Language, music, and the brain : a mysterious relationship / edited by Michael A. Arbib.

"This book explores the relationships between language, music, and the brain by pursuing four key themes and the crosstalk among them: song and dance as a bridge between music and language; multiple levels of structure from brain to behavior to culture; the semantics of internal and external worlds and the role of emotion; and the evolution and development of language. The book offers specially commissioned expositions of current research accessible both to experts across disciplines and to non-experts. These chapters provide the background for reports by groups of specialists that chart current controversies and future directions of research on each theme.

The book looks beyond mere auditory experience, probing the embodiment that links speech to gesture and music to dance. The study of the brains of monkeys and songbirds illuminates hypotheses on the evolution of brain mechanisms that support music and language, while the study of infants calibrates the developmental timetable of their capacities. The result is a unique book that will interest any reader seeking to learn more about language or music and will appeal especially to readers intrigued by the relationships of language and music with each other and with the brain.

Contributors: Francisco Aboitiz, Michael A. Arbib, Annabel J. Cohen, Ian Cross, Peter Ford Dominey, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Leonardo Fogassi, Jonathan Fritz, Thomas Fritz, Peter Hagoort, John Halle, Henkjan Honing, Atsushi Iriki, Petr Janata, Erich Jarvis, Stefan Koelsch, Gina Kuperberg, D. Robert Ladd, Fred Lerdahl, Stephen C. Levinson, Jerome Lewis, Katja Liebal, Jônatas Manzolli, Bjorn Merker, Lawrence M. Parsons, Aniruddh D. Patel, Isabelle Peretz, David Poeppel, Josef P. Rauschecker, Nikki Rickard, Klaus Scherer, Gottfried Schlaug, Uwe Seifert, Mark Steedman, Dietrich Stout, Francesca Stregapede, Sharon Thompson-Schill, Laurel Trainor, Sandra E. Trehub, Paul Verschure."--Pub. desc.

Cambridge, MA ; London, England : The MIT Press, [2013]

xiii, 662 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm.

Part 1: An expanded perspective -- 1. Five terms in serach of a synthesis -- 2. A cross-cultural perspective on the significance of music and dance to culture and society: Insight from BaYaka Pygmies -- 3. Cross-cultural universals and communication structures -- Part 2: Action, emotion, and the semantics -- 4. Shared meaning, mirroring, and joint action -- 5. Emotion in action, interaction, music, and speech -- 6. Neural correlates of music perception 7. Film music and the unfolding narrative -- 8. Semantics of internal and external worlds -- Part 3: Structure -- 9. The infrasture of the planguage-ready brain -- Musical syntax and its phonetics, phonology, and prosody -- 12. Multiple levels of structure in language and music -- Part 4: Integration -- Neural mechanisms of music, singing, and dancing -- 13. Sharing and nonsharing of brain resources for language and music -- 15. Action, language, and music: Events in time and models of the brain -- 16. Computational modeling of mind and music -- 17. The neurobiology of language, speech, and music -- Part 5: Development, evolution, and culture -- 18. Communication, music, and language in infancy -- 19. evolving the language- and music-ready brain -- 20. Birdsong and other animal models for human speech, song, and vocal learning -- 21. Culture and evolution.

Includes bibliographical references and subject index.