Search results for "music psychology"

Position coding effects in a 2D scenario: the case of musical notation.

2013

How does the cognitive system encode the location of objects in a visual scene? In the past decade, this question has attracted much attention in the field of visual-word recognition (e.g., "jugde" is perceptually very close to "judge"). Letter transposition effects have been explained in terms of perceptual uncertainty or shared "open bigrams". In the present study, we focus on note position coding in music reading (i.e., a 2D scenario). The usual way to display music is the staff (i.e., a set of 5 horizontal lines and their resultant 4 spaces). When reading musical notation, it is critical to identify not only each note (temporal duration), but also its pitch (y-axis) and its temporal seq…

Knots, Music and DNA

2020

Musical gestures connect the symbolic layer of the score to the physical layer of sound. I focus here on the mathematical theory of musical gestures, and I propose its generalization to include braids and knots. In this way, it is possible to extend the formalism to cover more case studies, especially regarding conducting gestures. Moreover, recent developments involving comparisons and similarities between gestures of orchestral musicians can be contextualized in the frame of braided monoidal categories. Because knots and braids can be applied to both music and biology (they apply to knotted proteins, for example), I end the article with a new musical rendition of DNA.

The Pursuit of Happiness in Music: Retrieving Valence with Contextual Music Descriptors

2009

In the study of music emotions, Valence is usually referred to as one of the dimensions of the circumplex model of emotions that describes music appraisal of happiness, whose scale goes from sad to happy. Nevertheless, related literature shows that Valence is known as being particularly difficult to be predicted by a computational model. As Valence is a contextual music feature, it is assumed here that its prediction should also require contextual music descriptors in its predicting model. This work describes the usage of eight contextual (also known as higher-level) descriptors, previously developed by us, to calculate happiness in music. Each of these descriptors was independently tested …

International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus15).

2016

The 8th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus15) took place from the 17th to 19th of September, 2015, in Leipzig, Germany, a city with a strong academic and musical heritage. Leipzig was home to famous musicians such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert and Clara Schumann, and Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. It was where Wilhelm Wundt opened the first laboratory for experimental psychology in 1879 (Rieber & Robinson, 2001, p. 206), and where Hugo Riemann founded one of the first institutes for Musicology in 1914 (Gollin & Rehding, 2011, p. 140). Against this background was held a conference highlighting the interdisciplinarity of modern Musicology.Musicology itself …

Pleasurable music affects reinforcement learning according to the listener.

2013

Mounting evidence links the enjoyment of music to brain areas implicated in emotion and the dopaminergic reward system. In particular, dopamine release in the ventral striatum seems to play a major role in the rewarding aspect of music listening. Striatal dopamine also influences reinforcement learning, such that subjects with greater dopamine efficacy learn better to approach rewards while those with lesser dopamine efficacy learn better to avoid punishments. In this study, we explored the practical implications of musical pleasure through its ability to facilitate reinforcement learning via non-pharmacological dopamine elicitation. Subjects from a wide variety of musical backgrounds chose…

2020

Since the beginning of the 20th century, electroencephalography (EEG) has been used in a wide variety of applications, both for medical needs and for the study of various cerebral processes. With the rapid development of the technique, more and more precise and advanced tools have emerged for research purposes. However, the main constraints of these devices have often been the high price and, for some devices the low transportability and the long set-up time. Nevertheless, a broad range of wireless EEG devices have emerged on the market without these constraints, but with a lower signal quality. The development of EEG recording on multiple participants simultaneously, and new technological …

Affective reactions to musical stimuli reflect emotional use of music in everyday life

2013

Music is a common means for regulating affective states in everyday life, but little is known about the individual differences in this behaviour. We investigated affective reactions to musical stimuli as an explanatory factor. Forty-four young adults rated self-selected music regarding perceived and felt emotions, preference, pleasantness and beauty. The ratings were reduced into five factors representing affective response tendencies. The participants also filled in the Music in Mood Regulation (MMR) questionnaire assessing seven music-related mood regulation strategies in everyday life. High beauty and pleasantness ratings for liked music correlated with the use of music for inducing str…

Implicit Learning of Regularities in Western Tonal Music by Self-Organization

2001

Western tonal music is a highly structured system whose regularities are implicitly learned in everyday life. A hierarchical self-organizing network simulates learning of tonal regularities by mere exposure to musical material. The trained network provides a parsimonious account of empirical findings on perceived tone, chord and key relationships and suggests activation as a unifying mechanism underlying a range of cognitive tasks.

RECURRENT SELF-ORGANIZATION OF SENSORY SIGNALS IN THE AUDITORY DOMAIN

2008

In this study, a psychoacoustical and connectionist modeling framework is proposed for the investigation of musical cognition. It is suggested that music perception involves the manipulation of 1) sensory representations that have correlations with psychoacoustical features of the stimulus, and 2) abstract representations of the statistical regularities underlying a particular musical syntax. In the implicit learning domain, sensory features have been shown to interact with the processes involved in the extraction of the regularities governing musical events combinations in a stream [e.g., 1]. Furthermore, in a more ecological context, it is well known that traditional Western tonal system …

The origins of the aesthetic enjoyment of music - A review of the literature

2009

Listeners attribute a positive or negative value to music. This aesthetic experience is known to be observable over the individuals’ entire life span, from early childhood to old age, and in every culture. It is then often concluded that such an aesthetic experience constitutes part of the human nature, having an important biological foundation. This assumption leads to the question of how aesthetic experience of music originated in the biological evolution. In this paper, we will explore this question in the light of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and systems neuroscience. After reviewing the existing proposals, we conclude that the explanation of the origin of aesthetic expe…