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While certain musical genres and songs are widely popular, there is still large variability in the music that individuals find rewarding or emotional, even among those with a similar musical enculturation. Interestingly, there is one Western genre that is intended to attract minimal attention and evoke a mild emotional response: elevator music. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that elevator music consistently elicits low pleasure and surprise. Participants reported elevator music as being less pleasurable than music from popular genres, even when participants did not regularly listen to the comparison genre. Participants reported elevator music to be familiar even when they had not explicitly heard the presented song before. Computational and behavioral measures of surprisal showed that elevator music was less surprising, and thus more predictable, than other well‐known genres. Elevator music covers of popular songs were rated as less pleasurable, surprising, and arousing than their original counterparts. Finally, we used elevator music as a control for self‐selected rewarding songs in a proof‐of‐concept physiological (electrodermal activity and piloerection) experiment. Our results suggest that elevator music elicits low emotional responses consistently across Western music listeners, making it a unique control stimulus for studying musical novelty, pleasure, and surprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the social factors shaping musical repertoires? This paper analyzes repertoires as social relations among performers, refracted through factors such as the organization of industry, genres, race, and gender. Using data from American popular music recordings, performers and songs are treated as a two-mode network and repertoire communities are operationalized as bicliques. The production of culture perspective, the sociology of genres, and theories of race and gender imply hypotheses that are tested diachronically. Analysis finds support for the first two, with genres becoming the strongest basis of repertoire community membership while race and gender are surprisingly weak. Importantly, these factors worked in tandem as reflexive mechanisms for each other. The repertoire community system documents the rise of genre as the primary means of categorizing American popular music in the early twentieth century and mediated the effect of other factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the conditions of multiculturalism, Chinese vocal art has formed its own unique theoretical system based on the characteristics of vocalization, articulation, diction, and breathing. The aims of the study are to identify singing features in Chinese popular and traditional music, as well as to determine the ways in which musical genres influence vocals. Two teachers of modern vocal, two teachers of traditional vocal, 30 students of the Vocal Arts Department of Beijing University, art historians from the Central Conservatory of Music and Lishui University took part in the study. According to the study purpose, it was found that in traditional Chinese vocal arts, the main technique is falsetto (58%), mixed techniques (21.2%), vibrato (13.2%), overtone singing (6.1%), and glissando (1.5%) are also used. In popular singing the key technique is splitting (33.6%), also used: subtone (20.2%), vibrato (17.7%), drive (12.1%), glissando (11.1%), vocal fry register (9.2%), falsetto (3.3%), overtone singing (2%). As a result of the correlation analysis the dependence of popular singing techniques on traditional singing was determined. The coefficient of determination was 33.5%. It was also determined that when performing pop music, vibrato is controlled; noises and growling tones are used in rock music; uncontrolled vibrato, falsetto, and mixed techniques are used in opera; nasal sounds and minimal vibrato are in folk/country music; clear diction, articulation, slides, and scatting in blues/jazz; rhythmic and nasal sounds in hip-hop. The experiment results can be used in pedagogy for teaching vocals in China and abroad, as part of cultural activities related to the organization of events such as festivals, concerts, tourist programs, theatrical performances, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining mahragānāt, a genre of music common among the lowincome working class in Cairo, and upper-class pop music, this article studies the expression of love and grief across socio-economic classes in Egypt. It challenges the mainstream argument that men, especially those belonging to lower socioeconomic classes, are expected to perform 'like men' and suppress their emotions and affection. These mahragānāt exhibit extreme affection and grief as men threat of inflicting self-harm or committing suicide if they lose their female lovers. This genre's popularity on social media resonates with increasing suicide rates among lower socio-economic classes due to failed love affairs. By focusing on expressions of love in Egyptian music, this article suggests a dialectic relation between love, class and the understanding of masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are higher status cultural tastes in the modern United States better described as being inclusive and broad or exclusive and narrow? We construct an original dataset in response to conflicting answers to this question. We fill a major gap in the literature on cultural tastes by simultaneously considering taste for both musical genres and artists within genres. By examining the compositional balance of respondents' taste portfolios, we reconcile seemingly incommensurate theoretical frameworks of class homology and omnivorousness. The results indicate that an omnivorous disposition to music is a relatively middle-status position in the social structure. In contrast, positions characterized by higher levels of cultural capital map onto exclusive and narrower tastes for consecrated culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study investigates the presence of verbal objectification in Rap, Country, Adult Contemporary, Rock, Rhythm & Blues (R&B)/Hip-Hop, and Pop music lyrics through a content analysis of the top 20 U.S. Billboard songs in each category from 2009 to 2013. Using objectification theory, we assessed the inclusion of body objectification, gaze, and attractiveness themes in music lyrics, genre and gender differences in the prevalence of objectification, and self-objectification. In support of previous research on objectification, our findings document clear genre and gender differences. Rap and R&B/Hip-Hop featured significantly more objectification than other genres. Women are the most frequent targets of objectification within music lyrics, and female artists are more likely than male artists are to objectify themselves. However, the greater frequency of top 20 songs by male artists indicates consumers are exposed to more messages about men objectifying their own bodies. Future research areas are proposed with an emphasis on the continued investigation of verbal objectification in music lyrics. Practical implications are discussed based on the findings, and the potential impact of objectification in music on audiences. The authors highlight strategies, such as media literacy training, to address this topic in young audiences that may be useful to many types of professionals, including therapists/counselors, activists/social policy makers, instructors, and organizational administrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past century, sociocultural and technological developments have fostered the emergence of what Peterson and Kern (1996) call "omnivorous" music listeners, who listen to music from a variety of different genres. As well, non-hierarchical forms of categorization, such as tagging, have appeared in recent years. Despite such trends, genre remains the primary basis for categorizing music in systems with content, metadata, or both. Furthermore, techniques employed within many recommender systems, intended to aid listeners with finding music for recreational listening, indirectly continue to reflect genre-based categorization and taste. This paper provides an overview of the contexts in which such trends have emerged. It also considers prospects for incorporating actively nuanced dimensions of similarity into recommender systems, which could enable users to engage in cross-genre music discovery more easily than current systems allow. To provide further grounding for such possibilities, I am currently conducting a study to determine how "avid recreational music listeners" conceptualize musical similarity. This paper discusses the study's methodology, which consists of semi-structured interviews and music-seeking exercises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voice is, next to the face, a defining aspect of the persona of popular music stars. This article seeks to understand the voice prior to lyrical content and genre convention. How does the voice relate to a singer and his or her body? Is the singing voice a sign of an individual? Does it rather embody a tradition, a nation or a generation? Or are the voices of Chinese popular music radically disembodied and phony? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]