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Using songs to facilitate speech processing in noisy environments seems appealing and practical. However, current research suggests otherwise, possibly due to the simplicity of sung speech contours. This study investigates the effects of contour tonality on sung speech intelligibility in noisy environments. A cohort of 20 trained musicians and 20 nonmusicians were tested on the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences sung on tonal, atonal, and fixed-pitch melodies or normally spoken under three signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs: −3, −6, and −9 dB). Perceptual musical skills related to speech-in-noise perception were also assessed. Results showed that overall speech-in-noise intelligibility decreased as the SNR decreased, with spoken speech being more intelligible than sung speech. Sung speech intelligibility was higher for fixed- than variable-pitch contours, with no difference between tonal and atonal melodies. No musician advantage was reported for spoken speech. Musicians, nonetheless, outperformed nonmusicians in identifying sung speech across all melodic contour types. Moreover, the musician sung speech advantage correlated with enhanced music perception abilities on pitch and accent. These results suggest that musicians have an advantage in sung speech in noisy environments. However, melody tonality provided no additional benefits, suggesting that imposing tonality on sung speech does not improve speech perception in noisy environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DIFFERENT MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS HAVE DIFFERENT pitch processing demands. However, correlational studies have seldom considered the role of musical instruments in music-to-language transfer. Addressing this research gap could contribute to a nuanced understanding of music-to-language transfer. To this end, we investigated whether pitched musicians had a unique musical advantage in lexical tone perception relative to unpitched musicians and nonmusicians. Specifically, we compared Cantonese pitched musicians, unpitched musicians, and nonmusicians on Thai tone discrimination and sequence recall. In the Thai tone discrimination task, the pitched musicians outperformed the unpitched musicians and the nonmusicians. Moreover, the unpitched musicians and the nonmusicians performed similarly. In the Thai tone sequence recall task, both pitched and unpitched musicians recalled level tone sequences more accurately than the nonmusicians, but the pitched musicians showed the largest musical advantage. However, the three groups recalled contour tone sequences with similar accuracy. Collectively, the pitched musicians had a unique musical advantage in lexical tone discrimination and the largest musical advantage in level tone sequence recall. From a theoretical perspective, this study offers correlational evidence for the Precision element of the OPERA hypothesis. The choice of musical instrumental may matter for musicto- language transfer in lexical tone discrimination and level tone sequence recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the influence of native language on musical working memory by comparing Finnish and Chinese speakers, both musicians and nonmusicians. It mentions the report which contributes to understanding language-to-music transfer effects and highlights cross-cultural differences in music cognition, reinforcing the strong links between music and language evidenced by shared cognitive processes and neural correlates.

The article is an editorial reflection on the past seven years of the journal Music Perception, as well as an announcement of a new editor. The author discusses the power of music to engage and stimulate individuals in various ways, and highlights the diverse range of research topics covered in the journal. The article also emphasizes the importance of open science practices and promoting access, inclusion, and diversity in music perception and cognition research. The author expresses gratitude to the contributors, reviewers, and editorial team, and looks forward to the leadership of the new editor. [Extracted from the article]

THE DOMINANT RESEARCH STRATEGY WITHIN THE field of music perception and cognition has typically involved new data collection and primary analysis techniques. As a result, numerous information-rich yet underexplored datasets exist in publicly accessible online repositories. In this paper we contribute two secondary analysis methodologies to overcome two common challenges in working with previously collected data: lack of participant stimulus ratings and lack of physiological baseline recordings. Specifically, we focus on methodologies that unlock previously unexplored musical preference questions. Preferred music plays important roles in our personal, social, and emotional well-being, and is capable of inducing emotions that result in psychophysiological responses. Therefore, we select the Study Forrest dataset ‘‘auditory perception’’ extension as a case study, which provides physiological and self-report demographics data for participants (N = 20) listening to clips from different musical genres. In Method 1, we quantitatively model self-report genre preferences using the MUSIC five-factor model: a tool recognized for genre-free characterization of musical preferences. In Method 2, we calculate synthetic baselines for each participant, allowing us to compare physiological responses (pulse and respiration) across individuals. With these methods, we uncover average changes in breathing rate as high as 4.8%, which correlate with musical genres in this dataset (p < .001). Highlevel musical characteristics from the MUSIC model (mellowness and intensity) further reveal a linear breathing rate trend among genres (p < .001). Although no causation can be inferred given the nature of the analysis, the significant results obtained demonstrate the potential for previous datasets to be more productively harnessed for novel research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

GROOVE AND CATCHINESS ARE CENTRAL PROPERTIES of popular music that frequently appear together. Yet, a possible relationship has neither been postulated nor examined. In music psychology, groove is commonly understood as a pleasurable urge to move. Catchiness is often tied to the memorability of music, but it is less researched, and definitions are elusive. In this study, we conducted stimuli-guided expert interviews with popular music creators to unveil their understandings of groove and catchiness based on their experiential, practical, and artistic knowledge. These insights allowed us to expand the ontologies of groove and catchiness. We found that groove consists of a bodily experience and positive affect, with participation, immersion and social aspects playing a part as well. We propose catchiness as a multi-dimensional quality that depends on the listener’s perception and experience of music, in which memorization and positive affect are central, and engagement, immediacy, and clarity are other aspects. We found considerable overlap in groove- and catchiness-promoting structures, and hypothesize that they positively interact and support each other, with some exceptions. The perspective of music creators, our detailed discussion of the ontologies, and the hypothesized relationship can broaden the psychological concepts, help with the explanation of previous, and inspire future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LITERATURE ON MUSICAL humor, the emphasis on laughter-inducing music has naturally led researchers to focus on quite uncommon devices, such as stylistic deviations or formal incongruities that strongly violate listeners' expectations, as the privileged basis for musical humor. But musical humor extends well beyond laughter-inducing music. It is also a kind of semantic content frequently ascribed to music, as attested by the long list of musical genres that are more or less explicitly associated with humor, wit, or comedy. As such, the communication of musical humor should be able to also rely on non-deviant compositional techniques; that is, compositional techniques that conform to the standard syntax in which the musical output is generated. In this paper, we show that selectively augmenting or inhibiting contrasts of register found in passages of Ce'cile Chaminade's humorous piano music impacted the extent to which both expert and non-expert listeners rated such passages as expressing something humorous. We then analyze the effects of contrasts of register in light of incongruity and play theories of humor, and further discuss the relevance of our results for the semantics and pragmatics of music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is an editorial from the journal Music Perception. It discusses the challenges and importance of interdisciplinary research in the field of music perception and cognition. The author expresses gratitude to the outgoing editor and acknowledges the contributions of various individuals and boards involved in the journal. The author, who has a background in music theory and research, highlights the diverse range of disciplines that contribute to the study of music perception and cognition. The article also mentions the journal's plans for future publications and encourages open-science research practices. [Extracted from the article]

We analyze four online concerts by K-pop group BTS (Bangtan Sonyeondan) during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020 to the present) from the view of participant observation. The pandemic served as a catalyst for the evolution of these concerts. BTS set new records for revenue generated by a single online concert in June 2020, only to beat their own record in October 2020, and again in June 2021. While BTS delivered high-quality online concerts to its fans, known as ARMY, these concerts highlighted the challenges to both audience members and performers despite the use of "virtual reality" technologies. We argue that BTS's online concerts represent a new type of concert production and consumption that expands the accessibility of performances to fans all over the world, and also enabled new forms of interactions between artists and audience members. However, these concerts inadvertently highlighted the importance of in-person interaction between fans and performers as K-pop relies heavily not only on cheering and banners that support artists, but also on light sticks, fan chants, and other activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights a study on the interaction effect observed specifically on the direct modulation condition was a result of the idiosyncrasy of the present stimuli or if it was a true indication of the effect of training. It discusses the exploratory principal components analysis identified a few variables that may have contributed to accuracy, the variability inherent to real stimuli make it difficult to pin down exactly what the contributing factors are.

JAZZ MUSICIANS USUALLY LEARN TO PLAY WITH "swing" phrasing by playing by ear. Classical musicians--who play more from musical scores than by ear--are reported to struggle with producing swing. We explored whether classical musicians play with more swing when performing from more detailed swing notation. Thereby we investigated whether a culturally specific improvisational social procedure can be scripted in detailed music notation for musicians from a different performance background. Twenty classical musicians sight-read jazz tunes from three styles of notation, each with a different level of notational complexity. Experienced jazz listeners evaluated the performances. Results showed that more score-independent classical musicians with strong aural abilities played with equally strong swing regardless of notation; more scoredependent musicians swung most with the mediumcomplexity classical notation. The data suggest that some higher-level swing features, such as appropriate articulation, event durations, and deviations from a beat sequence can be communicated to a limited extent using written instructions. However, their successful implementation in performance depends on matching instructional complexity to a musician's skill at decoding and interpreting unfamiliar information. This link between decoding skills and cross-cultural performance makes our findings relevant to ethnological and musicological studies of musical communication processes and perception-action coupling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CONSIDERABLE EVIDENCE CONVERGES ON THE plasticity of attention and the possibility that it can be modulated through regular training. Music training, for instance, has been correlated with modulations of early perceptual and attentional processes. However, the extent to which music training can modulate mechanisms involved in processing information (i.e., perception and attention) is still widely unknown, particularly between sensory modalities. If training in one sensory modality can lead to concomitant enhancements in different sensory modalities, then this could be taken as evidence of a supramodal attentional system. Additionally, if trained musicians exhibit improved perceptual skills outside of the domain of music, this could be taken as evidence for the notion of far-transfer, where training in one domain can lead to improvements in another. To investigate this further, we evaluated the effects of music training using tasks designed to measure simultaneity perception and temporal acuity, and how these are influenced by music training in auditory, visual, and audio-visual conditions. Trained musicians showed significant enhancements for simultaneity perception in the visual modality, as well as generally improved temporal acuity, although not in all conditions. Visual cues directing attention influenced simultaneity perception for musicians for visual discrimination and temporal accuracy in auditory discrimination, suggesting that musicians have selective enhancements in temporal discrimination, arguably due to increased attentional efficiency when compared to nonmusicians. Implications for theory and future training studies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EFFECTIVE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT WITH MUSICAL performance involves social, cognitive and affective elements. We investigate the influence of observers' musical expertise and instrumental motor expertise on their affective and cognitive responses to complex and unfamiliar classical piano performances of works by Scriabin and Hanson presented in audio and audio-visual formats. Observers gave their felt affect (arousal and valence) and their action understanding responses continuously while observing the performances. Liking and familiarity were rated after each excerpt. As hypothesized: visual information enhanced observers' action understanding and liking ratings; observers with music training rated their action understanding, liking and familiarity higher than did nonmusicians; observers' felt affect did not vary according to their musical or motor expertise. Contrary to our hypotheses: visual information had only a slight effect on observers' arousal felt affect responses and none on valence; musicians' specific instrumental motor expertise did not influence action understanding responses. We also observed a significant negative relationship between action understanding and felt affect responses. Ideas of empathy in musical interactions motivated the research; the empathy framework in relation to musical performance is discussed. Nonmusician audiences might be sensitized to challenging musical performances through multimodal strategies to build the performer-observer connection and increase understanding of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WHAT FACTORS INFLUENCE LISTENERS' PERCEPTION of meter in a musical piece or a musical style? Many cues are available in the musical ''surface,'' i.e., the pattern of sounds physically present during listening. Models of meter processing focus on the musical surface. However, percepts of meter and other musical features may also be shaped by reactivation of previously heard music, consistent with exemplar accounts of memory. The current study explores a phenomenon that is here termed metrical restoration: listeners who hear melodies with ambiguous meters report meter preferences that match previous listening experiences in the lab, suggesting reactivation of those experiences. Previous studies suggested that timbre and brief rhythmic patterns may influence metrical restoration. However, variations in the magnitude of effects in different experiments suggest that other factors are at work. Experiments reported here explore variation in metrical restoration as a function of: melodic diversity in timbre and tempo, associations of rhythmic patterns with particular melodies and meters, and associations of meter with overall melodic form. Rhythmic patterns and overall melodic form, but not timbre, had strong influences. Results are discussed with respect to style-specific or culturespecific musical processing, and everyday listening experiences. Implications for models of musical memory are also addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN STUDIES OF PERCEPTUAL AND NEURAL PROCESSING differences between musicians and nonmusicians, participants are typically dichotomized on the basis of personal report of musical experience. The present study relates self-reported musical experience and objectively measured musical aptitude to a skill that is important in music perception: temporal resolution (or acuity). The Advanced Measures of Music Audiation (AMMA) test was used to objectively assess participant musical aptitude, and adaptive psychophysical measurements were obtained to assess temporal resolution on two tasks: within-channel gap detection and acrosschannel gap detection. Results suggest that musical aptitude measured with the AMMA and self-reporting of music experiences (duration of music instruction) are both related to temporal resolution ability in musicians. The relationship between musical aptitude and/or duration of music training is important to music educators advocating for the benefits of music programs as well as in behavioral and neurophysiological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MUSIC OFTEN TRIGGERS A PLEASURABLE URGE IN listeners to move their bodies in response to the rhythm. In music psychology, this experience is commonly referred to as groove. This study presents the Experience of Groove Questionnaire, a newly developed self-report questionnaire that enables respondents to subjectively assess how strongly they feel an urge to move and pleasure while listening to music. The development of the questionnaire was carried out in several stages: candidate questionnaire items were generated on the basis of the groove literature, and their suitability was judged by fifteen groove and rhythm research experts. Two listening experiments were carried out in order to reduce the number of items, to validate the instrument, and to estimate its reliability. The final questionnaire consists of two scales with three items each that reliably measure respondents' urge to move (Cronbach's α = . 92) and their experience of pleasure (α = .97) while listening to music. The two scales are highly correlated (r = .80), which indicates a strong association between motor and emotional responses to music. The scales of the Experience of Groove Questionnaire can independently be applied in groove research and in a variety of other research contexts in which listeners' subjective experience of music-induced movement and enjoyment need to be addressed: for example the study of the interaction between music and motivation in sports and research on therapeutic applications of music in people with neurological movement disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CONSONANCE AND DISSONANCE ARE BASIC phenomena in the perception of chords that can be discriminated very early in sensory processing. Musical expertise has been shown to facilitate neural processing of various musical stimuli, but it is unclear whether this applies to detecting consonance and dissonance. Our study aimed to determine if sensitivity to increasing levels of dissonance differs between musicians and nonmusicians, using a combination of neural (electroencephalographic mismatch negativity, MMN) and behavioral measurements (conscious discrimination). Furthermore, we wanted to see if focusing attention to the sounds modulated the neural processing. We used chords comprised of either highly consonant or highly dissonant intervals and further manipulated the degree of dissonance to create two levels of dissonant chords. Both groups discriminated dissonant chords from consonant ones neurally and behaviorally. The magnitude of the MMN differed only marginally between the more dissonant and the less dissonant chords. The musicians outperformed the nonmusicians in the behavioral task. As the dissonant chords elicited MMN responses for both groups, sensory dissonance seems to be discriminated in an early sensory level, irrespective of musical expertise, and the facilitating effects of musicianship for this discrimination may arise in later stages of auditory processing, appearing only in the behavioral auditory task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rap, the musical element of hip hop culture, has depended on the recorded past to shape its birth, present and, potentially, its future. Founded on a sample-based methodology, the style's perceived authenticity and sonic impact are largely attributed to the use of phonographic records, and the unique conditions offered by composition within a sampling context. Yet, while the dependence on pre-existing recordings challenges traditional notions of authorship, it also results in unavoidable legal and financial implications for sampling composers who, increasingly, seek alternative ways to infuse the sample-based method with authentic content. But what are the challenges inherent in attempting to compose new material--inspired by traditional forms--while adhering to rap's unique sonic rationale, aesthetics and methodology? How does composing within a stylistic frame rooted in the past (i.e. the Blues) differ under the pursuit of contemporary sonics and methodological preferences (i.e. hip hop's sample-based process)? And what are the dynamics of this inter-stylistic synthesis? The article argues that in pursuing specific, stylistically determined sonic objectives, sample-based production facilitates an interactive typology of unique conditions for the composition, appropriation, and divergence of traditional musical forms, incubating era-defying genres that leverage the dynamics of this interaction. The musicological inquiry uses (auto)ethnography reflecting on professional creative practice, in order to investigate compositional problematics specific to the applied blues-hop context, theorize on the nature of inter-stylistic composition, and consider the effects of electronic mediation on genre transformation and stylistic morphing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY, WE INVESTIGATED how well novices can learn from each other in situations of technology-aided musical skill acquisition, comparing joint and solo learning, and learning through imitation, synchronization, and turn-taking. Fifty-four participants became familiar, either solo or in pairs, with three short musical melodies and then individually performed each from memory. Each melody was learned in a different way: participants from the solo group were asked via an instructional video to: 1) play in synchrony with the video, 2) take turns with the video, or 3) imitate the video. Participants fromthe duo group engaged in the same learning trials, but with a partner. Novices in both groups performed more accurately in pitch and time when learning in synchrony and turn-taking than in imitation. No differences were found between solo and joint learning. These results suggest that musical learning benefits from a shared, in-the-moment, musical experience, where responsibilities and cognitive resources are distributed between biological (i.e., peers) and hybrid (i.e., participant(s) and computer) assemblies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE AIM OF THE PRESENT STUDY WAS TO INVESTIGATE if the perception of time is affected by actively attending to different metrical levels in musical rhythmic patterns. in an experiment with a repeated-measures design, musicians and nonmusicians were presented with musical rhythmic patterns played at three different tempi. They synchronized with multiple metrical levels (half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes) of these patterns using a finger-tapping paradigm and listened without tapping. After each trial, stimulus duration was judged using a verbal estimation paradigm. Results show that the metrical level participants synchronized with influenced perceived time: actively attending to a higher metrical level (half notes, longer intertap intervals) led to the shortest time estimations, hence time was experienced as passing more quickly. Listening without tapping led to the longest time estimations. The faster the tempo of the patterns, the longer the time estimation. While there were no differences between musicians and nonmusicians, those participants who tapped more consistently and accurately (as analyzed by circular statistics) estimated durations to be shorter. Thus, attending to different metrical levels in music, by deliberately directing attention and motor activity, affects time perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WE EXPLORE THE EFFECTS OF TRAINED MUSICAL movements on sensorimotor interactions in order to clarify the interpretation of previously observed expertise differences. Pianists and non-pianists listened to an auditory sequence and identified whether the final event occurred in time with the sequence. In half the trials participants listened without moving, and in half they synchronized keystrokes while listening. Pianists and non-pianists were better able to identify the timing of the final tone after synchronizing keystrokes compared to listening only. Curiously, this effect of movement did not differ between pianists and non-pianists despite substantial training differences with respect to finger movements. We also found few group differences in the ability to align keystrokes with events in the auditory sequence; however, movements were less variable (lower coefficient of variation) in pianists compared to nonpianists. Consistent with the idea that the benefits of synchronization on rhythm perception are constrained by motor effector kinematics, this work helps clarify previous findings in this paradigm. We discuss these outcomes in light of training and the kinematics involved in pianist keystrokes compared to musicians synchronizing movements in other studies. We also overview how these differences across motor effector synchronization and training must be accounted for in models of perception and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EXPRESSIVE MUSICAL TERMS (EMTS) ARE commonly used by composers as verbal descriptions of musical expressiveness and characters that performers are requested to convey. We suggest a classification of 55 of these terms, based on the perception of professional music performers who were asked to: 1) organize the considered EMTs in a two-dimensional plane in such a way that proximity reflects similarity; and 2) rate these EMTs according to valence, arousal, extraversion, and neuroticism, using 7-level Likert scales. Using a minimization procedure, we found that a satisfactory partition requires these EMTs to be organized in four clusters (whose centroids are associated with tenderness, happiness, anger, and sadness) located in the four quarters of the valence-arousal plane of the circumplex model of affect developed by Russell (1980). In terms of the related positive-negative activation parameters, introduced byWatson and Tellegen (1985), we obtained a significant correlation between positive activation and extraversion and between negative activation and neuroticism. This demonstrates that these relations, previously observed in personality studies byWatson & Clark (1992a), extend to the musical field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TIMBRE IS AN IMPORTANT FACTOR THAT AFFECTS the perception of emotion in music. To date, little is known about the effects of timbre on neural responses to musical emotion. To address this issue, we used ERPs to investigate whether there are different neural responses to musical emotion when the same melodies are presented in different timbres. With a cross-modal affective priming paradigm, target faces were primed by affectively congruent or incongruent melodies without lyrics presented in the violin, flute, and voice. Results showed a larger P3 and a larger left anterior distributed LPC in response to affectively incongruent versus congruent trials in the voice version. For the flute version, however, only the LPC effect was found, which was distributed over centro-parietal electrodes. Unlike the voice and flute versions, an N400 effect was observed in the violin version. These findings revealed different patterns of neural responses to musical emotion when the same melodies were presented in different timbres, and provide evidence for the hypothesis that there are specialized neural responses to the human voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TRADITIONAL NEUROBIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF musical emotions explain well why extreme music such as punk, hardcore, or metal--whose vocal and instrumental characteristics share much similarity with acoustic threat signals--should evoke unpleasant feelings for a large proportion of listeners. Why it doesn't for metal music fans, however, is controversial: metal fans may differ from non-fans in how they process threat signals at the sub-cortical level, showing deactivated responses that differ from controls. Alternatively, appreciation for metal may depend on the inhibition by cortical circuits of a normal low-order response to auditory threat. In a series of three experiments, we show here that, at a sensory level, metal fans actually react equally negatively, equally fast, and even more accurately to cues of auditory threat in vocal and instrumental contexts than non-fans; conversely, we tested the hypothesis that cognitive load reduced fans' appreciation of metal to the level experienced by non-fans, but found only limited support that it was the case. Nevertheless, taken together, these results are not compatible with the idea that extreme music lovers do so because of a different sensory response to threat, and highlight a potential contribution of controlled cognitive processes in their aesthetic experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented to the article Ahmaud Arbery in the United States led to public outcry and international protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and broader awareness of the effects of systemic racism. Topics include the Society for Music Perception and Cognition has contemplating issues; and to focus on European harmonic practice has to treat as the default, marginalizing the musics and styles.

THE PYTHAGOREANS LINKED MUSICAL INTERVALS with integer ratios, cosmic order, and the human soul. The empirical approach of Aristoxenus, based on real musicians making real music, was neglected. Today, many music scholars and researchers still conceptualize intervals as ratios. We argue that this idea is fundamentally incorrect and present convergent evidence against it. There is no internally consistent "Just" scale: a 6th scale degree that is 5:3 above the 1st is not a perfect 5th (3:2) above the 2nd (9:8). Pythagorean tuning solves this problem, but creates another: ratios of psychologically implausible large numbers. Performers do not switch between two ratios of one interval (e.g., 5:4 and 81:64 for the major third), modern studies of performance intonation show no consistent preferences for specific ratios, and no known brain mechanism is sensitive to ratios in musical contexts. Moreover, physical frequency and perceived pitch are not the same. Rameau and Helmholtz derived musical intervals from the harmonic series, which is audible in everyday sounds including voiced speech; but those intervals, like musical intervals, are perceived categorically. Musical intervals and scales, although they depend in part on acoustic factors, are primarily psychocultural entities-not mathematical or physical. Intervals are historically and culturally variable distances that are learned from oral traditions. There is no perfect tuning for any interval; even octaves are stretched relative to 2:1. Twelve-tone equal temperament is not intrinsically better or worse than Just or Pythagorean. Ratio theory is an important chapter in the history Western musical thought, but it is inconsistent with a modern evidence-based understanding of musical structure, perception and cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on biological studies of musical processing with creative artists the opportunity to communicate with cross-cultural perception and cognition. Topics include cross-cultural investigation of the perception of emotion in music for psychophysical and cultural cues with accent in musical rhythms; and model of expressive timing in tonal music and duration structure and rubato on the piano for music cognition of music perception and music psychology.

STRUCTURE IN MUSICAL RHYTHM CAN BE MEASURED using a number of analytical techniques. While some techniques--like circular statistics or grammar induction--rely on strong top-down assumptions, assumption-free techniques can only provide limited insights on higher-order rhythmic structure. I suggest that research in music perception and performance can benefit from systematically adopting phase space plots, a visualization technique originally developed in mathematical physics that overcomes the aforementioned limitations. By jointly plotting adjacent interonset intervals (IOI), the motivic rhythmic structure of musical phrases, if present, is visualized geometrically without making any a priori assumptions concerning isochrony, beat induction, or metrical hierarchies. I provide visual examples and describe how particular features of rhythmic patterns correspond to geometrical shapes in phase space plots. I argue that research on music perception and systematic musicology stands to benefit from this descriptive tool, particularly in comparative analyses of rhythm production. Phase space plots can be employed as an initial assumption-free diagnostic to find higher order structures (i.e., beyond distributional regularities) before proceeding to more specific, theory-driven analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE IDEA THAT LISTENERS' TONAL/ATONAL SENSE represents a special case of multiple causation was examined, and the following hypothesis was tested: pitch dispersal (i.e., distance in pitch between successive tones) is a secondary determiner of tonality and atonality, the former being strengthened by low levels of pitch dispersal and the latter by high levels of pitch dispersal. A correlational study was conducted in which eight trained listeners judged the degree to which 78 melodies extracted from A. Schoenberg's oeuvre convey a tonic. In line with the present hypothesis, results suggest that listeners' judgments were influenced not only by consonance or pitch class distributions (i.e., by underlying ''scales''), as expected from previous research, but also by pitch dispersal. Interestingly, it was also found that Schoenberg' melodies became not only less diatonic over time, but also more dispersed, which suggests that the joint manipulation of pitch class distributions and pitch dispersal might have been a strategy on Schoenberg's part to weaken the sense of tonality. Some of the key musicological, theoretical, and psychological implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Augustine's appraisal of music's moral value in Confessions, as selectively abbreviated by Isidore of Seville, provides a conceptual framework for understanding early medieval Iberian musical values. Augustine advocates a devotional focus primarily on text, expressing anxiety about elaborate liturgical music. For Isidore, by contrast, diverse melody leads both faithful and unfaithful toward a transcendent anticipation of heaven, beyond reasonbased concentration on text. In this article I test the hypothesis that Isidore's musical values shaped the extant Old Hispanic chant texts and melodies, offering a new appraisal of the way Old Hispanic musical values and practice relate. Examples are drawn from Old Hispanic ("Mozarabic") chant, whose texts (preserved before 732) are closer to the late antique context than any other Western liturgy. Old Hispanic melodies are preserved in unpitched notation ca. 900. The methodology developed here has the potential to be applied to other ritual traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SCIENCE SINCE ANTIQUITY HAS ASKED WHETHER mathematical relationships among acoustic frequencies govern musical relationships. Psychophysics rejected frequency ratio theories, focusing on sensory phenomena predicted by linear analysis of sound. Cognitive psychologists have since focused on long-term exposure to the music of one's culture and short-term sensitivity to statistical regularities. Today evidence is rapidly mounting that oscillatory neurodynamics is an important source of nonlinear auditory responses. This leads us to reevaluate the significance of frequency relationships in the perception of music. Here, we present a dynamical systems analysis of mode-locked neural oscillation that predicts cross-cultural invariances in music perception and cognition. We show that this theoretical framework combines with short- and long-term learning to explain the perception of Hindustani ragas, not only by encultured Indian listeners but also by Western listeners unfamiliar with the style. These findings demonstrate that intrinsic neurodynamics contribute significantly to the perception of musical structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SOUND MASS HAS BEEN AN INFLUENTIAL TREND IN music since the 1950's and yet many questions about its perception remain unanswered. Approaching sound mass from the perspective of auditory scene analysis, we define it as a type of auditory grouping that retains an impression of multiplicity even as it is perceived as a perceptual unit. Sound mass requires all markers of the individual identities of sounds to be deemphasized to prevent them from splitting off into separate streams. Seeking to determine how consistent listeners are in their perception of sound mass, and whether it is possible to determine sound parameters and threshold values that predict sound mass perception, we conducted two perceptual studies on Ligeti's Continuum. This piece consists of an extremely rapid, steady stream of eighth-note dyads with no tempo changes. We addressed the claim by Ligeti and others that the fusion into a continuous texture or sound mass occurs at ca. 20 attacks/s, hypothesizing that other factors such as pitch organization, emergent rhythm, timbre, and register would affect this value. A variety of factors were found to affect sound mass perception, suggesting that the threshold value is not absolute but varies according to principles of auditory scene analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PRESENT STUDY INVESTIGATED THE IMPACT OF simple pair-association mechanisms for the acquisition of absolute pitch. At intervals of two weeks, participants (N = 20 adult nonmusicians) completed three tone identification tests (pre, post, and follow-up test). Participants of the experimental group (n = 10) underwent a ten-day adaptive training between the first and the second test in which they learned to associate pitches with the corresponding name. The results of the posttest revealed a positive effect of training in the experimental group compared to the control group as indicated by a higher proportion of correct responses as well as a smaller deviation measured in semitones in the tone identification task. The effect of training remained stable over the period without any further training (follow-up test). The results of this training study suggest that simple pair-association mechanisms are a key aspect in the development of absolute pitch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS STUDY USES A CORPUS OF EXCERPTS FROM eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century string quartets to examine how four acoustic cues--onset and offset synchrony, pitch comodulation, and spectral overlap--help to afford the perception of auditory streams. Two types of streams are dealt with: textural streams, which house individual string parts or groups of them that function as single musical units; and music streams, which typically house the music as a whole and distinguish it from other simultaneous sounds of music. The corpus contained real excerpts from classical string quartets as well as synthesized excerpts in which lines from two different quartets were combined. Both the author and ten survey respondents analyzed the corpus, identifying likely textural streams. Each of the four acoustic cues was modeled computationally, in order to assess its prevalence in textural and music streams found in the corpus. The results suggested that some cues are more important than others in establishing textural streams, music streams, or both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS PAPER PROPOSES A MODEL THAT AIMS TO illustrate how different human music cultures intersect and "dock in" to a set of music features that are universally perceived, while also displaying culture-specific features that must be learned. The model emphasize that over historic time the music in a given culture can "dock into" and "dock out of" cues that are universally perceived, shifting its potential for cross-cultural perception and interaction. While this model accounts for music ethnological evidence reviewed here, it also explains why universals of music perception cannot simply be determined by specifying the common denominator between the formal music features of a cultures. This report suggests that the Dock-in Mode can be generalized to account for cross-cultural perception more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS ARTICLE CONSIDERS A SIGNAL DETECTION theory (SDT) approach to evaluation of performance on the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA). One hundred fifty-five individuals completed the original binary response version of the MBEA (n = 62) or a confidence rating version (MBEA-C; n = 93). Confidence ratings afforded construction of empirical receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves and derivation of bias-free performance measures against which we compared the standard performance metric, proportion correct (PC), and an alternative signal detection metric, d'. Across the board, PC was tainted by response bias and underestimated performance as indexed by Az, a nonparametric ROC-based performance measure. Signal detection analyses further revealed that some individuals performing worse than the standard PC-based cutoff for amusia diagnosis showed large response biases. Given that PC is contaminated by response bias, this suggests the possibility that categorizing individuals as having amusia or not, using a PC-based cutoff, may inadvertently misclassify some individuals with normal perceptual sensitivity as amusic simply because they have large response biases. In line with this possibility, a comparison of amusia classification using d'- and PC-based cutoffs showed potential misclassification of 3370 of the examined cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

GROOVE IS A SENSATION OF MOVEMENT OR WANTing to move when we listen to certain types of music; it is central to the appreciation of many styles such as Jazz, Funk, Latin, and many more. To better understand the mechanisms that lead to the sensation of groove, we explore the relationship between groove and systematic microtiming deviations. Manifested as small, intentional deviations in timing, systematic microtiming is widely considered within the music community to be a critical component of music performances that groove. To investigate the effect of microtiming on the perception of groove we synthesized typical rhythm patterns for Jazz, Funk, and Samba with idiomatic microtiming deviation patterns for each style. The magnitude of the deviations was parametrically varied from nil to about double the natural level. In two experiments, untrained listeners and experts listened to all combinations of same and different music and microtiming style and magnitude combinations, and rated liking, groove, naturalness, and speed. Contrary to a common and frequently expressed belief in the literature, systematic microtiming led to decreased groove ratings, as well as liking and naturalness, with the exception of the simple short-long shuffle Jazz pattern. A comparison of the ratings between the two listener groups revealed this effect to be stronger for the expert listener group than for the untrained listeners, suggesting that musical expertise plays an important role in the perception and appreciation of microtiming in rhythmic patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a research study on listeners' abilities to segregate melodies from distracting notes, focusing on the effects of timbre and loudness on listeners' musical judgments. The authors discuss the effects of musical training on listeners' ability to segregate melodies, and special attention is paid to the brain networks used by musicians and nonmusicians when processing melodies. Other topics include hearing impairment and cochlear implants.

The article discusses the results of a research study on the emotional connotations of diatonic musical modes such as the Ionian, Mixolydian, and Lydian, focusing on the happiness associated with each mode. Topics discussed include the relationship between familiarity with a mode and the emotions it evokes, the change in emotional connotation based on the mode's position relative to the tonic pitch, and the use of modes in popular music and rock music.

The article presents a review of research on the relationship between music and emotion, focusing on research approaches and methodology, models of emotion, and types of musical stimuli studied. Topics discussed include discrete and dimensional emotional models, studies based on classical music stimuli, and self-report approaches to the study of emotions. The authors discuss problems with prevalent approaches to music and emotion studies and suggest strategies for future research.

The article presents a study on musicians' ability to perform three-interval rhythms, focusing on distortions of interval duration ratios when reproducing rhythms. Topics discussed include a study on the perception of rhythms by psychologist P. Fraisse, the synchronization of rhythms, and musicians' attraction to ideal rhythms.

The present study was designed to investigate differences in auditory and visual temporal information processing between musicians and nonmusicians. For this purpose, timing performance on a set of six different psychophysical temporal tasks for both the auditory and visual sensory modalities was compared in 40 formally trained musicians and 40 controls without musical experience. Across modalities, superior temporal acuity for musicians compared to nonmusicians could be shown for all temporal tasks except for temporal generalization. When comparing the two sensory modalities, temporal acuity was superior to auditory stimuli as compared to visual stimuli, with the exception of the temporal generalization task in the 1-s range. The overall pattern of our findings is consistent with the notion that musicians' long-lasting intensive music training, starting in childhood, improves general timing ability irrespective of sensory modality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoacoustic theories of dissonance often follow Helmholtz and attribute it to partials (fundamental frequencies or overtones) near enough in frequency to affect the same region of the basilar membrane and therefore to cause roughness, i.e., rapid beating. In contrast, tonal theories attribute dissonance to violations of harmonic principles embodied in Western music. We propose a dual-process theory that embeds roughness within tonal principles. The theory predicts the robust increasing trend in the dissonance of triads: major < minor < diminished < augmented. Previous experiments used too few chords for a comprehensive test of the theory, and so Experiment 1 examined the rated dissonance of all 55 possible three-note chords, and Experiment 2 examined a representative sample of 48 of the possible four-note chords. The participants' ratings concurred reliably and corroborated the dual-process theory. Experiment 3 showed that, as the theory predicts, consonant chords are rated as less dissonant when they occur in a tonal sequence (the cycle of fifths) than in a random sequence, whereas this manipulation has no reliable effect on dissonant chords outside common musical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals with congenital amusia have difficulty recognizing and discriminating melodies. While much research has focused on the perceptual deficits of congenital amusics, the extent to which these deficits have an impact on the ability to engage with and appreciate music remains unexplored. The current study used experience sampling methodology to identify distinct patterns of music-related behavior in individuals with amusia and matched controls. Cluster analysis was used to group individuals according to the similarity of their behavior, regardless of their status as amusic or control. This yielded a two-cluster solution: one cluster comprising 59% of the amusic sample and 6% of controls and the other comprising 41% of the amusic sample and 94% of controls. Comparisons of the two clusters in terms of specific aspects of music listening behavior revealed differences in levels of music engagement and appreciation. Further comparisons provided support for the existence of amusic subgroups showing distinct attitudes toward music. The findings are discussed in relation to social, contextual, and demographic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study addressed episodic and semantic memory for melodies in three groups of participants: 35 younger adults, 40 older adults, and 10 individuals with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD). To assess episodic memory, a study list of eight novel target melodies was presented three times, followed by a test trial in which target melodies were mixed with foil (previously unheard) melodies. Both explicit and implicit measures were obtained. Explicit memory was assessed by the accuracy of discrimination of the target melodies from the foils. Younger adults were significantly more accurate than older adults, who in turn had significantly higher scores than AD adults. Implicit memory was assessed by examining the difference in pleasantness ratings between target and foil melodies. Younger adults showed significantly greater differences in pleasantness ratings than older adults and AD adults; scores for the two latter groups did not differ. To assess semantic memory, participants were asked to identify traditional melodies within a series of traditional and novel melodies. In contrast to the episodic memory results, all three groups showed very high scores on the semantic memory task with no significant differences among groups. The results support the notion that, though other forms of musical memory may be compromised, semantic memory for melody may be preserved in normal aging and in AD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

POLYPHONIC TIMBRE PERCEPTION WAS INVESTIGATED IN A cross-cultural context wherein Indian and Western nonmusicians rated short Indian and Western popular music excerpts (1.5 s, n = 200) on eight bipolar scales. Intrinsic dimensionality estimation revealed a higher number of perceptual dimensions in the timbi'e space for music from one's own culture. Factor analyses of Indian and Western participants' ratings resulted in highly similar factor solutions. The acoustic features that predicted the perceptual dimensions were similar across the two participant groups. Furthermore, both the perceptual dimensions and their acoustic correlates matched closely with the results of a previous study performed using Western musicians as participants. Regression analyses revealed relatively well performing models for the perceptual dimensions. The models displayed relatively high cross-validation performance. The findings suggest the presence of universal patterns in polyphonic timbre perception while demonstrating the increase of dimensionality of timbre space as a result of enculturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE SKILL OF ABSOLUTE PITCH (AP) HAS BEEN PROPOSED an ideal paradigm for investigating the complex relationships that exist between the genome and its expression at a cognitive and behavioral level (the phenotype). Yet despite this, we still have limited understanding of the early conditions that might be necessary or sufficient for development of this skill, and the influence of the current music environment has not been explored. To investigate these issues we undertook a detailed characterization of the early and current music-environment of 160 musicians, and then identified factors predictive of varying extent of AP ability. The results demonstrate a similar contribution of past and present environmental influences, with a combination of factors (rather than any given factor) most salient in AP musicians. The novel finding for the role of the current environment suggests that auditory processing models emphasizing plasticity effects are relevant to AP ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about three meetings is presented including the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) and Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM), July 2012 in Greece; the International Symposium on Performance Science (ISPS), August 2011 in Canada; and the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, August 2011 in New York. The journal's website is also presented, located at www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=musicperception.