<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Apr 5, 2009, at 10:03 AM, Panayotis Mavromatis wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: -1; ">I agree that this is ultimately a scientific question that should be addressed in the framework of cognitive psychology. One thing to keep in mind is that the notion of "capacity" cannot be simply quantified, and there are active debates in psychology circles about this issue. However, it is generally agreed that this capacity depends on the specific type of mental coding involved, and cannot be simply defined in terms of the symbolic content of the stimulus at the surface level.</span></div></div><div><br></div><div>Our psychologist colleagues who study other domains have developed their expertise for mental codings different from the ones relevant for music (although I agree there may be some commonalities). As a result, these colleagues may not have accurate estimates on the limits of music information processing, at least not at the level of detail that we should be engaging in our music conversations. Other disciplines can offer useful methodological models, and often help us in formulating our hypotheses. But the burden of answering musical questions ultimately falls on us, and should be pursued with empirical research specifically designed for that purpose.</div></div></blockquote><br></div><div>I think we might disagree about how important the subtleties are, or about the level of detail required.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; ">Typical spoken English contains syntactic units that are about 13 words long, as compared to written English, in which the syntactic units are 22 words long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This contrasts with the length of classical movements, which can be 20 minutes long, and can contain hundreds of measures and tens of thousands of notes. Furthermore, the accuracy of linguistic perception is significantly higher than that of musical perception -- any way you slice it, there is an enormous amount of information loss in musical perception, whereas linguistic perception is remarkably accurate. The differences here are dramatic and not at all subtle -- we're talking orders of magnitude, rather than factors of 2.</span></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">If it could be conclusively demonstrated that recursive perception in music outstripped recursive perception in language, by an order of magnitude or more, I believe it would literally be front page news, maybe even Nobel prize territory. It would potentially revolutionize our understanding of the mind's capabilities and about the evolution of the species. I suspect that any cognitive scientist who thought they had a chance of proving this experimentally would immediately drop everything and hop to it. </span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">All I'm trying to say is: if we really believe we have good evidence for such an important claim -- that recursive perception in music far outstrips that in language -- then we let's get serious and try to prove it conclusively, and communicate it to the wider scientific world. </span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">DT</span></font></div><div><br></div><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div>Dmitri Tymoczko</div><div>Associate<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Professor of Music</div><div>310 Woolworth Center</div><div>Princeton, NJ 08544-1007</div><div>(609) 258-4255 (ph), (609) 258-6793 (fax)</div><div><a href="http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri">http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri</a></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></body></html>