Speech-Based Meaning of Music

Music, much like language, is a distinctively human and universal faculty engaging various facets of cognition and serving as a valuable medium for exploring cognitive processes. In this chapter, we will delve into the intricate interplay between language and music processing, with a specific focus on the semantic realm. The central inquiry revolves around whether language and music contend for processing resources in the perception and interpretation of a song. A song, amalgamating speech and music, naturally offers a context for comparing the processing of these two expressive forms. Over the past decades, connection between language and music processing has become a central theme in cognitive neurosciences, and here we synthesize their latest insights. The overarching goal of this chapter is to present a broad panorama of the current knowledge of the processes involved in perceiving and comprehending a complex semiotic object, addressing the extent to which music influences the perception of speech, as exemplified by sung lyrics in song listening. We review recent studies probing the music-language interface, exploring related issues such as domain specificity and overlapping representations. The accumulated evidence not only suggests the existence of shared neural processing networks for music and language but also implies the presence of independent components in their processing.