Margulis Receives NSF Grant to Study Role of Narrative in Music Perception

Russell Cothren

Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – University of Arkansas music professor Elizabeth Margulis has received a $294,268 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the factors that drive narrative responses to music.

The three-year study will focus on the role of imagined stories in music perception, or the way people derive meaning from music without words.

“It wasn’t until students in my classes started telling me that they imagined pirates and thunderstorms while listening to orchestral music that I understood how common it is for music to trigger perceived stories,” said Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the U of A.

“Over the past few years of preliminary experiments, we’ve developed a rigorous set of methodologies to probe these narrative experiences – both what gives rise to them and how they tend to be structured,” she said. “This NSF grant will allow us to do cross-cultural work to illuminate the role of nature versus nurture in the generation of these stories.”

Margulis will direct the project in collaboration with J. Devin McAuley, director of the Cognitive Science Program and Natalie Phillips, director of the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab, both at Michigan State University. Michigan State University also obtained a $218,149 NSF grant for the project.

The team also will collaborate with Patrick C.M. Wong, Stanley Ho Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Researchers will test two hypotheses about the mechanisms governing narrative listening to music, using data collected for a large sample of Western and Chinese musical excerpts. Participants will be American listeners with little exposure to Chinese music and listeners from remote Chinese villages with little exposure to American music. Both groups will listen to music from both cultural contexts.

The researchers hypothesize that if narrative listening arises from a tendency to interpret abstract stimuli in the form of a story, then listeners will be most likely to imagine stories in response to excerpts with high musical contrast, as they struggle to make sense of what they are hearing.

In the second hypothesis, researchers will test to see if narrative listening arises from enculturation, or the way people interpret music based on cultural cues. In that case listeners will be most likely to perceive narratives in music from their own culture, especially music with strong cultural associations.

The findings also will allow researchers to investigate the relation between narrative listening to music and other aspects of music cognition, such as affective responses to music, overlaps between music and language and empirical aesthetics.

The project bridges the sciences and humanities, providing cross-disciplinary training to students in both areas, Margulis said.

“We are excited to provide students in the humanities with STEM-based research training and expose students in the sciences to humanities scholarship that encourages the development of novel scientific methodologies,” she said. “Together, our team hopes to uncover some of the mechanisms critical to making sense of music.”