Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts

Monday, July 13, 2026

Musical Intermentality


Starting off here with an article that might not be about music proper, but it is about sounds and perception. Some people are hyperperceptive, some dull as a rock - anesthetic you could call it. Everyone else just thinks their house is haunted. 

You can't hear it, yet this sound may explain paranormal experiences
Apr 2026, phys.org

Infrasound is very low-frequency sound, below 20 Hertz (Hz), which humans typically can't hear. It can come from natural sources like storms, or from anthropogenic sources like traffic.

The scientists recruited 36 participants and invited them to sit alone in a room while either calming or unsettling music was played. For half the participants, hidden subwoofers played infrasound at 18 Hz. After listening, they were asked to report their feelings, their emotional rating of the music, and whether they thought the infrasound was present. They also gave saliva samples before and after listening.

The scientists found that participants' salivary cortisol levels were higher if they had been listening to infrasound. These participants also reported feeling more irritable and less interested, and thinking the music was sadder. But they couldn't tell they were listening to infrasound.

via MacEwan University: Infrasound Exposure is Linked to Aversive Responding, Negative Appraisal, and Elevated Salivary Cortisol in Humans, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (2026). DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1729876

Image credit: Photographer Christopher Payne - Jelly Belly Fairfield CA - 2021


Popular song lyrics have become more negative since 1973, analysis reveals
Dec 2025, phys.org

Researchers analyzed the lyrics of the top 100 most popular English-language songs in the United States each week between 1973 and 2023 (20,186 songs), according to the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The authors found that, in general, the lyrics of popular songs have become simpler and more negative over time and contain more stress-related words.

However, they also found that the popularity of songs with more complex lyrics began to increase from 2016 onward and suggest that further research is needed to investigate the reasons for this.

When assessing potential factors influencing changes in listener lyric preferences, the authors did not identify associations with changes in median household income since 1973, but did identify some associations with major stressful events — such as the September 11, 2001, attacks and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These events were associated with lyrics becoming more complex and positive and containing fewer stress-related words, or with no significant changes in lyrics. The authors suggest that this could be due to more positive and complex music being used as a form of escapism during stressful periods.

via University of Vienna: Maurício Martins, Societal crises disrupt long-term increases in stress, negativity, and simplicity in US Billboard song lyrics from 1973 to 2023, Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-28327-5.


Why some tunes stick: Mathematical symmetry helps explain catchy melodies
Feb 2026, phys.org

They simplified melodies into their essential note groups and examined how common musical changes affect 2 kinds structure - tonal and positional structure. These changes include transposition, which shifts a melody up or down; inversion, which flips it; retrograde, which reverses it; and translation, which moves it through time.

Their analysis revealed symmetrical relationships in many melodies that help explain why certain musical phrases feel cohesive and complete.

via University of Waterloo: Olga Ibragimova et al, Algebraic Applications in Investigation of Musical Symmetry, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics (2025). DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-84869-8_5


From virtue to vice: How the morality of popular music lyrics has changed since the 1960s
Jun 2026, phys.org

The study examined two large popular music data sets spanning more than 60 years, making it the first study to chart moral content in song lyrics at this scale: more than 377,000 English-language songs covering 1960 to 2010 were filtered from the WASABI data set and complemented with 5,500 songs that made Billboard's year-end charts between 1960 and 2023.

Their analysis revealed a rise in expressions associated with moral vices such as harm, cheating, subversion and degradation, alongside increasing levels of negative sentiment, anger and disgust. At the same time, expressions linked to moral virtues such as care and decency became less prominent.

via Queen Mary University of London Center for Digital Music: Vjosa Preniqi et al, Evolution of moral expression in song lyrics, Scientific Reports (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-53778-9


Pop song lyrics grew more self-focused in the US and Germany over 50 years, research reveals
Jun 2026, phys.org

Researchers have examined the possibility that global society may be becoming more self-centric by measuring how often different pronouns appear in cultural products such as books, movie scripts and lyrics. Compared with first-person plural pronouns, such as "we" and "us," a higher proportion of first-person singular pronouns, such as "I" and "me," can indicate greater self-focus.

(Shouldn't be a surprise to those familiar w the Hofstede's cultural dimensions model)

They found that self-focused language rose significantly between 1970 and 2019 in the U.S. and Germany—two more individualistic countries. Meanwhile, the use of self-focused language was relatively stable over time in the two more collectivist countries, Japan and Hong Kong.

via United Arab Emirates University and U of Aberdeen Scotland: Golubickis M, et al. Are societies becoming more self-centric? Evidence from five decades of popular music spanning three continents, PLOS One (2026). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0349765

*We are not a fan of academic collaborations with the UAE, because they're buying themselves a culture instead of growing it the old fashioned way, and we are old fashioned. 

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Thursday, June 11, 2026

On the Tip of the Telepathic Tongue


Distinguishing 'things' from 'stuff': Brain's visual processing areas separate solid objects from flowing substances
Jul 2025, phys.org

Things - rigid or deformable objects like a bouncing ball
Stuff - liquids or granular substances such as sand

"When you're looking at some fluid or gooey stuff, you engage with it in different way than you do with a rigid object. With a rigid object, you might pick it up or grasp it, whereas with fluid or gooey stuff, you probably are going to have to use a tool to deal with it" 

via MIT: Dissociable Cortical Regions Represent Things and Stuff in the Human Brain, Current Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.07.027. 



Language structure shapes color-adjective links even for people born blind, study reveals
Apr 2025, phys.org

"Certain colors are strongly associated with certain adjectives (e.g., red is hot, blue is cold)" 

"Some of these associations are grounded in visual experiences such as seeing glowing red embers. Surprisingly, despite having no visual experience, many congenitally blind people show very similar color associations, which are likely learned through language. We show that these associations are indeed embedded in the statistical structure of language."

via University of Wisconsin-Madison: Qiawen Liu et al, Learning about color from language, Communications Psychology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00230-9.


A universal rhythm guides how we speak: Global analysis reveals 1.6-second 'intonation units'
Aug 2025, phys.org

Human speech across the world pulses to the beat of what are called intonation units, short prosodic phrases that occur at a consistent rate of one every 1.6 seconds.

Intonation units play a critical role in helping listeners follow conversations, take turns speaking, and absorb information. 

The research analyzed over 650 recordings in 48 languages spanning every continent and 27 language families.

via Hebrew University: Maya Inbar et al, A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2425166122


What's in a name? Information structure parallels discovered across cultures—with repercussions for Asian names
Feb 2026, phys.org

(ie, Name Entropy)

Fixing of Western last names around the 1600's meant a loss of information within the naming system, which had to be compensated for - which is why first names now convey more and more information (there's more first names than there used to be).

Naming systems must allow for the separate identification of a large number of people, while keeping the total number of words required by the system manageable so that they don't overtax people's brains as they process them.

In England, in every 50-year period between 1550 and 1880, half of the male population was given the first names John, William, or Thomas, and half the female population Ann, Mary, or Elizabeth.

Today, in Korea, it's the opposite, in both ways, because half the population still has 6 names, and in Asia, they come first, not last - Kim Jong Il would be called Jong Il Kim in the West. And I can't find it in the paper but I think the 6 names would be something like Kim, Park, Lee, Son, ...

From the paper itself, using badminton player Simon Archer and the basketball player Yao Ming 姚明 - Simon and Yao are names, whereas Archer is an English word for someone who shoots arrows with a bow, and Ming is a Chinese word meaning brightness.

The problem is that, because of the focus on inherited names in the Western system, the order of names of researchers from East Asian countries is reversed for publication. For Asian researchers, this means that the part of the name that conveys more information is initialized, and the part that conveys less is written out in full.

"For researchers from China today, it is as if Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, and Charles Dodgson had all been forced to publish their works under the name Charles D."

via University of Tübingen, MIT, UC Irvine, U of Texas at Austin: Michael Ramscar et al, Cross-cultural structures of personal name systems reflect general communicative principles, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-67079-8


Study suggests people are losing 338 spoken words every year and have been for at least 15 years
Apr 2026, phys.org

(Surprise) We were replicating an earlier paper on gender differences in how many words men and women speak per day. My collaborator, Valeria Pfeifer, came to me with the word counts from the replication analyses using the same methodology as our 2007 paper, but with 2,200 new participants across 22 studies. Our estimate of daily spoken word average came in at around 12,700 words. Our 2007 estimate had been 15,900. I told her there had to be a mistake. But she rechecked everything, and the number held. Something had genuinely changed.

These studies were conducted for entirely different purposes—coping with breast cancer, adjustment after divorce, the social effects of meditation, relationship dynamics. None of them were designed to track how much people talk over time. Participants had no idea their word counts would ever be analyzed this way, which rules out any concern that people adjusted their behavior to fit a hypothesis.

Young adults under 25 showed a steeper decline, about 452 words per year, compared to 314 for older adults.

via University of Arizona and University of Missouri–Kansas City: Valeria A. Pfeifer et al, Sliding Into Silence? We Are Speaking 300 Daily Words Fewer Every Year, Perspectives on Psychological Science (2026). DOI: 10.1177/17456916261425131


Small talk shapes big trends: Physics predicts how language patterns spread
May 2026, phys.org

The model is a step towards understanding the "statistical physics of language" - Professor Burridge tested his approach against large-scale survey data on American dialects collected by the Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes, created by Bert Vaux, a professor of linguistics at the University of Cambridge. 

In 1950, the term roly-poly for a woodlouse was largely confined to a relatively small group of speakers in the American South. By 1995, the term had spread dramatically, becoming almost universal across much of the United States.

"Splinter is used across almost all of England, except around Newcastle, where people still say spelk. Although Newcastle itself is densely populated, it is surrounded by more sparsely populated areas, which helps the local form hold its ground and prevents splinters from taking over.

University of Portsmouth: James Burridge, Statistical field theory for dialectology, Physical Review E (2026). DOI: 10.1103/7f86-mxf2.
On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2512.17668

Post Script: I was thinking about the word zig-zag, and whether or not I actually made up the word wiggle-waggle or if I heard it somewhere. And after that I was thinking why have one and the other but not ziggle zaggle or wig-wag. 

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Sunday, March 30, 2025

On Language the Universal Autoencoder

 
  
The 'Arrow of Time' effect: LLMs are better at predicting what comes next than what came before
Sep 2024, phys.org

Their performance at predicting the previous word is always a few percent worse than at predicting the next word. This phenomenon is universal across languages, and can be observed with any large language model."

"In theory, there should be no difference between the forward and backward directions, but LLMs appear to be somehow sensitive to the time direction in which they process text. Interestingly, this is related to a deep property of the structure of language that could only be discovered with the emergence of large language models in the last five years."

via EPFL Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne: Vassilis Papadopoulos et al, Arrows of Time for Large Language Models, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.17505



Ouch! Study investigates pain vocalizations and interjections across 131 languages
Nov 2024, phys.org

Each of the three emotions yielded consistent and distinct vowel signatures across cultures. Pain interjections also featured similar open vowels, such as "a," and wide falling diphthongs, such as "ai" in "Ayyy!" and "aw" in "Ouch!"

However, for disgusted and joyful emotions, in contrast to vocalizations, the interjections lacked regularities across cultures. The researchers expressed surprise at this latter finding.

Is this because disgust is cultural, or at least not entirely physical, and heavily mediated by culture, as compared to actual pain? This is commonly understood in the realm of olfactory perception, where some people think the smell of revolting, rotten fish is delicious (they're Norwegian). Or the smell of vomit (they're Italian, Parmesan to be specific), or the smell of the inside of the skin folds of a homeless person who hasn't been able to bathe in months (they're called New Yorkers, and they kind of long for the smell of the subway, which contains these volatiles). In fact, anything that's fermented is so close to rotten food, that unless you've been culturally conditioned to like it, you won't, at least not at first. Cilantro, I'm looking at you too. 

via CNRS et Université Lumière Lyon, School of Social Sciences at University of Western Australia, and Institute of Psychology at University of Wrocław: Vowel signatures in emotional interjections and nonlinguistic vocalizations expressing pain, disgust and joy across languages, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2024). DOI: 10.1121/10.0032454


Words activate hidden brain processes shaping emotions, decisions and behavior
Jan 2025, phys.org

Words have meaning, but they also have emotional meaning:

"There's no single brain region handling this activity, and it's not as simple as one chemical representing one emotion."

(These studies were done thanks to the participation of patients being treated for epilepsy.)

The researchers discovered emotionally charged words - whether positive, negative, or neutral - modulate neurotransmitter release. By measuring the sub-second dynamics of the releases, they identified distinct patterns tied to emotional tone, anatomical regions, and which hemisphere of the brain was involved.

"The surprising result came from the thalamus. This region hasn't been thought to have a role in processing language or emotional content, yet we saw neurotransmitter changes in response to emotional words. This suggests that even brain regions not typically associated with emotional or linguistic processing might still be privy to that information. For instance, parts of the brain responsible for mobilizing movement might benefit from having access to emotionally significant information to guide behavior."

Note: The words used in the study were drawn from the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) database, which rates words by positive, negative, or neutral emotional valence.

via Virginia Tech School of Neuroscience and Fralin Biomedical Research Institute: Seth R. Batten et al, Emotional words evoke region- and valence-specific patterns of concurrent neuromodulator release in human thalamus and cortex, Cell Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.115162

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Friday, February 14, 2025

The Entelechy of Information

 

Things that aren't alive behave as if they are, making us question what life is.  Darwin's theory of evolution started with a Tree of Life for language, not for Life. This is a great piece, and she's the one who did the 'black traffic stop' study btw, very clever.


Study traces an infectious language epidemic
May 2024, phys.org

Note for context: More than 692,000 preventable hospitalizations were reported among unvaccinated patients from November to December 2021 alone, and at a minimum cost of $13.8 billion.

They used GPT-4 to find Covid prevention-opposed posts in banned subreddits. They were looking for something called "gists" - Reyna has shown that individuals learn and recall information better when it is expressed in a cause and effect relationship, and not just as rote information. This holds true even if the information is inaccurate or the implied connection is weak. Reyna calls this cause-and-effect construction a "gist."

The results show that, indeed, social media posts that linked a cause, such as "I got the COVID vaccine," with an effect, such as "I've felt like death ever since," quickly showed up in people's beliefs and affected their offline health decisions. In fact, the total and new daily COVID-19 cases in the U.S. could be significantly predicted by the volume of gists on banned subreddit groups.

Rho's work is grounded in a social science framework called Fuzzy Trace Theory that was pioneered by Valerie Reyna, a Cornell University professor of psychology and a collaborator on this Virginia Tech project.

via Eugenia Rho and Society + AI & Language Lab in the Department of Computing at the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech: Xiaohan Ding et al, Leveraging Prompt-Based Large Language Models: Predicting Pandemic Health Decisions and Outcomes Through Social Media Language, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2403.00994

And this, an important to note to stand by itself:
Many other social media platforms have barred outside researchers from using their data.

(And this is why they used reddit, which I think as of today no longer allows ^this. Regardless consider for a moment that digital social-mediated misinformation is a thing, and it's a real risk, and yet we can't even study it anymore because it's all totally proprietary. But don't consider the fact that data - all the data - is created by the users, yet it's not owned by the users to the extent that they, or anyone, can study it; that's for another post.)

Image credit: Plant root via Fiber Optic 2x - Dr Adolfo Ruiz De Segovia Nikon Small World - 2024


Back to language as an epidemic, behold Legalese:
Study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style
Aug 2024, phys.org

A 2022 study found legal documents frequently have long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences - a feature known as "center-embedding" which makes text more difficult to understand, even for lawyers. "Legalese somehow has developed this tendency to put structures inside other structures, in a way which is not typical of human languages." 

"Lawyers don't like it, laypeople don't like it, so the point of this current paper was to try and figure out why they write documents this way."

Hypotheses:
"Copy and edit hypothesis" - legal documents begin with a simple premise, and then additional information and definitions are inserted into already existing sentences, creating complex center-embedded clauses.

"Magic spell hypothesis" - the convoluted style of legal language signals a kind of authority, "if you want to write something that's a magic spell, people know that the way to do that is you put a lot of old-fashioned rhymes in there."

Test:
They did two experiments, one with people split in two groups for writing laws and then adding to them, or writing laws all at once. They found that people wrote center-embeddings regardless of whether they had to copy and edit.

The other experiment gave people laws from another country and asked them to rewrite them, both as law itself and as a description of the law. They found that people put embeddings in the law but not the description. 

They're now investigating the origins of center-embedding in legal documents, back to the Hammurabi Code of 1750 BC.

via MIT, University of Melbourne, University of Chicago Law School: Martínez, Eric, Even laypeople use legalese, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2405564121


But in case you still weren't convinced that contagion is a function of information systems, and not of living systems ... or perhaps you'd rather believe that language is in fact a form of life:
How new words arise in social media
Sep 2024, phys.org

They analyzed 650 million tweets written in French between 2012 and 2014 to identify 400 words that were new to appear on the social media network then called Twitter, then they tracked the diffusion of these words over the following five years, and looked at the position and connectivity of users who adopted the words.

"lexical innovations" - new words

On average, the words that eventually persisted were used by people who were more central to their community, and remained in circulation at low levels for a longer period before entering a growth phase (18.5 months in circulation compared to 6.5 months for buzzes).

Words that became only temporary buzzes were used by people with less central positions within a social network and had a more rapid rise in use - followed by a rapid decline.

via École Normale Supérieure in France: Tarrade L, Chevrot J-P, Magué J-P (2024) How position in the network determines the fate of lexical innovations on Twitter, PLOS Complex Systems (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcsy.0000005

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Tuesday, January 28, 2025

The Tree of Life is a Dictionary


Survey shows shift in language around mental health over 79 years
Jun 2024, phys.org

340,000 texts taken from Google Books, and a combination of the Corpus of Historical American English, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and spanning 79 years from 1940–2019, using a list of generic terms for mental ill health. It's important to note that the authors here have specifically looked at numerical frequency of word usage in written culture, rather than community word preferences over time.
  • Generic terms for mental ill health appeared more than twice as often in 2019 as in 1940
  • Phrases which included "disease," and "disturbance" grew less common over time
  • Phrases that included words like "mental health," "psychiatric," and "illness" were used more commonly
  • In particular, "mental illness," after a spike in popularity between the 1940s and 1960s, reigned as the most-used term. 

via University of Melbourne: Haslam N, Baes N. What should we call mental ill health? Historical shifts in the popularity of generic terms. PLOS Mental Health (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000032



Study finds politicians use simpler language on hot days
Jun 2024, phys.org

They used seven million parliamentary speeches representing more than 28,000 politicians in eight different countries over several decades combined with global meteorological data.

Hot days reduce language complexity but cold days did not have the same effect.

They looked closer using a subset in Germany: The larger effect size observed in older politicians could be because older individuals are more susceptible to extreme temperatures.

via Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock: The effect of temperature on language complexity: Evidence from seven million parliamentary speeches, iScience (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.110106


Texting abbreviations makes senders seem insincere, study finds
Nov 2024, phys.org

u wot mate??

via Stanford: David Fang et al. Shortcuts to Insincerity: Texting Abbreviations Seem Insincere and Not Worth Answering, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2024). DOI: 10.1037/xge0001684.


Northerners, Scots and Irish excel at detecting fake accents to guard against outsiders, study suggests
Nov 2024, phys.org

Just this thought, never considered this - 
 "Cultural, political, or even violent conflict are likely to encourage people to strengthen their accents as they try to maintain social cohesion through cultural homogeneity. Even relatively mild tension, for example the intrusion of tourists in the summer, could have this effect."

via University of Cambridge: Evidence that cultural groups differ in their abilities to detect fake accents, Evolutionary Human Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1017/ehs.2024.36

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Tuesday, January 7, 2025

On Intermental Access and Semantic Phrenology


Now they're using pairs of epilepsy patients, talking to each other.

Context contingent networks is the new wordcloud. But this is literally the baby steps of mind-reading, word-by-word:

Brain activity associated with specific words is mirrored between speaker and listener during a conversation
Aug 2024, phys.org

The team collected brain activity data and conversation transcripts from pairs of epilepsy patients during natural conversations, using electrocorticography and GPT-2

"We can see linguistic content emerge word-by-word in the speaker's brain before they actually articulate what they're trying to say, and the same linguistic content rapidly reemerges in the listener's brain after they hear it."

Word-specific brain activity peaked in the speaker's brain around 250 ms before they spoke each word, and corresponding spikes in brain activity associated with the same words appeared in the listener's brain approximately 250 ms after they heard them.

via Princeton and New York University School of Medicine Comprehensive Epilepsy Center: A shared model-based linguistic space for transmitting our thoughts from brain to brain in natural conversations, Neuron (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.06.025.


Words like 'this' and 'that' act as attention tools across languages
Jul 2024, phys.org

This and that and here and there are 'demonstrative' words are used to direct listeners' focus of attention and to establish joint attention.

There is debate about whether directing the listener's attention - the 'mentalistic' representation - is part of the meaning (semantics) of demonstratives, or whether it arises from general principles of social cognition (pragmatics). The researchers used computational modeling and experiments with speakers of ten different languages from eight different language groups to investigate this question.

Results showed that participants were not only sensitive to the location of the target but also to the listener's attention. As expected, the meaning of demonstratives varied within and across languages. For example, the 'near' demonstrative (such as English 'this one') sometimes had a spatial meaning ('the one close to me'). But it also had a joint attention meaning ('the one we are both looking at') or a 'mentalistic' meaning ('the one over here'), directing the listener's attention towards the speaker.

Interestingly, speakers of languages with a three-word system used the medial word (such as Spanish 'ese') to indicate joint attention.

via Yale University and the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen: Jara-Ettinger, Julian et al, Demonstratives as attention tools: Evidence of mentalistic representations within language, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2402068121. 

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Friday, January 3, 2025

Entropy Engineering and Social Syncopation


Singing researchers find cross-cultural patterns in music and language
May 2024, phys.org

An international team of researchers recorded themselves performing traditional music and speaking in their native language. In all 50+ languages, the rhythms of songs and instrumental melodies were slower than those of speech, while the pitches were higher and more stable.

Speculating on underlying reasons for the cross-cultural similarities, Savage suggests songs are more predictably regular than speech because they are used to facilitate synchronization and social bonding.

"Slow, regular, predictable melodies make it easier for us to sing together in large groups," he says. "We're trying to shed light on the cultural and biological evolution of two systems that make us human: music and language."

via Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen: Yuto Ozaki et al, Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower, higher, and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adm9797. 



Neuroplasticity study shows how singing rehabilitates speech production in post-stroke aphasia
May 2024, phys.org

According to the findings, singing repairs the structural language network of the brain. The language network processes language and speech in our brain. In patients with aphasia, the network has been damaged.

"For the first time, our findings demonstrate that the rehabilitation of patients with aphasia through singing is based on neuroplasticity changes"

via University of Helsinki: Aleksi J. Sihvonen et al, Structural Neuroplasticity Effects of Singing in Chronic Aphasia, eNeuro (2024). DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0408-23.2024


Study shows the power of social connections to predict hit songs
Jun 2024, phys.org

The team analyzed data from last.fm, analyzing 2.7 million users, 10 million songs, and 300 million plays, along with networks of mapping friendships and another capturing influence dynamics (who listens to a song and who follows suit). 

Examining the first 200 plays of a new song, they predicted its chances of becoming a hit.

The researchers improved the precision of predicting hit songs from 14% to 21%.

Existing models often focus on artist fame and listening metrics, but the CSH study highlights the overlooked social aspect - musical homophily, which is the tendency for friends to listen to similar music.

via Complexity Science Hub Vienna: Niklas Reisz et al, Quantifying the impact of homophily and influencer networks on song popularity prediction, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-58969-w


Understanding the synchronization of physiological states during a live music performance
Jul 2024, phys.org

"Music-induced synchronization of heart rate may be the mechanism underlying the coherent behavior of a large audience in a theater." 

Synchronization of physical and cognitive processes is better within an individual compared to that between different individuals; and heart rate synchronization in response to music depends on the reliable physiological responses of the listener, not on their mood or music preferences.

Note that in the study, to guage mood, they had participants in the study listen to the same piece of music on different days. And to quantify the influence of music preference on heart rate synchronization, he investigated whether a person listening to a piece of music selected by the researcher differed in synchronization response to a piece of music that deeply moves them when played in a randomized order.

Why - "From data on small audiences, for example, the degree of proficiency of performers, commercial success can be predicted in terms of reliability."

via Waseda University: Ryota Nomura, Reliability for music-induced heart rate synchronization, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-62994-0


Classical music lifts our mood by synchronizing our 'extended amygdala'
Aug 2024, phys.org

The study focused on 13 patients with treatment-resistant depression who already had electrodes implanted in their brains for the purpose of deep-brain stimulation. These implants are placed in a circuit connecting two areas in the forebrain—the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Using these implants, the researchers found that music generates its antidepressant effects by synchronizing the neural oscillations between the auditory cortex, which is responsible for processing of sensory information, and the rewards circuit, which is responsible for processing emotional information.

The patients in the study were assigned to two groups: low music appreciation or high music appreciation. Those in the high music appreciation group demonstrated more significant neural synchronization and better antidepressant effects, while those in the low music appreciation group showed poorer results.  

via Center for Functional Neurosurgery at Shanghai Jiao Tong University: uditory entrainment coordinates cortical-BNST-NAc triple time locking to alleviate the depressive disorder, Cell Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.114474. 

Intermission on sonic superpowers:
Singing from memory unlocks a surprisingly common musical superpower
Aug 2024, phys.org

They asked people to sing out any earworms they were experiencing and record them on their phones when prompted at random times throughout the day, and found the majority perfectly matched the pitch of the original songs.

"Surprisingly large portion of the population has a type of automatic, hidden 'perfect pitch' ability."

They think it depends on whether the music was recalled deliberately or as a result of an "earworm", which is why they asked people to record themselves as soon as they hear one in their head. So now they think there may be something unique about musical memories and the ways they are encoded and maintained inside our brains.

via University of California Santa Cruz: Matthew G. Evans et al, Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics (2024). DOI: 10.3758/s13414-024-02936-0


Below are a couple articles recalling the genius of Leonard B. Meyer

Bach, Mozart or jazz: Scientists provide a quantitative measure of variability in music pieces
Nov 2024, phys.org

They even mention Meyer in the write up: "According to Meyer, emotions and meaning in music arise from the interplay of expectations and their fulfillment or (temporary) non-fulfillment."

Sorry I have to copy mostly the whole thing, because this stuff is complicated:

They used time series analysis to infer how similar a tone sequence is to previous sequences (the autocorrelation function of musical pitch sequences).

They analyzed more than 450 jazz improvisations and 99 classical compositions, and found the autocorrelation function of pitches initially decreases slowly with the time difference. This expresses a high similarity and possibility to anticipate musical sequences. 

However, they found that there is a time limit, after which this similarity and predictability ends relatively abruptly. For larger time differences, the autocorrelation function and memory are both negligible.

Of particular interest here are the values of the transition times of the pieces where the more predictable behavior changes into a completely unpredictable and uncorrelated behavior. Depending on the composition or improvisation, the scientists found transition times ranging from a few quarter notes to about 100 quarter notes. Jazz improvisations typically had shorter transition times than many classical compositions, and therefore were usually less predictable.

Differences could also be observed between different composers. For example, the researchers found transition times between five and twelve quarter notes in various compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, while the transition times in various compositions by Mozart ranged from eight to 22 quarter notes. This implies that the anticipation and expectation of the musical progression tends to last longer in Mozart's compositions than in Bach's compositions, which offer more variability and surprises.

via Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and the University of Göttingen: Corentin Nelias et al, Stochastic properties of musical time series, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-53155-y


Study explores how brain waves reflect melody predictions while listening to music
Nov 2024, phys.org

We aimed to disentangle the frequency-specific neural dynamics linked to melodic prediction uncertainty (modeled as entropy) and prediction error (modeled as surprisal) for temporal (note onset) and content (note pitch) information."

They recruited 20 participants, half of whom were professional pianists, to listen to 10 piano melodies extracted from the work of Johann Sebastian Bach, each lasting approximately 150 seconds, and while being recorded using electroencephalography (EEG).

"An analysis of the temporal response function (TRF) weights revealed that the temporal predictability of a note (entropy of note onset) may be encoded in the delta- (1–4 Hz) and beta-band (12–30 Hz) brain activity prior to the stimulus, suggesting that these frequency bands associate with temporal predictions."

via Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences: Juan-Daniel Galeano-Otálvaro et al, Neural encoding of melodic expectations in music across EEG frequency bands. European Journal of Neuroscience(2024). DOI: 10.1111/ejn.16581

Further Reading for Meyer-like things:

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Wednesday, August 28, 2024

On Modern Tongues and the Slipperiness of the Spoken Word


We are always being reminded that Darwin used the "tree of language" to come up with his "tree of life" idea; others might refer to it as evolution, natural selection, or survival of the fit.

When languages collide, which survives?
Nov 2023, phys.org

Language is a meme - 

Our findings lead to the conclusion that the more mixing that occurs between different social groups, the more challenging it becomes for language varieties to coexist within the same society," said author Pablo Rosillo-Rodes. "The dynamics of the system has a subtle dependence on both the preferences of the speakers and the coupling between different communities."

Existing work from sociolinguistics showed that the social prestige of a language was considered the main factor leading to its extinction or survival. Insights in language contact from these previous studies, in combination with sociolinguistic studies on language ideologies, were used by the researchers to present a comprehensive picture of how language varieties are distributed in societies.

The team chose a quantitative approach based on a society in which only one language with two varieties, the standard and the vernacular, existed. The resulting mathematical model can predict the conditions that allow for the coexistence of different languages, presenting a comprehensive view of how language varieties are distributed within societies.

via University of the Balearic Islands in Spain: Pablo Rosillo-Rodes et al, Modeling language ideologies for the dynamics of languages in contact, Chaos An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science (2023). DOI: 10.1063/5.0166636

Image credit: AI Art - Mouth - 2024


Rare pre- and post-operative recordings show what happens after the brain loses a hub
Dec 2023, phys.org

This is the first direct recordings of the human brain in the minutes before and after a brain hub crucial for language meaning was surgically disconnected, and was conducted during surgical treatment of two patients with epilepsy. 

The innovation in this study was that the neurosurgery team was able to safely complete the procedure with the recording electrodes left in place or replaced to the same location after the procedure.

"The rapid impact on the speech and language processing regions well removed from the surgical treatment site was surprising, but what was even more surprising was how the brain was working to compensate"

The findings disprove theories challenging the necessity of specific brain hubs by showing that the hub was important to maintain normal brain processing in language. (Don't forget the girl who could smell despite having no olfactory cortex.)
via University of Iowa: Zsuzsanna Kocsis et al, Immediate neural impact and incomplete compensation after semantic hub disconnection, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-42088-7


Study suggests existence of a universal, nonverbal communication system
Dec 2023, phys.org

Hints of the presence of a universal system of communication:

The children either spoke English or Turkish. They were asked to use their hands to act out specific actions, such as running into a house.

They found that when the children spoke and gestured at the same time, their gesture followed the conventions of their language, with clear differences between the gestures of the Turkish and English speakers.

When the children used gestures without speaking, however, their gestures were remarkably similar.

via Georgia State, University of Chicago, and Cornell: Şeyda Özçalışkan et al, What the development of gesture with and without speech can tell us about the effect of language on thought, Language and Cognition (2023). DOI: 10.1017/langcog.2023.34

AI Art - Making Mouths - 2024

Survival of the fittest: Words like 'sex' and 'fight' are most likely to stand the test of time
Jan 2024, phys.org

Words with the strongest lasting power are:
  • Words acquired earlier in life
  • Words associated with things people can see or imagine, termed "concrete" words. For example, "cat" is more concrete than "animal," which is more concrete than "organism"
  • Words that are more arousing, including words like "sex" and "fight"

Early acquisition, concreteness, and arousal give linguistic information a selective advantage.

via University of Warwick: Ying Li et al, How cognitive selection affects language change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2220898120


Faulty machine translations litter the web
Jan 2024, phys.org

Eat This

They state, "Machine generated, multi-way parallel translations not only dominate the total amount of translated content on the web in lower resource languages, it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages."

Such content, they suggested, tends to be simpler, lower-quality passages "likely produced to generate ad revenue." Since fluency and accuracy are lower for machine-trained material, numerous translations will lead to even less accurate content and increase the odds of AI hallucination.

Medical prescription translation tool for Armenian speakers:
English: "You can take over-the-counter ibuprofen as needed for pain."
Translation to Armenian: "You may take anti-tank missile as much as you need for pain."

Regions under-represented on the web such as African nations and other countries with more obscure languages will face greater challenges in establishing reliable large language models.

via Amazon Web Services Artificial Intelligence Lab and the University of California Santa Barbara, and also a Vice Motherboard interview w the scientist: Brian Thompson et al, A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.05749


Can any English word be turned into a synonym for “drunk”? Not all, but many can
Feb 2024, Ars Technica

Drunkonyms - like the words wasted, smashed, hammered, obliterated

Because the British are far better at this game than the Americans, also see - wellied, trousered, ratarsed, "I was utterly gazeboed," or "I am going to get totally and utterly carparked." (these come from the British comedian Michael McIntyre in a bit concerning the many slang terms posh British people use to describe being drunk)

They found the basic structure is common - combining "be" or "get" with an intensifying adverb ("totally") and a random word ending in "-ed." 

Bonuses:
  • The authors include an appendix of 546 English synonyms for "drunk" 
  • Benjamin Franklin penned the Drinker's Dictionary in 1737, with 288 words https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-02-02-0029
  • Dictionary of American Slang by 1975 had 353 synonyms
  • Linguist Harry Levine in 1981 noted 900 terms https://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/~hlevine/Vocabulary-of-Drunkenness-Levine.pdf
  • P.G. Wodehouse's books especially 'Wooster's World,' a condensed version of The Millennium Wodehouse Concordance he produced with Tony Ring, includes them throughout with in each case referring you to the next term, if you follow the trail you end up back at the first one with no meaning every having being given. For example: Awash: see blotto. Blotto: see boiled. Boiled: see fried. Fried to the tonsils: see full to the back teeth. Full to the back teeth: see lathered. And so on. -via user Stendec

via Chemnitz University of Technology and Peter Uhrig of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg: Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, 2024. DOI: 10.1515/gcla-2023-0007

Can't forget: The Alcohol Language Corpus (of drunk speech) aka Drunken John
Between 2007 and 2009, linguistic researchers from the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Institute of Legal Medicine in Munich in Germany convinced 162 men and women to get drunk (and talk Drunken John into a voice recorder).

AI Art - Mouthing - 2024

Isolated for six months, scientists in Antarctica began to develop their own accent
Feb 2024, phys.org

"They say it is quicker to get to someone on the International Space Station than it is to medically evacuate someone from Antarctica in the winter" 

  • Over the 26-week winter of near perpetual darkness and harsh weather, Clark and his fellow inhabitants at Rothera would work, eat and socialise together with barely any contact with home. Satellite phone calls are expensive and so used sparingly. With just each other for company and limited entertainment on the base, the "winterers", as they are known, would chat to each other – a lot. 
  • Their common language was English, sprinkled with slang words unique to the Antarctic research stations.
  • 10-minute recordings every few weeks; sit in front of a microphone and repeat the same 29 words as they appeared on a computer screen.
  • They found some of the vowels had shifted.
  • One of those changes was the "ou" sound in words such as "flow" and "sew" that shifted towards the front of the vocal tract.
  • They also saw some of the winterers beginning to converge in the way they pronounced three other vowels.

"When we speak to each other, we memorise that speech and then that has an influence on our own speech production," says Harrington. In effect, we transmit and infect one another with pronunciations every time we interact with others. Over time, if we have regular and prolonged contact with someone, we can start to pick up their sounds.

via Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich: Phonetic change in an Antarctic winter 
Jonathan Harrington et al. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 146, 3327–3332 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5130709


AI analysis of social media language predicts depression severity for white Americans, but not Black Americans
Mar 2024, phys.org

Remember the point here is not that an entire subroup of the population doesn't get depressed, it's that models don't work for those people, so they need to be tuned better.

The study, which recruited 868 consenting participants who identified themselves as Black or white, demonstrated that models trained on Facebook language used by white participants with self-reported depression showed strong predictive performance when tested on the white participants. However, when the same models were trained on Facebook language from Black participants, they performed poorly when tested on the Black participants, and showed only slightly better performance when tested on white participants.

While depression severity was associated with increased use of first-person singular pronouns ("I," "me," "my") in white participants, this correlation was absent in Black participants. Additionally, white people used more language to describe feelings of belongingness ("weirdo," "creep"), self-criticism ("mess," "wreck"), being an anxious-outsider ("terrified," "misunderstood"), self-deprecation ("worthless," "crap"), and despair ("begging," "hollow") as depression severity increased, but there was no such correlation for Black people. For decades, clinicians have been aware of demographic differences in how people express depressive symptoms, and this study now demonstrates how this can play out in social media.

via University of Pennsylvania and the National Institute on Drug Abuse: Sunny Rai et al, Key language markers of depression on social media depend on race, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2319837121


First languages of North America traced back to two very different language groups from Siberia
Apr 2024, phys.org

Nichols' techniques involve the use of linguistic typology, a field that involves comparing languages and organizing them based on shared criteria. To learn more about early North American languages, she compiled lists of language characteristics and applied them to all known languages. She then scored each of the languages based on the revealed qualities. This allowed her to compare the languages as a way to find resemblances among them and spot patterns.

Nichols found that she could trace the languages spoken in early North America back to just two lineages, both of which originated in Siberia. They came, she notes, with the people who made their way across land bridges during Ice Age glaciation events.

via University of California Berkeley: Johanna Nichols, Founder effects identify languages of the earliest Americans, American Journal of Biological Anthropology (2024). DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24923


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Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Social Control as Social Service and the Art of Meme Hygiene


Study shows babies learn to imitate others because they themselves are imitated by caregivers
Sep 2023, phys.org

(The whole article is basically a good description of recursion.)

  • Social learning avoids laborious trial and error; the wheel does not have to be reinvented each time.
  • "Children acquire their ability to imitate because they themselves are imitated by their caregivers" 
  • Parents respond to the signals given by the child and reflect and amplify them. A mutual imitation of actions and gestures develops. 
  • "These experiences create connections between what the child feels and does on the one hand and what it sees on the other"
  • "Imitation is the start of the cultural process toward becoming human" 
  • Over the course of generations and millennia, this interplay has led to the cultural evolution of humans"

via Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich:  Samuel Essler et al, The cultural basis of cultural evolution: Longitudinal evidence that infant imitation develops by being imitated, Current Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.08.084. 

Image credit: Speaking of memetics, imitation, and learning, the image above is an example of a computer trying to be a human - a graphic designer specifically. We can see how, in very subtle ways, computers can't be people, not just yet: AI Art - Ad Poop - 2024


Social bonding gets people on the same wavelength, neural synchronization study suggests
Mar 2024, phys.org

176 three-person groups of human participants wore caps with fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) electrodes while they communicated with strangers in a face-to-face triangle. (But it sounds like they communicated via text message, although they were sitting across from each other.)

This writeup is so concise I have to copy the whole thing:

Each group democratically selected a leader, so each group of three ultimately included one leader and two followers. After strategizing together, groups played two economic games designed to test their willingness to make sacrifices to benefit their group (or harm other groups).

Experimenters assigned some triads to go through a bonding session, where they were grouped according to color preferences, given uniforms, and led through an introductory chat session to build familiarity.

Bonded groups spoke more freely and bounced between speakers more frequently and rapidly, relative to groups that didn't experience this bonding session. This bonding effect was stronger between leaders and followers than between two followers.

Neural activity in two brain regions linked to social interaction, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC) and the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), aligned between leaders and followers if they had bonded.

The authors state that this neural synchronization suggests that leaders may be anticipating followers' mental states during group decision-making, though they acknowledge that their findings are restricted to East Asian Chinese individuals communicating via text (without non-verbal cues), whose culture emphasizes group cohesion and commitment towards group leaders.

via Beijing Normal University: Ni J, Yang J, Ma Y (2024) Social bonding in groups of humans selectively increases inter-status information exchange and prefrontal neural synchronization. PLoS Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002545

Charting brain synchronization patterns during social interactions - Yuto Kurihara from Waseda University - Apr 2024

Charting brain synchronization patterns during social interactions
Apr 2024, phys.org

See the infographic above, really well done.

"Our findings challenge the conventional understanding"

Cooperative interactive tasks between individuals with weak social ties result in more synchronized brain activity compared to individuals with strong ties. 

The participants were given a joint tapping task where they had to tap a mouse button in opposite rhythms. They wore earphones and had to anticipate their partner's movements.

Researchers suggest that the lack of familiarity between strangers requires a more involved process for predicting each other's actions or behaviors in a cooperative task. Consequently, this heightened engagement leads to a more efficient transfer of information between closely connected nodes within the neural network.

via Waseda University: Yuto Kurihara et al, The topology of interpersonal neural network in weak social ties, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-55495-7


Understanding the spread of behavior: How long-tie connections accelerate the speed of social contagion
Apr 2024, phys.org

This is all getting pretty scary; I used to think this was something far off, but it sure seems we have both the knowledge and the means to do these things, and I wonder how it's being done already, and highly doubt it's not being done already. Too irresistible. 

Initially, researchers thought highly clustered ties that are close together in networks created the perfect environment for the spread of complex behaviors that require significant social reinforcement. However, long ties, which are created through randomly rewired edges that make them "longer," accelerate the spread of social contagions. 

(So this is not about weak vs strong ties, but short vs long.)

Having a small probability of adoption below the contagion threshold is enough to ensure that random rewiring accelerates the spread of these contagions.

"Further work could study such strategies for seeding complex behaviors"

This research suggests those wanting to achieve fast, total spread would benefit from implementing intervention points across network neighborhoods with long-tie connections to other network regions

via University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering, Sloan School of Management at MIT: Dean Eckles et al, Long ties accelerate noisy threshold-based contagions, Nature Human Behaviour (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01865-0

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Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Going On About Language


Speech and sun: New research on climate and how we speak
Aug 2023, phys.org

They evaluated  humidity, altitude, temperature, precipitation and density of vegetation across 1,000 globally distributed languages, documented over 300 years. How were these environmental conditions affecting speech over time?

"The representation of a diversity of languages were scattered geographically over the widest possible range of global environments," Benedict said. "Ian went to great lengths to specifically build the linguistic data set to provide that geographic diversity. We tried to be intentional about making sure that we had languages in all environmental areas that are implicated in the potential development of these linguistic features."
  • greater reliance on vowels in areas with high temperature and humidity,
  • more use of ejective consonants within higher altitude areas,
  • more complex tone systems in humid areas,
  • fewer complex consonants used in areas with more precipitation and a higher temperature.
"If we think about time scales of a century or more of habitual mask use in areas where diseases are common, or you know, air quality is such that it's a standard practice, I would expect to see changes in the way that we communicate with each other," Benedict said.

"There's some research on bird song which shows that with birds that live in both urban and rural settings, the birds that live in urban areas tend to pitch their songs a little higher to get above the background noise of cars and things like that," Maddieson said. "We know that some species do adapt to these relatively recent changes because the lifespan of a bird is much less than human lifeform."
via University of New Mexico's Department of Linguistics and College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences: Ian Maddieson et al, Demonstrating environmental impacts on the sound structure of languages: challenges and solutions, Frontiers in Psychology (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1200463



Speech study finds classic Georgia accent fading fast
Sep 2023, phys.org

The analysis was carried out with recordings of white individuals native to Georgia, born from the late 19th century to the early 2000s. The researchers focused on the way the recorded speakers pronounced vowels. The team found that older Georgians pronounced the word "prize" as prahz and "face" as fuh-eece, but the youngest speakers use prah-eez and fayce. These are distinctive features of the traditional Southern drawl. (These are called dpithong by the way, when a one-syllable word seems to have two syllables.)

"Using transcribed audio, we can use a computer to estimate where you put your tongue in your mouth when you pronounce each vowel, which gives us a quantitative metric of accent.")

via University of Georgia and Georgia Tech: Margaret E. L. Renwick et al, Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English, Language Variation and Change (2023). DOI: 10.1017/S095439452300011X

AI Art - Cosmic Rainbow - 2023

Social vs. language role: Researchers question function of two brain areas
Sep 2023, phys.org

Ouch, just got way more complicated:

"A research team led by Prof. Lin Nan from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that during sentence processing, the neural activity of two canonical language areas—the left ventral temporoparietal junction (vTPJ) and the lateral anterior temporal lobe (lATL)—is associated with social-semantic working memory rather than language processing per se."

These regions were sensitive to sentences only if the sentences conveyed social meaning. 

These findings are likely to force a major reconsideration of the functional organization of the cortical language network

via Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences: Zhang, G. et al, A social-semantic working-memory account for two canonical language areas, Nature Human Behaviour (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01704-8.

Post Script: For smell-related language, it gets even more complicated because social smells are already confusing but now there's two kinds of language also, "regular" and "social".


Why all languages have words for 'this' and 'that'
Oct 2023, phys.org

First, things you didn't know you needed to know: Languages around the world have words for "this" and "that" 

But better, "this" means within reach and "that" means outside of reach.

via University of East Anglia: Spatial Communication Systems Across Languages Reflect Universal Action Constraints, Nature Human Behaviour (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01697-4

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