keep "store" happening on time. French, on the other hand, has the syllables occurring at equal intervals rather than the stresses. This is mirrored in the music. Same goes for melodic contrast, with languages that have larger pitch contrasts also using that in melodies.
Ani Patel has claimed in this book that there is some evidence for rhythm in music to correspond to the stress patterns in the composer's native language.