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| Pauline Larrouy-Maestri |
Pauline Larrouy-Maestri, you have a very diverse background – can you tell us how you got into neuroaesthetics?
Yes, I studied music, psychology and pedagogy and worked as a musician and a speech therapist. My PhD was in cognitive psychology, on the singing voice which is of course linked to aesthetics. But aesthetics wasn't my main focus then – it's more of a means of looking at how people interact with their environment, at auditory perception and processing. I've been working on this as a post-doc here at the MPI for 3 years now.
How do you start with something as vague and mysterious as beauty and end up learning about perception and processing mechanisms?
Suppose you start with the question: what makes something beautiful? Is it the same as being somehow correct? Or interesting? Recently, we've been working on pitch accuracy, so let's take that as an example. Beautiful singing voices or melodies are often associated with being "correct". Everyone can hear if a performance is in or out of tune – musicians, non-musicians, male, female, young and old – people usually agree on this. So what is it that makes all of us feel that one tone is correct and the other is not? It's hard to put a label on this, it just sounds right or wrong. Somehow, people must become sensitive to the criteria for a correct melody without ever being aware of it! And we know this holds true not only for music but also for other domains – we learn rules and we apply them to make an aesthetic judgment without even noticing.
But if we don't even notice it – how are we learning those rules?
The brain is made for taking in stimuli and building rules, and thus knowledge from it. It's similar to how children learn a language, a totally implicit process. To understand language you have to parse the auditory signal – you need to cut it into sensible units and concatenate them in a meaningful way. The same parsing and integrating of course happens in music appreciation as well and it is this process which I am interested in. Aesthetics is my vehicle to study how we learn auditory processing, what the minimal units and the rules of meaningful integration are.
How can you research music appreciation in the lab?
Me, I am doing psychophysics: I manipulate stimuli, I invite people to the lab and ask them to listen to these stimuli. We change single features of tones and ask something like “Which of these sounds is more in tune?”. The resulting data can tell us what differences are perceived and what magnitude of change is needed. That alone reveals a lot about the structure of sounds, its components and their relative importance. This was how we found out that the smallest meaningful units are not single notes – it's the beginning and the end of a a note that matters. Once you find these units and confirm their discerning value, you can play with them: find out how the changes influence the perceived agreeableness or pitch accuracy. And whether people even agree on the direction of effect of a specific parameter.
Pardon my impoliteness, but apart from being fascinating, what use is there in all this?
Aesthetic appreciation of course is very fundamental. Many things are related to what you see and hear, all around you. Interaction with people is about tastes, preferences, about your appreciation of the environment. We all function with that all the time. But we don't understand the processes behind it very well: we know that the pleasure circuitry is based on automatic processes. For perceiving something as beautiful, however, indirect pathways, such as mediation by thought, are needed. Simply knowing how perception works has a clinical application. If someone has a speech impairment or a difficulty to understand language, is it because they cannot parse? Cannot concatenate? Didn't learn the appropriate rules? As soon as we have a working model we can tick which box is malfunctioning and focus training or treatment there.
To save the best for last: what was your personal research highlight?
I showed that we are all musicians. Let me explain. For decades, we had in the scientific literature a separation between musicians and non-musicians. It is categorical, but the idea has been around for a while – and it's nonsense! Take an opera performance. Who goes to the opera? No one does! Only a very small part of the general population, mostly educated people with a musical background or interest. And musicians agree to a very great extent on their judgment of what makes a beautiful opera voice. But here is what I found: people who have no idea what an opera voice is or should be apply the same criteria and come to the same conclusions. So, without ever going to the opera, without any explicit input, we build a representation that creates a link – between you and me, between people who are privileged enough to enjoy operas and those who aren't. Our learning mechanisms are fundamentally the same and they take whatever they can get from the environment.
The interview was conducted by Malika Renz, MSc Student MedNeuro
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