Musical and Speech Melodies May Be the “Social Glue” or the “Lowest Common Denominator in Human Evolution”

One part of the Research Group she leads investigates the role of speech melodies – word stress, the sequence of pitches in a sentence, and the cadence of speech. The other part researches how melodies are perceived in music. To do this she has had a special piano constructed by the Julius Blüthner piano manufacturing company in Leipzig that can be played while in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. With its help scientists can measure the brain activity of pianists while playing the piano. 

What’s really fascinating is how our sense for the rules of music governs how we interpret it. Both of these investigations suggest that similar regions of the brain are employed to process melodies in both speech and music, and colleagues in the same scientific circles are taking note: “Thanks to the intensive research that Daniela Sammler has undertaken, we now know that the neuronal substrates of music and speech are more similar than we ever suspected,” says Angela Friederici, Director at the same Institute. “It’s her work that has demonstrated the central role of speech melody in our interpersonal communication.”

 

                  
Credit: © Amac Garbe

“Our brains don’t have separate specialized regions for speech and for music,” stresses Daniela Sammler. Music, like speech, activates a number of brain regions that are often also responsible for other functions. “Take hearing for example, and also motor function – like tapping your foot. Not to forget the emotional centres, like those used to store memories,” adds Sammler. In the brain, different highly interconnected regions all work together. In the process, similar tasks are bundled together in specialized regions. How this happens in detail is what Daniela is hoping to understand.

What unites and what separates individual cultures?

For this reason she is investigating both the “universals” – the commonalities that exist in our understanding of music and speech across many cultures – as well as the culturally-learned differences. Do speakers of Arabic who understand no German have the same experience of German sentence melodies that a native German speaker might have? Is the reverse also true? Do we recognize a critical tone in the cadence of speech whether or not we speak the language?

Daniela Sammler is fascinated by this and many other new projects, and her students are often astonished at how analogous the results of speech and music research are. She supervises four doctoral students in her Group, as well as an ever-changing number of undergraduates. What are her further plans? “What I’m interested in could go on forever,” says Sammler. She recently submitted her German Habilitation (extended postdoctoral qualification), and she is now in the process of applying for vacant posts as a professor. Her scientific journey is ongoing in other words. She hopes to stay in Germany, or at least in Europe.

Contacts and sources:
Daniela Sammler
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig

Text: Mechthild Zimmermann / Barbara Abrell