SNARC-like effects for visual and auditory musical stimuli: the relation between space and different music parameters

This thesis aimed to investigate the spatial association for different music parameters through four experimental studies, showing consistent SNARC-like effects for note height, note value/duration, music tempo and pitch height. Visually presented notes on the stave showed relatively low/high notes to be associated to left/right response key-presses in musicians with formal education, while no signs of such an association were found in amateur musicians. A further experiment revealed that the direction of the association is constant among musicians and is not influenced by the disposition of notes on the keyboard of specific instruments (i.e., piano and flute). Note value/duration showed to be spatially coded when duration magnitude was processed directly, while no such evidence was revealed in the order-irrelevant task. The direction of the association surprisingly revealed a reversed pattern from the expected one, namely large duration values were coupled with left key-presses, while the opposite was true for small duration values. This evidence seems to support the predominance of over-learned ordinal sequences as opposed to stimuli's magnitude, in the spatial association effects. Auditory presented beat sequences showed to be spatially coded even in non musicians. Indeed, participants revealed a left/right key-press advantage for relatively slow/fast music tempo when tempo processing was mandatory, while no evidence of a spatial association appeared in the order-irrelevant task (i.e., timbre judgment). Evidence of a spatial association in non musicians suggests that experience with tempo is widespread among the population and its influence overcomes the music domain. The spatial association for pitch height was assessed through an alternative response coding to close and far key-presses, instead of the classically used left-right key-presses. Results showed a relative advantage for close responses to middle-range pitches with piano timbre, suggesting a linear representation for piano tones. However, further investigations are needed to certainly discriminate predictions based on different theoretical accounts. Overall, this thesis provides a complete review of the spatial association for musical stimuli, showing that various parameters of music share many features in common with numbers, ordinal sequences and other magnitudes. Furthermore, music showed to be an interesting domain for investigating more general properties that require interactions among time, space and quantity.