Elizabeth Margulis

One example is that when we played people in the US, examples of this Chinese music that they said they had not been familiar with before,

that was on an instrument, so a Chinese instrument, that sounded kind of slide guitar dobro-y, right?

That would be like the frame that people ended up putting in, or that's what we hypothesize happened, because they readily imagined stories to this music, but the stories were of a solitary cowboy sitting out on the front stoop in a ghost town, looking over the dry desert landscape.

So the idea there that we have about what was happening is they were really just slotting that into this kind of dobro soundscape.

Conversely, when we played music that was for string quartet,

that is highly atonal, okay?

So it sounds really like the pitches sound quite random.

People in the US can't get past the kind of psycho effect and really experienced that as a scene of somebody alone in their house getting stalked by a murderer.

When we played that for people in this village in China where they didn't have much experience with Western media and often had no experience with Western media, they told us a story that was quite similar to one another, but about something very different.

They reported imagining having fun playing games outside with friends.

And what we think was happening there is that they didn't need to impose this framework of tonality, what should be happening with the pitches.

They were perfectly fine with what was going on in that dimension and were tuning in instead to the fact that the notes were quite short and jumped back and forth between high and low registers really quickly.

And it's easy to kind of imagine how that could read as playful.

So again, you see this opportunity to kind of get behind someone's ears

And have this very different sensory meaning-making experience about how a shared kind of stimulus comes to have an intuitive sense about what it's connoting.

Exactly.

And think about it.

That's a whole constraining set of forces to how you're experiencing the world, right?

How you're structuring the universe you're living in.

And so, you know, from where I'm sitting, there's just so much to learn from turning our lens on these very fleeting things