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Attention

Auditory attention, unique among attentional modes, further explores the ways in which attention to music differs from other forms of auditory attention. Important issues with respect to music-directed attention include stream segregation, expectancy, dynamic attending, and subliminal influence.

Attention can be described as a tool employed by the mind to amplify processing capacity with respect to certain classes of stimuli. The mind perceives and processes multiple streams of information simultaneously—in parallel—but the focus of the attention tends to be serial, with only a single information stream being selected for enhanced processing. This method of selection can emerge from top-down motivations or can be the result of bottom-up perceptual salience (as in the startle response). Mechanisms of attention include focusing, monitoring, tracking, scanning, and remaining vigilant. Attention is closely related to consciousness (some say identical), but it is useful to consider attention as, rather than the contents of consciousness, the means whereby those contents enter consciousness and are cognitively enhanced.

While attention is to some extent a general property of mind, there are ways in which auditory attention is unique. A principle central to understanding auditory attention is that of auditory scene analysis. Consider the phenomenon of the cocktail party: a listener can focus on certain voices while tuning out others. Listeners doing so necessarily parse the auditory scene into separate voices, more generally called streams. They do this in part based on spatial location and volume (which will differ at an actual cocktail party) but also upon more basic acoustic features such as timbre, pitch, speed, gender of speaker, and subject matter. According to a lead researcher in the field, Albert Bregman, there are two distinct phases to auditory stream segregation: a preattentive phase, which involves the bottom-up grouping of sounds based on acoustic features and gestalt perceptual principles; and an active seeking out of expected patterns in a top-down manner, based on past experience and motivation. Preattentive processes operate in parallel, whereas active focus is serial. As evidenced by research using electroencephalography (EEG), preattentive processes are active even when an organism is asleep or anaesthetized.

Uniqueness of Music and Attention

From the perspective of attention research, music is unique in a number of ways. First, much like at a cocktail party, music rarely presents a single stream of information, but rather layers streams atop one another in varying degrees of coordination. At times all streams are rhythmically identical, yielding a homophonic or hymn-like texture; but at other times, a polyphonic or multivoiced texture will be found. In such contrapuntal textures, voices are virtually always distinguished by means of rhythm, and they may additionally be distinguished by means of pitch range, timbre, and spatial location. Despite this diversity, however, the overriding aesthetic principle of traditional counterpoint is to coordinate voices harmonically. A listener of polyphonic music is thus presented with a unique attentional challenge: to hear streams as both segregated and coordinated at the same time. Selective attention to individual voices in polyphonic textures has been examined neuroscientifically in several laboratories.

A second unique feature of attention with respect to music is that music is presented temporally, and hence listeners must construct mental representations of pieces over time. This is of course the case for speech as well, but music is additionally unique in that it tends to be periodic—having a stable, repeating interval at which stronger pulses occur relative to weaker ones. According to one influential view, listeners project internalized templates of oscillation upon external sonic stimuli, expecting certain things to happen at certain times—a phenomenon termed dynamic attending. Experiments have demonstrated that listeners are more accurate at judging both pitch height and loudness at metrically salient compared to nonsalient time points. Recent work in neuroscience further demonstrates that, as pulse becomes more salient in music, brain structures such as the putamen and dorsal premotor cortex become more active (while the auditory cortex becomes less active). Thus, the efficiency afforded by accurate temporal prediction is evident at the neural level.

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