acroyear | a little musical science

Mixing Memory : Music Is Visual Pattern Recognition and Language To the Brain:

Norton et al. didn't find any neural, cognitive, or motoric differences between the students beginning music lessons and those who weren't, but they did find something else. The scores on the visual pattern recognition -- a Raven's Progressive Matrices test, which involves presenting the kids with pictures that have a piece missing, and then having them choose the piece that will complete the picture from a group of 6-8 pieces -- and the phonemic awareness test -- the Auditory Analysis test, in which the kids are presented with words, and asked to repeat them in full, and then to repeat them with parts (e.g., the first letter or syllable, or the last letter or syllable) missing -- were correlated with music audiation, or skill in perceiving music (this was measured by having children listen to a bunch of pairs of rhythms and tone sequences, and asking them to make same-different judgments).

Norton et al. argue that the correlation between visual pattern recognition and music audiation scores indicates a relationship between visual pattern recognition and auditory pattern recognition, and that the correlation between phonemic awareness and music audiation reflects a relationship between language and music (a connection supported by previous neuroimaging studies). Now, what do these relationships mean? I don't know, really. But I thought they were cool enough to write a quick post about anyway.