(MAF) The Cultural Context of Music Lesson

The Cultural Context Of Music

A person's culture has an impact on their music, including their preferences, emotion recognition, and musical memory. Musical preferences are biased toward culturally familiar musical traditions beginning in infancy, and adults' classification of the emotion of a musical piece depends on both culturally specific and universal structural features. Additionally, individuals' musical memory abilities are greater for culturally familiar music than for culturally unfamiliar music. The sum of these effects makes culture a powerful influence in one's music perception.

Effect of Culture

Culturally linked preferences and familiarity for music begin in infancy and continue through adolescence and adulthood. People tend to prefer and remember music from their own cultural tradition.

Familiarity for culturally regular meter styles is already in place for young infants of only a few months' age, four to eight months old. Western infants indicate that they prefer Western meter in music, while Turkish infants of the same age prefer both Turkish and Western meters

In addition to influencing preference for meter, culture affects people's ability to correctly identify music styles. Adolescents from Singapore and the United Kingdom rated familiarity and preference for excerpts of Chinese, Malay, and Indian music styles. Neither group demonstrated a preference for the Indian music samples, although the Singaporean teenagers recognized them. Participants from Singapore showed higher preference for and ability to recognize the Chinese and Malay samples; United Kingdom participants showed little preference or recognition for any of the music samples, as those types of music are not present in their native culture.

Effect of Musical Experience

An individual's musical experience may affect how they formulate preferences for music from their own culture and other cultures. American and Japanese individuals (non-music majors) both indicated preference for Western music, but Japanese individuals were more receptive to Eastern music.

Dual Cultures

Bimusicalism is a phenomenon in which people well-versed and familiar with music from two different cultures exhibit dual sensitivity to both genres of music. In a study conducted with participants familiar with Western, Indian, and both Western and Indian music, the bimusical participants (exposed to both Indian and Western styles) showed no bias for either music style in recognition tasks and did not indicate that one style of music was more tense than the other. In contrast, the Western and Indian participants more successfully recognized music from their own culture and felt the other culture's music was more tense on the whole. These results indicate that everyday exposure to music from both cultures can result in sensitivity to music styles from those cultures.

Effect of Culture

Memory For Music

Despite the universality of music, one's culture has a pronounced effect on individuals' memory for music. Evidence suggests that people develop their understanding of music from their cultures. People are best at recognizing and remembering music in the style of their native culture, and their music recognition and memory is better for music from familiar but nonnative cultures than it is for music from unfamiliar cultures. Part of the difficulty in remembering culturally unfamiliar music may arise from the use of different neural processes when listening to familiar and unfamiliar music. For instance, brain areas involved in attention, including the right angular gyrus and middle frontal gyrus, show increased activity when listening to culturally unfamiliar music compared to culturally familiar music.

Development

Children's developing music understanding may be influenced by the language of their native culture. For instance, children in English-speaking cultures develop the ability to identify pitches from familiar songs at 9 or 10 years old, while Japanese children develop the same ability at age 5 or 6. This difference may be due to the Japanese language's use of pitch accents, which encourages better pitch discrimination at an early age, rather than the stress accents upon which English relies.

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