Song Excerpts Research Articles

Neural correlates of musical familiarity: a functional magnetic resonance study.

Existing neuroimaging studies on neural correlates of musical familiarity often employ a familiar vs. unfamiliar contrast analysis. This singular analytical approach reveals associations between explicit musical memory and musical familiarity. However, is the neural activity associated with musical familiarity solely related to explicit musical memory, or could it also be related to implicit musical memory? To address this, we presented 130 song excerpts of varying familiarity to 21 participants. While acquiring their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we asked the participants to rate the familiarity of each song on a five-point scale. To comprehensively analyze the neural correlates of musical familiarity, we examined it from four perspectives: the intensity of local neural activity, patterns of local neural activity, global neural activity patterns, and functional connectivity. The results from these four approaches were consistent and revealed that musical familiarity is related to the activity of both explicit and implicit musical memory networks. Our findings suggest that: (1) musical familiarity is also associated with implicit musical memory, and (2) there is a cooperative and competitive interaction between the two types of musical memory in the perception of music.

Emotional and musical factors combined with song-specific age predict the subjective autobiographical saliency of music in older adults.

Music that evokes strong emotional responses is often experienced as autobiographically salient. Through emotional experience, the musical features of songs could also contribute to their subjective autobiographical saliency. Songs which have been popular during adolescence or young adulthood (ages 10-30) are more likely to evoke stronger memories, a phenomenon known as a reminiscence bump. In the present study, we sought to determine how song-specific age, emotional responsiveness to music, musical features, and subjective memory functioning contribute to the subjective autobiographical saliency of music in older adults. In a music listening study, 112 participants rated excerpts of popular songs from the 1950s to the 1980s for autobiographical saliency. Additionally, they filled out questionnaires about emotional responsiveness to music and subjective memory functioning. The song excerpts' musical features were extracted computationally using MIRtoolbox. Results showed that autobiographical saliency was best predicted by song-specific age and emotional responsiveness to music and musical features. Newer songs that were more similar in rhythm to older songs were also rated higher in autobiographical saliency. Overall, this study contributes to autobiographical memory research by uncovering a set of factors affecting the subjective autobiographical saliency of music.

Jackson do Pandeiro: anotações sobre o cotidiano na obra do Rei do Ritmo

ABSTRACT The present article, which is theoretical, bibliographical as well as phonographic-documental in nature, aims to reflect on how daily life influenced Jackson do Pandeiro’s compositions and interpretations. Moments of Jackson do Pandeiro’s trajectory and excerpts of songs were selected to expose the importance of daily life for his work. The article shows that Jackson do Pandeiro’s works establish a dialectic relationship with the society that raised him, enabling listeners to access a critical potency. This potentiality grants them a new set of lenses to interpret daily life, which, in turn, is the cradle of artists’ inspiration. This set of factors led the musical sphere as well as some of the Brazilian intellectual elite to consider Jackson do Pandeiro the King of Rhythm in the Música Popular Brasileira, MPB [Brazilian Folk Music].

A new fingerprint definition for effective song recognition

Music and song recognition is an activity of wide interest for researchers and companies due to the intrinsic challenges and the possible economic profits it can give. Despite basic algorithms about song recognition are simple in principle, it is quite difficult to obtain an efficient and robust approach able to generate an effective algorithm for identifying songs on the fly. This statement is proved by the fact that there are very few companies in the world having their core business into this field, even if the potential market is very huge. In this paper, we propose a new approach for generating fingerprints from excerpts of songs that is the first step in implementing a complete algorithm of song recognition. Their generation is based on the Welch’s method for spectral density estimation, the use of a Mel filter bank and an exponential adaptive threshold curve in the frequency domain never used before. Even if the previous techniques are not new, at the best of our knowledge they are not used all together for fingerprint generation. Our main purpose is to show that the proposed fingerprint generation approach permits to obtain a very high accuracy in recognizing pieces of song and their position inside the song, as well as it appears robust compared to typical alteration of the audio signal. Specifically, the fingerprints we generate are highly insensitive to noise and audio lossy compression algorithms; moreover, we think the method is prone also to generate pitch insensitive fingerprints with a small modification. We show through an experimentation with a large database of songs the recognition accuracy obtained with our fingerprints is better than the landmark-based approach (already used by the famous Shazam application). This is not a negligible results because even small improvements means a very large number of more recognitions, with higher profit prospects in industrial applications. In order to better focus on the fingerprint structure and its generation algorithm, we don’t discuss any specific search algorithm, that is a subject of further work, and we use a linear search only in our experiments; in such a way, we think the goodness of the fingerprint as such is better evinced.

The Optimal Mix? Presentation Order Affects Preference Ratings of Vocal Amplitude Levels in Popular Music

Mixing popular music is a complex task requiring the consideration of artistic goals, as well as preferences of both the mixing engineer and potential listeners. Vocals are of particular importance in the mixing process. Here, we tested whether listeners possess stable preferences for the mixing level of vocals, whether these preferences are subject to order effects, and the extent to which individual differences between listeners play a role. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants rated which of two mixes in a pair of song excerpts (unchanged reference versus comparison mix with adjusted vocal level) they preferred. Each excerpt pair was presented in two orders – reference first and comparison first. Generally, listeners preferred increased vocal levels and showed pronounced primacy effects, yielding higher ratings for the mix that was presented first. To circumvent order effects, Experiment 3 presented and asked for a rating of only one excerpt at a time and showed ratings similar to reference-first excerpt pairs in Experiments 1 and 2. No systematic influences of demographic variables were observed. However, we found two clusters of participants that differed in their overall preferences, with one group showing stronger preferences for higher vocal levels. The present findings underscore the role of listening history of the immediate past in complex auditory tasks such as evaluating the level of a salient sound source in a musical mixture.

When Music Speaks: An Acoustic Study of the Speech Surrogacy of the Nigerian Dùndún Talking Drum

Yorùbá dùndún drumming is an oral tradition which allows for manipulation of gliding pitch contours in ways that correspond to the differentiation of the Yorùbá linguistic tone levels. This feature enables the drum to be employed as both a musical instrument and a speech surrogate. In this study, we examined four modes of the dùndún talking drum, compared them to vocal singing and talking in the Yorùbá language, and analyzed the extent of microstructural overlap between these categories, making this study one of the first to examine the vocal surrogacy of the drum in song. We compared the fundamental frequency, timing pattern, and intensity contour of syllables from the same sample phrase recorded in the various communicative forms and we correlated each vocalization style with each of the corresponding drumming modes. We analyzed 30 spoken and sung verbal utterances and their corresponding drum and song excerpts collected from three native Yorùbá speakers and three professional dùndún drummers in Nigeria. The findings confirm that the dùndún can very accurately mimic microstructural acoustic temporal, fundamental frequency, and intensity characteristics of Yorùbá vocalization when doing so directly, and that this acoustic match systematically decreases for the drumming modes in which more musical context is specified. Our findings acoustically verify the distinction between four drumming mode categories and confirm their acoustical match to corresponding verbal modes. Understanding how musical and speech aspects interconnect in the dùndún talking drum clarifies acoustical properties that overlap between vocal utterances (speech and song) and corresponding imitations on the drum and verifies the potential functionality of speech surrogacy communications systems.

What makes music memorable? Relationships between acoustic musical features and music-evoked emotions and memories in older adults

Music has a unique capacity to evoke both strong emotions and vivid autobiographical memories. Previous music information retrieval (MIR) studies have shown that the emotional experience of music is influenced by a combination of musical features, including tonal, rhythmic, and loudness features. Here, our aim was to explore the relationship between music-evoked emotions and music-evoked memories and how musical features (derived with MIR) can predict them both. Healthy older adults (N = 113, age ≥ 60 years) participated in a listening task in which they rated a total of 140 song excerpts comprising folk songs and popular songs from 1950s to 1980s on five domains measuring the emotional (valence, arousal, emotional intensity) and memory (familiarity, autobiographical salience) experience of the songs. A set of 24 musical features were extracted from the songs using computational MIR methods. Principal component analyses were applied to reduce multicollinearity, resulting in six core musical components, which were then used to predict the behavioural ratings in multiple regression analyses. All correlations between behavioural ratings were positive and ranged from moderate to very high (r = 0.46-0.92). Emotional intensity showed the highest correlation to both autobiographical salience and familiarity. In the MIR data, three musical components measuring salience of the musical pulse (Pulse strength), relative strength of high harmonics (Brightness), and fluctuation in the frequencies between 200-800 Hz (Low-mid) predicted both music-evoked emotions and memories. Emotional intensity (and valence to a lesser extent) mediated the predictive effect of the musical components on music-evoked memories. The results suggest that music-evoked emotions are strongly related to music-evoked memories in healthy older adults and that both music-evoked emotions and memories are predicted by the same core musical features.

WordUp: An app that teaches English words through extensive exposure to authentic materials

This paper reviews WordUp, a mobile application which fosters English vocabulary learning through exposure to new words in authentic and engaging contexts such as excerpts of movies, songs, and news programme. The samples of use are introduced after the definition of the target words have been provided in both the learners’ first language and English. In this review, the advantage of extensive exposure to authentic use of the target words will be discussed. Moreover,some of the app’sshortcomingssuch as its unsuitability for beginner learners and insufficient tasks to improve the users’ production of the learned vocabulary will be highlighted. WordUp is recommended for learners above level A1 The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) who wish to learn theappropriate application of the learned material through authentic input.

Boosting Autobiographical Memory and the Sense of Identity of Alzheimer Patients Through Repeated Reminiscence Workshops?

Despite severe amnesia, some studies showed that Alzheimer Disease (AD) patients with moderate to severe dementia keep a consistent, but impoverished representation of themselves, showing preservation of the sense of identity even at severe stages of the illness. Some studies suggest that listening to music can facilitate the reminiscence of autobiographical memories and that stimulating autobiographical memory would be relevant to support the self of these patients. Consequently, we hypothesized that repeated participation to reminiscence workshops, using excerpts of familiar songs as prompts would participate to the enrichment of autobiographical memories, self-representation and sense of identity. We included a group of 20 AD patients with severe dementia residing in nursing homes. Their performances were compared to a control group of 20 matched (age, education, mood) healthy residents living in the same institutions. The experiment was conducted in three phases over a 2-week period. On phase 1, an individual assessment of sense of identity was proposed to each participant. On phase 2, participants joined musical reminiscence workshops (six sessions over 2 weeks for AD patients and 3 sessions over a week for controls). During the third phase (12 days after the first assessment), individual evaluation of autobiographical memory and a second assessment of sense of identity were proposed. Our results showed that, despite their massive amnesia syndrome, autobiographical memories of AD reached at the end of the 2 weeks the number and quality of those of matched controls. Moreover, we confirmed a continuity of self-representation in AD patients with a stable profile of the answers between the first and second individual assessments of sense of identity. However, the increase in number and episodic quality of autobiographical memories was not accompanied by an enrichment of the sense of identity. In a complementary study, new patients participated in the same paradigm, but using movie extracts as prompts, and showed very similar effects. We discuss all of these results with regard to the literature showing the significant impact of repetition on the reactivation of memory traces even in very amnestic AD patients at severe stages of the disease.

Disco Time: The Relationship Between Perceived Duration and Tempo in Music

Our perception of the duration of a piece of music is related to its tempo. When listening to music, absolute durations may seem longer as the tempo—the rate of an underlying pulse or beat—increases. Yet, the perception of tempo itself is not absolute. In a study on perceived tempo, participants were able to distinguish between different tempo-shifted versions of the same song (± 5 beats per minute (BPM)), yet their tempo ratings did not match the actual BPM rates; this finding was called tempo anchoring effect (TAE). In order to gain further insights into the relation between duration and tempo perception in music, the present study investigated the effect of musical tempo on two different duration measures, to see if there is an analog to the TAE in duration perception. Using a repeated-measures design, 32 participants (16 musicians) were randomly presented with instrumental excerpts of Disco songs at the original tempi and in tempo-shifted versions. The tasks were (a) to reproduce the absolute duration of each stimulus (14–20 s), (b) to estimate the absolute duration of the stimuli in seconds, and (c) to rate the perceived tempo. Results show that duration reproductions were longer with faster tempi, yet no such effect was found for duration estimations. Thus, lower-level reproductions were affected by the tempo, but higher-level estimations were not. The tempo-shifted versions showed no effect on both duration measures, suggesting that the tempo difference for the duration-lengthening effect requires a difference of at least 20 BPM, depending on the duration measure. Results of perceived tempo replicated the typical rating pattern of the TAE, but this was not found in duration measures. The roles of spontaneous motor tempo and musical experience are discussed, and implications for future studies are given.

Farewell to Holbrook & Schindler’s (1989) “Song-Specific Age”? – Little Evidence for Lifelong Influence of Age-Specific Musical Preferences

As predicted by Holbrook and Schindler (1989) in a seminal study, popular music from the charts released when a person is roughly 23.47 years old (so-called Song-Specific Age, SSA) has a particularly positive impact on that person’s song evaluations decades later. In our replication study, N = 162 participants ( M age = 59.1 years, SD = 17.3) indicated their preferences for 18 song excerpts randomly selected from a corpus of 87 German Top 10 chart hits, released between 1930 and 2017. The fitting of a quadratic curve (as in the original study) to the aggregated ratings revealed a much earlier overall SSA peak at 14.16 years ( R 2 = .184). The best approximation to the original SSA peak of 23.47 years was found only for the elderly subgroup of participants aged 50+ years with an SSA value of 22.63 years, however, with a relatively low goodness-of-fit ( R 2 = .225). To summarize, the original finding of an SSA peak in the phase of early adulthood (23.47 years) could not be confirmed in terms of a point estimate. Instead, various subgroups showed various SSA peaks. The decomposition of ratings on the song level by latent profile analysis revealed four basic rating patterns (constantly high, constantly low, increasing, and decreasing over time) that might explain the different findings of the overall course of SSA regression curves within our subgroups without reference to the concept of SSA. Results are discussed in favor of current dynamic models of lifelong changes in musical preferences. We conclude that today, the SSA proposition – at least in its original form – seems to be of only limited validity for the explanation of musical preferences.

Vocal emotion expressions in infant‐directed singing: The impact of war trauma and maternal mental health and the consequences on infant development

AbstractMaternal singing is considered vital to infant well‐being. This study focuses on vocal emotion expressions in infant‐directed singing among mothers in war conditions. It examines the questions: (a) how traumatic war events and mental health problems are associated with the content and valence of vocal emotion expressions and (b) how these emotion expressions are associated with infant development. The vocal material consists of songs sung by 50 Palestinian mothers who participated at delivery (T1) as well as when their infants were 6 (T2) and 18 (T3) months of age. These mothers reported traumatic war events (T1); depressive and post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms (T2–T3); and infants' emotional, sensorimotor, and cognitive development (T2–T3). Student judges evaluated the valence and content of vocal emotion expressions in maternal infant‐directed singing (playfulness‐vivacity, fear, joy, sadness, love‐tenderness, anger, and tension). Severe traumatic war events and depressive symptoms were associated with low positive and high negative vocal emotion expressions. High levels of playfulness and joy, as well as low levels of fear and tension, were associated with infant positive affectivity, while low levels of fear, anger, and tension were associated with advanced infant language skills. Discussion focuses on the vocal markers of maternal mental health and infant development.Highlights How are maternal war trauma and mental health problems (symptoms of depression and post‐traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]) associated with the valence and content of mothers' vocal emotion expressions when they sing to their infants? How are the maternal vocal emotion expressions associated with infant emotional and sensorimotor development? Methodologically, the study involved cultural in‐ and out‐group judges to evaluate maternal vocal emotion expressions. The vocal material consisted of song excerpts of 50 Palestinian women from the Gaza strip, which is sung in Arabic. War trauma was photodocumented; mothers reported their symptoms of depression and PTSD; and infant emotion development by the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ), sensorimotor development, is based on the Bayley test. Maternal vocal emotion expression in infant‐directed singing can provide a marker for her mental health in transition to parenthood. Further, valence and content of infant‐directed singing are vital for infant emotional and sensorimotor development.

Development of emotion recognition in popular music and vocal bursts

ABSTRACT Previous research on the development of emotion recognition in music has focused on classical, rather than popular music. Such research does not consider the impact of lyrics on judgements of emotion in music, impact that may differ throughout development. We had 172 children, adolescents, and adults (7- to 20-year-olds) judge emotions in popular music. In song excerpts, the melody of the music and the lyrics had either congruent valence (e.g. happy lyrics and melody), or incongruent valence (e.g. scared lyrics, happy melody). We also examined participants’ judgements of vocal bursts, and whether emotion identification was linked to emotion lexicon. Recognition of emotions in congruent music increased with age. For incongruent music, age was positively associated with judging the emotion in music by the melody. For incongruent music with happy or sad lyrics, younger participants were more likely to answer with the emotion of the lyrics. For scared incongruent music, older adolescents were more likely to answer with the lyrics than older and younger participants. Age groups did not differ on their emotion lexicons, nor recognition of emotion in vocal bursts. Whether children use lyrics or melody to determine the emotion of popular music may depend on the emotion conveyed.

Reaksi Detak Jantung Musisi Amatir dan Non-Amatir Terhadap Repatoar Klasik Bertempo Cepat dan Lambat dan Musik Dangdut.

The importance of music in our daily life has given rise to an increased number of studies addressing the brain regions involved in its appreciation. Some of these studies controlled only for the familiarity of the stimuli, while others relied on pleasantness ratings, and others still on musical preferences. With a listening test and a recorded heart rate ratings experiment, we wished to clarify the role of familiarity in the brain correlates and the reaction of cardiovascular system of music appreciation by controlling, in the same study, for both familiarity and musical preferences. First, we conducted a listening test, in which participants rated the familiarity and liking of song excerpts from the classical repertoire and dangdut. Music the recorded fluctuation of heart rate gives us a slight information that there is/are factors that influence human biology system to respond music, aside from the natural respond of body to music in terms of experience that amateur and non-amateur musician had. Hence, familiarity seems to be a crucial factor in making the listeners emotionally engaged with music.

The Street Ideology: Sexual Contours in Nigerian Hip-Hop Music

Nigerian hip-hop thrives on open discussion of sex and sexuality. Although it is generally viewed as unacceptable to engage in uninhibited sexual discussion or behaviour in Nigeria, especially where females are concerned, Nigerian female hip-hop artistes freely indulge in blatant sex-talk and overt sexual display in their music and videos. This study examines sexual ideologies in the lyrics of Nigerian female hip-hop artistes with the aim of teasing out the sex and sexual themes portrayed in relation to the prevailing Nigerian cultural attitude towards sex and sexuality. In this regard, ten song excerpts of seven Nigerian female hip-hop artistes are selected for analysis, using ideological strategies and an aspect of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics—the ideation function of language. The analysis reveals that the success of hip-hop music lies in its lyrical appeal to, and the existential representation of, the subculture of sex and sexuality of the artistes on the street. The study also notes the need for rethinking the concept of sexploitation since women themselves exploit sex (as reflected in their music) and their sexuality to wield power against male hegemony and dominance. On balance, the significance of survival, as a vital human instinct, comes to the fore; and this instinct, which is embodied in the street culture of sex and sexuality, can help the Nigerian female hip-hop artistes thrive in a music industry that operates in the context of male domination and a culture that discourages open expression of sex and sexuality.

Decomposing Complexity Preferences for Music.

Recently, we demonstrated complexity as a major factor for explaining individual differences in visual preferences for abstract digital art. We have shown that participants could best be separated into two groups based on their liking ratings for abstract digital art comprising geometric patterns: one group with a preference for complex visual patterns and another group with a preference for simple visual patterns. In the present study, building up on these results, we extended our investigations for complexity preferences from highly controlled visual stimuli to ecologically valid stimuli in the auditory modality. Similar to visual preferences, we showed that music preferences are highly influenced by stimulus complexity. We demonstrated this by clustering a large number of participants based on their liking ratings for song excerpts from various musical genres. Our results show that, based on their liking ratings, participants can best be separated into two groups: one group with a preference for more complex songs and another group with a preference for simpler songs. Finally, we considered various demographic and personal characteristics to explore differences between the groups, and reported that at least for the current data set age and gender to be significant factors separating the two groups.

Computer-based music feature analysis mirrors human perception and can be used to measure individual music preference

This paper explores the measurement of individual music feature preference using human- and computer-rated music excerpts. In the first of two studies, we correlated human ratings of song excerpts with computer-extracted music features and found good accordance, as well as similar criterion validity with preference for musical styles (the MUSIC model, mean r = 0.88). In a second online study (N = 2118), using PCA and Procrustes analysis, we found that measured music preference showed the same established three-component structure from previous research (Arousal, Valence, Depth), regardless of whether the music pieces were rated by humans or the ESSENTIA music analysis software. Our results suggest that computer-extracted music features can be used to assess individual music preference.

Form and Function in Human Song

Humans use music for a variety of social functions: we sing to accompany dance, to soothe babies, to heal illness, to communicate love, and so on. Across animal taxa, vocalization forms are shaped by their functions, including in humans. Here, we show that vocal music exhibits recurrent, distinct, and cross-culturally robust form-function relations that are detectable by listeners across the globe. In Experiment 1, internet users (n= 750) in 60 countries listened to brief excerpts of songs, rating each song's function on six dimensions (e.g., "used to soothe a baby"). Excerpts were drawn from a geographically stratified pseudorandom sample of dance songs, lullabies, healing songs, and love songs recorded in 86 mostly small-scale societies, including hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and subsistence farmers. Experiment 1 and its analysis plan were pre-registered. Despite participants' unfamiliarity with the societies represented, the random sampling of each excerpt, their very short duration (14 s), and the enormous diversity of this music, the ratings demonstrated accurate and cross-culturally reliable inferences about song functions on the basis of song forms alone. In Experiment 2, internet users (n= 1,000) in the United States and India rated three contextual features (e.g., gender of singer) and seven musical features (e.g., melodic complexity) of each excerpt. The songs' contextual features were predictive of Experiment 1 function ratings, but musical features and the songs' actual functions explained unique variance in function ratings. These findings are consistent with the existence of universal links between form and function in vocal music.

Pela Luz de uma Canção em Terras Estranhas: a Referência à Música Pop Anglófona na Poesia de Rui Pires Cabral*

This essay analyzes the references to Anglophone pop music in Rui Pires Cabral’s poetry, especially some quotes that inserts in the poems excerpts of songs belonging to universe of jazz or to the underground scene of the post-punk movement. Such approximation between poetry and music in this contemporary work it is still necessary to question how this procedure operates in a context in which the evocation of the musical element usually consists in the verifcation of its loss in a poetry that has been increasingly conceived like discursive or prosodic for excellence.

Developing a benchmark for emotional analysis of music.

Music emotion recognition (MER) field rapidly expanded in the last decade. Many new methods and new audio features are developed to improve the performance of MER algorithms. However, it is very difficult to compare the performance of the new methods because of the data representation diversity and scarcity of publicly available data. In this paper, we address these problems by creating a data set and a benchmark for MER. The data set that we release, a MediaEval Database for Emotional Analysis in Music (DEAM), is the largest available data set of dynamic annotations (valence and arousal annotations for 1,802 songs and song excerpts licensed under Creative Commons with 2Hz time resolution). Using DEAM, we organized the ‘Emotion in Music’ task at MediaEval Multimedia Evaluation Campaign from 2013 to 2015. The benchmark attracted, in total, 21 active teams to participate in the challenge. We analyze the results of the benchmark: the winning algorithms and feature-sets. We also describe the design of the benchmark, the evaluation procedures and the data cleaning and transformations that we suggest. The results from the benchmark suggest that the recurrent neural network based approaches combined with large feature-sets work best for dynamic MER.