Understanding students' physiological characteristics is essential in piano teaching. However, how can teachers in the field know what music suits their students physiologically? This paper explores a new theory in sport science called, "the Four-Stance Theory" to provide teachers with a simple yet practical method to understand students' physiological nature. A survey-based experiment with 20 research participants (10 male and 10 female pianists) was conducted. Research participants were physically tested for their physiological "Stance Types" to see if pianists' physiological characteristics can predict their preferences for certain composers' music. Chi-square tests of independence showed that Stance Type can indeed predict what type of composers they favor (p < .05); further, this simple 10-minute physical test could also predict what types of composer's works they feel most technically comfortable to perform (p < .01) and feel are easier to understand (p < .05). These results indicate that this remarkably simple method could effectively discern pianists' physiological nature and predict which composer's music suits them physiologically. The authors envision that this 10-minute test could be useful for bringing physiological preparedness to both teachers and students.

The interesting study by Watanabe and Takeda (2023) found a significant association between musical affinity and physiological characteristics of piano students. However, several issues limit the reliability of their work and make a sensitive interpretation of their results rather premature. This commentary discusses three main limitations of the study and suggests possible solutions to be implemented in future research.

This article introduces the Mysterium corpus, the complete published oeuvre of Alexander Scriabin’s 207 solo piano works, and makes the corpus available in Humdrum’s kern format. Scriabin’s music presents distinct challenges, specifically in relation to his use of complex rhythmic and metric explorations and the idiosyncratic ways in which he notated his compositional ideas. While this sidetdataset is focused on Scriabin, the methodological challenges explored in the article may shed light on the encoding process for other related late-tonal and early post-tonal repertoires. As such, this article provides a case study of methodological considerations involved in systematically translating messy musical notations into a symbolic encoding of the musical data. Finally, this article provides descriptive statistics of the corpus, especially focusing on Scriabin’s treatment of meter and two harmonies (i.e., the dominant-seventh chord with lowered fifth, and the “Mystic” chord), and discusses the applicability of the Mysterium corpus for future research.

In this paper we theorize that there are specific musical features that contribute to a melody’s character which we define as melodiousness and conduct a large-scale corpus analysis to examine whether there are differences in the melodiousness of popular hit songs from the 1960s compared with present-day pop songs. To carry out the corpus analysis, we use a new approach for generating symbolic data for popular music melodies to overcome the lack of preexisting symbolic data. In addition, we attempt to answer the question of whether any key characteristics of melodiousness appear to have changed or shifted in notable ways over time.

I comment on Clark and Arthur's response to a YouTuber’s claim of the death of melody for which they used corpus analysis and statistical methods of computational musicology. While I basically appreciate the effort, I also will discuss three pertinent problems I see ingrained here: whether such claims can be substantiated in any form in the first place, and how to react to dubious claims disseminated from YouTube musicology, and I will also shortly discuss some methodological issues.

Music is a stimulus that is known to have manipulative potential in different societal contexts. Misattributed arousal is one mechanism through which music may affect perception and behavior. Lee and Zaryab (this volume) present a study that examined the influence of groove on sexual selection in a simulated speed-dating paradigm, building upon research by Marin et al. (2017) and Chang et al. (2021). Their results indicate that groove ratings predicted sexual attraction among males, but not among females. This commentary discusses several methodological issues and suggests possible refinements for future studies on music-induced arousal transfer, which may ultimately enhance our understanding of how music can affect mate choice. Finally, I discuss the topic in the context of the origins of music and musicality.

Statistics derived from the Essen Folksong Collection have widely been used as a proxy for general stylistic norms familiar to Western listeners. Since the specific facets of contemporary musical experience best modeled by a corpus of nineteenth-century European folksongs remain ambiguous, this study tests whether Essen-like music might be familiar to North American listeners through common children’s songs. Comparison with a corpus of 38 English-language children’s songs highly popular in North America finds that scale degrees from Essen and the children’s song corpus have near-perfect correlations in frequency profiles as well as high to very high correlations in tonal expectations and 4-grams. Profiles of scale degrees’ downbeat probabilities and average durations have moderate to high correlations for the diatonic but not the total chromatic. Overall, profiles of scale-degree behavior from the children’s song corpus match profiles from Essen more closely than do profiles from another corpus of music widely familiar to contemporary listeners (Billboard Hot 100 songs) and similarly closely as a corpus of nineteenth-century common-practice German vocal music (Schubert songs). For contemporary North American listeners, studies relying on Essen might plausibly be reinterpreted in terms of Essen acting as a corpus of early musical experience although the generalizability of Essen-derived statistics likely depends on the precise statistics being measured.

This is a commentary on Quan et al. (2022) about their paper on world music open earedness and functional uses of music in relationship with psychological and sociocultural adaptations in student sojourners in Australia. The strengths of the paper, including the significance of cross-cultural music research and its applications for mental well-being, are discussed. Additionally, comparing responses through control groups and providing clear definitions of “novel and unfamiliar” musical excerpts for future replications are suggested in more detail in this commentary.

In this commentary, I discuss Verosky’s article, “Essen as a Corpus of Early Musical Experience” from my position as a developmental psychologist. I consider how Verosky’s findings connect to what is known about early cognitive development, discuss how the corpus fits into efforts to characterize early environments, and raise questions for future study.