News Finding: And our conscious ability to apply symbolic meaning to sounds, lyrics and song aEUR" and to recognize when listening to music that what weaEUR(tm)re listening to is supposed to be music aEUR" also certainly influences human musical perception.
Paper Finding: Our data go beyond this for one key reason: the target pitch distortion had no temporally valid prediction.
News Context: How humans perceive music is, of course, far more complicated than simply tuning in to tempo. And our conscious ability to apply symbolic meaning to sounds, lyrics and song aEUR" and to recognize when listening to music that what weaEUR(tm)re listening to is supposed to be music aEUR" also certainly influences human musical perception. But the work of Poeppel and others suggests that a tonal time perception hinted at in apes and more fully formed in man could be a prerequisite for discerning a song.
Paper Context: These studies support a dynamic attention theory (or varieties thereof) wherein attentional rhythms align to optimize processing of predicted inputs . Our data go beyond this for one key reason: the target pitch distortion had no temporally valid prediction. It was uniformly distributed throughout the clips and not tied to a particular note in the stimulus.