Symposium on cross-cultural approaches in music perception and cognition

Presentations for this session address arise, in a variety of ways, from the following general, over-arching questions: Are there universals in music perception and cognition across cultures? Are there relationships between music and speech and other auditory stimuli that are similar or different as a function of culture? How do culture-specific conventions of performance and use of music affect cross-cultural appreciation and understanding? What does the presence of music say about the role of music in our cognitive evolution? What do the culture-specific aspects of music say about the influence of social learning and geography? The first three papers deal with empirical issues. Balkwill, Thompson and Cuddy study the role of emotion-specific acoustic cue patterns in Western and Japanese emotive music and outline their influence on the emotional judgments of Western and Japanese listeners. Eerola compares melodic expectancies across Sami and South African listeners, and discusses evidence for the common use of data-driven heuristics and the culture-specific use of schema-driven strategies. Patel, Iversen and Ohgushi present data suggesting that the rhythmic structure of language influences nonlinguistic rhythm perception. The next three papers discuss methodological and theoretical issues. Himberg and Cross develop and present a method for studying actual interactive context within and across cultures. Clayton argues for the importance of integrating ethnographic perspectives with empirical psychological research. Finally, Huron discusses basic theoretical issues regarding cultural expression and cognitive experience and the urgent need to address them.