Research has shown that music can be used as an alternative method to access these functions that may be unavailable through non-musical stimulus due to a disorder.
Musicology explores the use of music and how it can provide alternative transmission routes for information processing in the brain for diseases such as Parkinson's and dyslexia as well.
[11] A collection of papers that he co-edited served to heighten the visibility of cognitive musicology and to strengthen its association with AI and music.
[12] The foreword of this book reprints a free-wheeling interview with Marvin Minsky, one of the founding fathers of AI, in which he discusses some of his early writings on music and the mind.
Desain and Honing have exploited Lisp in their efforts to tap the potential of microworld methodology in cognitive musicology research.
[27][28][29] Equally important is Aniruddh D. Patel, whose work combines traditional methodologies of cognitive psychology with neuroscience.
The idea is to find the least complex data representations in the sense of Kolmogorov, i.e. requiring the least memory storage, which can be regarded as saving the brain energy.
This data representation approach enables the recognition of interval relations in chords and tracing polyphonic voices with no reference to pitch (thereby explaining the predominance of interval hearing over absolute hearing) and to break the rhythm-tempo vicious circle while rhythm recognition under variable tempo.
[38] For the German-speaking area, Laske's conception of cognitive musicology has been advanced by Uwe Seifert in his book Systematische Musiktheorie und Kognitionswissenschaft.
There is evidence that children who take music classes have obtained skills to help them in language acquisition and learning (Oechslin, 2015), an ability that relies heavily on the dorsal pathway.
After birth and again at the age of 4 months, they played the infants in the control and learning group a modified melody in which some of the notes were changed.
Using fMRI, Menon and Levitin found for the first time that listening to music strongly modulates activity in a network of mesolimbic structures involved in reward processing.
This included the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area (VTA), as well as the hypothalamus, and insula, which are all thought to be involved in regulating autonomic and physiological responses to rewarding and emotional stimuli (Gold, 2013).
Since the correlation is so extensive it is natural that researchers have tried to see if music could serve as an alternative pathway to strengthen reading abilities in people with developmental disorders such as dyslexia.
The difficulties have been shown to stem from a phonological core deficit that impacts reading comprehension, memory and prediction abilities (Flaugnacco, 2014).
Parkinson's disease is a complex neurological disorder that negatively impacts both motor and non-motor functions caused by the degeneration of dopaminergic (DA) neurons in the substantia nigra (Ashoori, 2015).
The deficiencies of dopamine in these areas of the brain have shown to cause symptoms such as tremors at rest, rigidity, akinesia, and postural instability.
Ashoori's study consisted of 15 non-demented patients with idiopathic Parkinson's who had no prior musical training and maintained their dopamine therapy during the trials.