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Sobre como a linguagem e as diversas camadas que nos constituem modificam a percepção da música.

"In languages such as English, the pitch at which a word is pronounced doesn’t influence its dictionary meaning. Motorcycle means a two-wheeled vehicle with an engine whether I say it in a really high or really low voice. But other languages, such as Mandarin Chinese and Thai, are tone languages: when Chinese speakers say ma with a high, stable pitch it means ‘mother’, but if they say it with a pitch that starts high, declines, then goes back up again, it means ‘horse’. The centrality of pitch to basic definitional content in these languages means that tone-language speakers produce and attend to pitch differently than non-tone-language speakers, day in and day out over the course of years. This cumulative sonic environment tunes the auditory system in ways that alter basic aspects of music perception. Speakers of tone languages, for example, detect and repeat musical melodies and pitch relationships more accurately than non-tone language speakers.

The psychologist Diana Deutsch at the University of California, San Diego concocted tritones (two pitches separated by half an octave) using digitally manipulated tones of ambiguous pitch height. People heard these tritones as ascending or descending (the first note lower or higher than the second) depending on the linguistic background in which they had been raised. Speakers of English who grew up in California tended to hear a particular tritone as ascending, but English speakers raised in the south of England tended to hear it as descending. Chinese listeners raised in villages with different dialects showed similar differences. A striking characteristic of this ‘tritone paradox’ is that listeners who hear the interval as ascending generally experience this upward motion as part of the perception, and have trouble imagining what it would be like to experience it the other way, and vice versa for listeners who hear it as descending. The effect influences what feels like the raw perception of the sound, not some interpretation layered on later. Culture and experience can change how music is heard, not just how people derive meaning from it.

[…] Music cannot be conceptualised as a straightforwardly acoustic phenomenon. It is a deeply culturally embedded, multimodal experience. At a moment in history when neuroscience enjoys almost magical authority, it is instructive to be reminded that the path from sound to perception weaves through imagery, memories, stories, movement and words." — Music is not for ears, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis