2015

Efficient methods of biodiversity assessment and monitoring are central to ecological research and crucial in conservation management; technological advances in remote acoustic sensing inspire new approaches. In line with the emerging field of Soundscape Ecology, the acoustic approach is based on the rationale that the ecological processes occurring within a landscape are tightly linked to and reflected in the high-level structure of the patterns of sounds emanating from those landscapes ¿ the soundscape.

Here we present an extension to the studyforrest dataset – a versatile resource for studying the behavior of the human brain in situations of real-life complexity (http://studyforrest.org). This release adds more high-resolution, ultra high-field (7 Tesla) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from the same individuals. The twenty participants were repeatedly stimulated with a total of 25 music clips, with and without speech content, from five different genres using a slow event-related paradigm.

We investigated the perception of music in a cognitive musicology study, employing behavioral methods to examine general associative patterns--i.e. the propensity for subjects to recruit associations when listening to music, reminiscent of synaesthetic cross-wiring (Cytowic, 2009). Although non-Synaesthetic associations to music are less explored, experiments such as Köhler’s (1929) linguistic “Kiki, Boulba” study, demonstrated associations in non-synaesthetes, supporting the hypothesis that general listeners engage cross-sensorial connections.

Our research explores theories based upon past behavioural studies and FMRI scans with Synaesthetes and general listeners. FMRI experiments have revealed that the cross-modal associations to sounds in Synaesthetes are less pronounced, yet still present in the general population. The results of our psycho-musicology study with 40 Synaesthetes and 40 non-Synaesthetes reveal a quasi-Synaesthetic [Nikolic, 2014] spectrum extending to general listeners, similar to culturally founded Synaesthesia [Kohler].