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When music tells a story

People commonly attribute semantic meaning to musical passages, but there have been few scientific studies of this process. Now Koelsch and colleagues report that brief excerpts of classical music cause behavioral and electrophysiological priming effects that are indistinguishable from those evoked by sentences, suggesting that music can convey meaning.

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Figure 1: Semantic priming.

Kamal Masuta

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Janata, P. When music tells a story. Nat Neurosci 7, 203–204 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0304-203

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