Search results for "Music psychology"
showing 10 items of 71 documents
Action in Perception: Prominent Visuo-Motor Functional Symmetry in Musicians during Music Listening.
2015
Musical training leads to sensory and motor neuroplastic changes in the human brain. Motivated by findings on enlarged corpus callosum in musicians and asymmetric somatomotor representation in string players, we investigated the relationship between musical training, callosal anatomy, and interhemispheric functional symmetry during music listening. Functional symmetry was increased in musicians compared to nonmusicians, and in keyboardists compared to string players. This increased functional symmetry was prominent in visual and motor brain networks. Callosal size did not significantly differ between groups except for the posterior callosum in musicians compared to nonmusicians. We conclude…
Semantic structures of timbre emerging from social and acoustic descriptions of music
2011
The perceptual attributes of timbre have inspired a considerable amount of multidisciplinary research, but because of the complexity of the phenomena, the approach has traditionally been confined to laboratory conditions, much to the detriment of its ecological validity. In this study, we present a purely bottom-up approach for mapping the concepts that emerge from sound qualities. A social media ( http://www.last.fm ) is used to obtain a wide sample of verbal descriptions of music (in the form of tags) that go beyond the commonly studied concept of genre, and from this the underlying semantic structure of this sample is extracted. The structure that is thereby obtained is then evaluated th…
Cerebellar patients demonstrate preserved implicit knowledge of association strengths in musical sequences
2006
Recent findings suggest the involvement of the cerebellum in perceptual and cognitive tasks. Our study investigated whether cerebellar patients show musical priming based on implicit knowledge of tonal-harmonic music. Participants performed speeded phoneme identification on sung target chords, which were either related or less-related to prime contexts in terms of the tonal-harmonic system. As groups, both cerebellar patients and age-matched controls showed facilitated processing for related targets, as previously observed for healthy young adults. The outcome suggests that an intact cerebellum is not mandatory for accessing implicit knowledge stored in long-term memory and for its influenc…
Music in the moment? Revisiting the effect of large scale structures.
2007
The psychological relevance of large-scale musical structures has been a matter of debate in the music community. This issue was investigated with a method that allows assessing listeners' detection of musical incoherencies in normal and scrambled versions of popular and contemporary music pieces. Musical excerpts were segmented into 28 or 29 chunks. In the scrambled version, the temporal order of these chunks was altered with the constraint that the transitions between two chunks never created local acoustical and musical disruptions. Participants were required (1) to detect on-line incoherent linking of chunks, (2) to rate aesthetic quality of pieces, and (3) to evaluate their overall co…
Cross-cultural music cognition: cognitive methodology applied to North Sami yoiks
2000
This article is a study of melodic expectancy in North Sami yoiks, a style of music quite distinct from Western tonal music. Three different approaches were taken. The first approach was a statistical style analysis of tones in a representative corpus of 18 yoiks. The analysis determined the relative frequencies of tone onsets and two- and three-tone transitions. It also identified style characteristics, such as pentatonic orientation, the presence of two reference pitches, the frequency of large consonant intervals, and a relatively large set of possible melodic continuations. The second approach was a behavioral experiment in which listeners made judgments about melodic continuations. Thr…
The role of mood and personality in the perception of emotions represented by music.
2009
Neuroimaging studies investigating the processing of emotions have traditionally considered variance between subjects as statistical noise. However, according to behavioural studies, individual differences in emotional processing appear to be an inherent part of the process itself. Temporary mood states as well as stable personality traits have been shown to influence the processing of emotions, causing trait- and mood-congruent biases. The primary aim of this study was to explore how listeners' personality and mood are reflected in their evaluations of discrete emotions represented by music. A related aim was to investigate the role of personality in music preferences. An experiment was ca…
Decoding Musical Training from Dynamic Processing of Musical Features in the Brain
2018
AbstractPattern recognition on neural activations from naturalistic music listening has been successful at predicting neural responses of listeners from musical features, and vice versa. Inter-subject differences in the decoding accuracies have arisen partly from musical training that has widely recognized structural and functional effects on the brain. We propose and evaluate a decoding approach aimed at predicting the musicianship class of an individual listener from dynamic neural processing of musical features. Whole brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data was acquired from musicians and nonmusicians during listening of three musical pieces from different genres. Six mus…
Trait Empathy associated with Agreeableness and rhythmic entrainment in a spontaneous movement to music task: Preliminary exploratory investigations
2017
The simulation theory of empathy suggests that we use motor processing to empathise, through modelling the actions of others. Similarly, research into embodied music cognition posits that music, particularly musical rhythm, is perceived as a motor stimulus. In both cases, the human Mirror Neuron System (MNS) is put forward as a potential underlying mechanism. If this is the case, some overlap may exist between the ability to empathise with others, and the ability to perceive rhythm in music. The present study investigated this relationship indirectly, through the study of individual differences in Trait Empathy and rhythmic entrainment. Undergraduate students ( N = 237) completed a questio…
Perceiving rhythm where none exists : Event-Related Potential (ERP) correlates of subjective accenting
2008
Previous research suggests that our past experience of rhythmic structure in music results in a tendency for Western listeners to subjectively accent equitonal isochronous sequences. We have shown in an earlier study that the occurrence of a slightly softer tone in the 8th to 11th position of such a sequence evokes a P300 event-related potential (ERP) response of different amplitudes depending on whether the tone occurs in putatively subjectively accented or unaccented sequence positions (Brochard et al., 2003). One current theory of rhythm processing postulates that subjective accenting is the result of predictive modulations of perceptual processes by the attention system. If this is the …
Electrophysiological Correlates of Aesthetic Music Processing
2009
We analyzed the processes of making aesthetic judgments of music, focusing on the differences between music experts and laypersons. Sixteen students of musicology and 16 control subjects (also students) judged the aesthetic value as well as the harmonic correctness of chord sequences. Event-related potential (ERP) data indicate differences between experts and laypersons in making aesthetic judgments at three different processing stages. Additionally, effects of expertise on ERP components that have previously been proven to be sensitive to musical training were replicated. The study thus provides insights into the effects of musical expertise on neural correlates of aesthetic music processi…