Musical Excerpts Research Articles

The Influence of Dissonance on Listeners’ Perceived Emotions in Rhythmically Complex Musical Excerpts

ABSTRACT This study investigates the influence of dissonance on listeners’ ratings of five emotional dimensions (mood, energy, movement, dissonance, and tension) using excerpts from twentieth-century keyboard music that feature complex rhythmic structures. Dissonance was operationalized as randomized pitches from four scale types: pentatonic major, diatonic major, whole-tone, and chromatic. Register presentation of two contrasting rhythmic groups within each excerpt was counterbalanced, while rhythmic structure was held constant, resulting in 64 distinct stimuli (8 excerpts × 4 scales × 2 register conditions), from which rhythm and pitch measures were extracted. There was a main effect of scale type, but not register. Pentatonic excerpts were rated as more positive and less dissonant than diatonic, whole-tone, and chromatic excerpts. Whole-tone and chromatic were also perceived as more negative and dissonant than diatonic, as well as more tense and less entraining than both pentatonic and diatonic. There was no effect of scale on energy. Sonority dissonance was a reliable predictor of perceived dissonance and tension, as well as mood and movement. Furthermore, several rhythmic features were predictive of participants’ perceived emotions, providing support for the use of pitch-randomized naturalistic stimuli to assess the influence of musical structure on perceived emotions.

Music Familiarization Elicits Functional Connectivity Between Right Frontal/Temporal and Parietal Areas in the Theta and Alpha Bands

Frequent listening to unfamiliar music excerpts forms functional connectivity in the brain as music becomes familiar and memorable. However, where these connections spectrally arise in the cerebral cortex during music familiarization has yet to be determined. This study investigates electrophysiological changes in phase-based functional connectivity recorded with electroencephalography (EEG) from twenty participants’ brains during thrice passive listening to initially unknown classical music excerpts. Functional connectivity is evaluated based on measuring phase synchronization between all pairwise combinations of EEG electrodes across all repetitions via repeated measures ANOVA and between every two repetitions of listening to unknown music with the weighted phase lag index (WPLI) method in different frequency bands. The results indicate an increased phase synchronization during gradual short-term familiarization between the right frontal and the right parietal areas in the theta and alpha bands. In addition, the increased phase synchronization is discovered between the right temporal areas and the right parietal areas at the theta band during gradual music familiarization. Overall, this study explores the short-term music familiarization effects on neural responses by revealing that repetitions form phasic coupling in the theta and alpha bands in the right hemisphere during passive listening.

Third-octave analyses describing two perceptual dimensions of sound reproduction and the resulting overall perceived dissimilarity between loudspeakers or headphones.

Many objective measurements have been proposed to evaluate sound reproduction, but it is often difficult to link measured differences with the differences perceived by listeners. In the literature, the best correlations with perception were obtained for measures involving an auditory model. The present study investigated simpler measurements to highlight the signal processing steps required to make the link with perception. It is based on dissimilarity evaluations from two previous studies: 1 study comparing 12 single loudspeakers using 3 musical excerpts, 1 study comparing 21 headphones using 2 musical excerpts, and both studies highlighting 2 perceptual dimensions associated with the relative strengths of bass and midrange. The objective approach compared several signal analyses computing the dissimilarity between the spectra of the recorded sound reproductions. The results show that a third-octave analysis can accurately describe the overall dissimilarity between the loudspeakers or headphones and the two underlying perceptual dimensions.

The presence of drum and bass modulates responses in the auditory dorsal pathway and mirror-related regions to pop songs

In pop music, drum and bass components are crucial for generating the desire to move one’s body, primarily due to their role in delivering salient metrical cues. This study explored how the presence of drum and bass influences neural responses to unfamiliar pop songs. Using AI-based algorithms, we isolated the drum and bass components from the musical excerpts, creating two additional versions: one that included only the drum and bass (excluding vocals and other instruments), and another that excluded the drum and bass (consisting solely of vocals and other instruments). Twenty-five participants were subjected to fMRI scans while listening to these musical stimuli. Analysis of fMRI data indicated that the removal of drum and bass led to increased activity in the auditory dorsal pathway, suggesting that the absence of these metrical cues demands greater cognitive effort to process the beats. In contrast, the version featuring only drum and bass elicited stronger activation in frontal regions associated with mirror properties, including the right ventral premotor cortex (extending into the inferior frontal gyrus) and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, compared to the original version. Overall, this study contributed insights into the foundational role of drum and bass in imparting metrical salience to pop songs, enriching our understanding of listeners’ sensorimotor processing of musical genres that prominently feature these two elements.

Music-Evoked Thoughts

Music listening can evoke a range of extra-musical thoughts, from colors and smells to autobiographical memories and fictional stories. We investigated music-evoked thoughts as an overarching category, to examine how the music’s genre and emotional expression, as well as familiarity with the style and liking of individual excerpts, predicted the occurrence, type, novelty, and valence of thoughts. We selected 24 unfamiliar, instrumental music excerpts evenly distributed across three genres (classical, electronic, pop/rock) and two levels of expressed valence (positive, negative) and arousal (high, low). UK participants (N = 148, Mage = 28.68) heard these 30-second excerpts, described any thoughts that had occurred while listening, and rated various features of the thoughts and music. The occurrence and type of thoughts varied across genres, with classical and electronic excerpts evoking more thoughts than pop/rock excerpts. Classical excerpts evoked more music-related thoughts, fictional stories, and media-related memories, while electronic music evoked more abstract visual images than the other genres. Positively valenced music and more liked excerpts elicited more positive thought content. Liking and familiarity with a style also increased thought occurrence, while familiarity decreased the novelty of thought content. These findings have key implications for understanding how music impacts imagination and creative processes.

Anhedonia severity mediates the relationship between attentional networks recruitment and emotional blunting during music listening

Emotion studies have commonly reported impaired emotional processing in individuals with heightened anhedonic depressive symptoms, as typically measured by collecting single subjective ratings for a given emotional cue. However, the interindividual variation in moment-to-moment emotional reactivity, and associated time-varying brain networks recruitment as emotions are unfolding, remains unclear. In this study, we filled this gap by using the unique temporal characteristics of music to investigate behavioural and brain network dynamics as a function of anhedonic depressive symptoms severity. Thirty-one neurotypical participants aged 18–30 years completed anhedonic depression questionnaires and then continuously rated happy, neutral and sad pieces of music whilst undergoing MRI scanning. Using a unique combination of dynamic approaches to behavioural (i.e., emotion dynamics) and fMRI (i.e., leading eigenvector dynamics analysis; LEiDA) data analysis, we found that participants higher in anhedonic depressive symptoms exhibited increased recruitment of attentional networks and blunted emotional response to both happy and sad musical excerpts. Anhedonic depression mediated the relationship between attentional networks recruitment and emotional blunting, and the elevated recruitment of attentional networks during emotional pieces of music carried over into subsequent neutral music. Future studies are needed to investigate whether these findings could be generalised to a clinical population (i.e., major depressive disorder).

Multisensory interactions: The influence of context on beverage and soundtrack pairing

In everyday life, the environment that surrounds us plays a key role in perception and emotions. Environments can influence positively or negatively food perception and liking. However, very few studies have investigated the interaction between our five senses in specific contexts. The aim of the present study was to explore multisensory interactions in context using auditory and gustatory stimuli. A hundred and eleven participants were recruited and tested in one out of three different contexts: 1) laboratory condition, 2) in a bar context, and 3) in an auditorium (playing classical music). For the bar and auditorium context, the sessions took place in an immersive room. For each context, participants were asked to taste one beer while listening to a musical excerpt, and to rate liking, harmony, and familiarity of the beer-excerpt association. In addition, liking and familiarity of the beers and the excerpts were rated separately. Results showed that 1) the harmony evaluation of beer-excerpt pairs could be separately explained by the sensory characteristics of beers and the music; 2) Participants in the musical context evaluated the pairs differently: pairs were more harmonious, preferred and judged more familiar in the musical context than in the laboratory and the bar contexts. The present study helps understanding the sensory dominance of one sense over the other senses and gives insights for marketing research as it shows that context not only influences consumer behavior but also products evaluation.

Sight-singing in a group context: An eye-tracking study with experienced choral singers

Studies on music reading have provided insights into the cognitive processes in sight singing. However, there has been limited research on sight singing in a group setting. This study aims to assess how choral singers approach music reading as they perform previously unfamiliar choral scores together. We addressed (1) how singers’ gaze direction is distributed over staff systems, and (2) how their gaze behaviour is influenced by note density and repeated practice. Four quartets, a total of sixteen experienced singers, performed eight Baroque music excerpts three times, while the singers’ eye movements were recorded. Eye-movement measures were analysed in conjunction with the singers’ views regarding their music reading, obtained through questionnaires and group discussions. Results reveal that besides reading their own voice lines, singers typically inspected the neighbouring lines, seeking visual cues to coordinate the performance. The results of a generalised linear mixed model analysis underscore the substantial influence of note density on fixation durations on one’s own lines, but not on other voices’ lines. Practice, on the other hand, exhibited effects only on average fixation duration for one’s own lines, with no significant impact observed on other lines. The study provides evidence of coordination between an actual sight-reading process and a parallel information-gathering process that helps singers relate their parts to the overall musical structure.

Video-based categorization system and frequency analysis of gestures in saxophone playing

The study of gestures in music performance provides valuable insights for instrumental learning. However, gestural vocabularies vary depending on the instrument being played, according to its postural and technical specificities. The goals of this study were twofold: first, to create a gesture categorization system for saxophone players, and second, to analyse their gestural behaviour across contrasting musical excerpts. A criteria-based observational analysis was conducted, considering the type and frequency of gestures identified in a database of 100 video and motion recordings. The categorization system, including 15 gesture types applicable to the case of saxophone playing, was further validated by 2 expert raters. A descriptive appendix is provided for the identification of each gesture type. Results revealed that: (1) knee and trunk flexion, feet elevation, mediolateral sway and flap were the most recurrent gestures among saxophone players; (2) energetic, fast-tempo excerpts led to higher movement frequency; and (3) impulsive gestures (head nods) were idiosyncratic of the excerpt containing repeated accentuated notes. These results present a definition of the gestural behaviour of saxophone players, which constitutes relevant knowledge for the development of future studies in the fields of injury prevention, body expression and historically informed performance.

A Brilliant, but Problematic Study: What do the Results of Frank (et al.) signify?

Frank (et al.)'s article, "Exploring the variability of musical-emotion expression over historical time" is a thoughtful, creative attempt to tackle the thorny problem of reconstructing the historical cognition and perception of music. The article is a pleasure to read, owing in large part to the brilliant design of using musical excerpts composed by Johann David Heinichen to explicitly express particular emotional states. These descriptions serve as a ground truth for a modern empirical study. The study produced negative results, which are always tricky to interpret. This review explores some of the methodological choices of the study that may have contributed to the negative results. The review then questions the interpretations of the negative results suggested by the authors in light of some of the problematic methodological decisions of the study, especially the claims that the results suggest that the perception of musical affect has changed over the past 200 years. Finally, the review proposes what conclusions are appropriate to draw from the study in light of its design and framing.

Can Brief Listening to Mozart's Music Improve Visual Working Memory? An Update on the Role of Cognitive and Emotional Factors.

The aim of this research was to enhance understanding of the relationship between brief music listening and working memory (WM) functions. The study extends a previous large-scale experiment in which the effects of brief exposure to music on verbal WM were explored. In the present second phase of the experiment, these effects were assessed for the visuospatial subcomponent of WM. For that aim, visuospatial WM was measured using the Corsi blocks task-backwards and Visual Patterns Test in a large sample of 311 young and older adults after being exposed to musical excerpts coming from different music composers (Mozart, Vivaldi, Glass). To account for possible effects of arousal, a silence condition was used. Individual preference for music excerpts and emotional reactions to each condition were also subjectively rated using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) to account for the role of emotional reactions in shaping subsequent cognitive performance. Results showed that music affected the visuospatial sketchpad of WM. In line with the previously described Mozart effect, only Mozart's music had a significant positive impact on visuospatial WM in the two age groups, regardless of preferences, and on overall age-related WM decline in older adults. The Mozart effect was more prominent for the VPT than the Corsi task and was also expressed for the prevailing positive effect. These observations are in contrast to the selective influence of Vivaldi's music on verbal WM that was detected in our first study. Together, the results demonstrate a differential music influence on the phonological loop and on the visuospatial sketchpad. They thus contribute to the debate of whether music has the potential to affect distinct processes within working memory in an excerpt- or composer-specific manner. Also, they suggest that emotional activation and central executive attention are essentially involved in modulating the influence of music on subsequent cognition. These findings can assist in the selection of music excerpts used in cognitive rehabilitation programs that focus on visuospatial skills.

Hexachord Solmization in the Classroom: A Revival of Old Practices

This article proposes the practice of hexachord solmization as a component of a "histor ically informed" theory curriculum for early-music students. Many theory treatises and singing manuals from the sixteenth century and before start with a discussion of the gam ut, hexachords, the Guidonian hand, and solmization syllables. This strongly suggests that hexachord solmization was one of the principles of contemporary music education. Analyses of musical excerpts demonstrate that a hexachord is a meaningful melodic unit rather than a random set of six tones. Its solmization syllables illuminate the inherent tonal relations around the semitone mi–fa ; furthermore, they represent expressive tone qualities in themselves—for instance, the bright mi versus the soft fa. The hexachord sys tem was still in use in eighteenth-century Italy, apart from some adjustments with regard to the emerging major-minor tonality. Most likely, young apprentices at Italian conserv atories learned the syllables before they could read the pitches. Sets of solfeggi produced by the conservatory masters for their pupils show how plain solmization patterns form the basis of the melodic art of the period. In the classroom today, hexachord solmization offers both a useful tool for a non-verbal mode of musical understanding and a starting point for melodic improvisation.

Construction of a Chinese traditional instrumental music dataset: A validated set of naturalistic affective music excerpts

Music is omnipresent among human cultures and moves us both physically and emotionally. The perception of emotions in music is influenced by both psychophysical and cultural factors. Chinese traditional instrumental music differs significantly from Western music in cultural origin and music elements. However, previous studies on music emotion perception are based almost exclusively on Western music. Therefore, the construction of a dataset of Chinese traditional instrumental music is important for exploring the perception of music emotions in the context of Chinese culture. The present dataset included 273 10-second naturalistic music excerpts. We provided rating data for each excerpt on ten variables: familiarity, dimensional emotions (valence and arousal), and discrete emotions (anger, gentleness, happiness, peacefulness, sadness, solemnness, and transcendence). The excerpts were rated by a total of 168 participants on a seven-point Likert scale for the ten variables. Three labels for the excerpts were obtained: familiarity, discrete emotion, and cluster. Our dataset demonstrates good reliability, and we believe it could contribute to cross-cultural studies on emotional responses to music.

Cortical Sources And Autonomic Nervous System Response Of Listening To North Indian Classical Music

BACKGROUND: Music can affect the human brain and qEEG with its sub-second resolution can be used to study brain activity. The North Indian classical music’s (NICM) effect on brain activity is largely undiscovered. OBJECTIVE: To find out the cortical sources activated along with the autonomic nervous system response while listening to NICM. Methods: 30 Indian subjects (Mean age- 26.1 and (SD) - 1.4 years) were asked to listen to 4 NICM ragas of 5 minutes each with increasing minor note to major note ratio i.e., M1(0), M2(0.16), M3(0.4), M4(1.33).128 channel of EEG signal was recorded which was preprocessed and cortical source localization was done using sLORETA.The autonomic nervous system response while listening to each music excerpt was assessed using Heart Rate Variability parameters by measuring lead II electrocardiography. RESULTS: The cortical sources analysis showed increased activation in cortical regions associated with the extraction of acoustic features of music (superior, middle, and inferior temporal gyruses in addition to fusiform and supramarginal gyrus), emotion generation (precuneus and inferior frontal gyri) and Default Mode Network (posterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, and inferior parietal lobule) while listening to M1. There was a decreased activation in these areas while listening to M2, M3 & M4 (as the minor notes increased).The mean heart rate was significantly higher while listening to M4. There was a reduction in HF while listening to M4 and M3.There was a significant decrease in RMSSD while listening to M4 as compared to the resting state. CONCLUSION: Music can affect brain activity and autonomic function. Music with major notes causes activation of DMN areas causing mind wandering and self-referential mental activity than music with minor notes which decreases DMN activity.In terms of autonomic function increase in minor notes caused decrease in RMSSD and HF signifying an increase in stress and reduced parasympathetic tone. The authors declare no competing interest. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB). No Grant was used. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.

Unraveling the interplay of emotions in art and music: An event-related potential investigation

The study examined the impact of music’s emotional content on the aesthetic experience of visual artworks during combined stimulation. The hypothesis posited that incongruity of emotional states induced by music would impede accurate comprehension of emotional aspect of artworks. A total of 18 university students were presented with 192 paintings and 20 emotionally congruent or incongruent musical excerpts. Both paintings and music were validated as belonging to four emotional categories with different valence (positive vs negative) and arousal (high vs low). ERP data showed that visual N170 and auditory N400 were modulated by stimuli emotional valence and that negative visual stimuli attracted more attention than positive ones (larger P300). The multimodal LP was modulated by the stimulus emotional congruence, with larger responses to positive than negative congruent pairs. During multimodal artistic simulation, the most active brain areas were the left middle frontal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, right precuneus, and right middle temporal gyrus. Taken together, these results suggest that visual stimuli with negative valence attract more attention than positive ones and that congruent pairs are more pleasant than incongruent. Also, these findings suggest that the neural basis of the emergence of aesthetic sensations may be similar for both auditory and visual emotional processing.

How Does Increasing Contextual Interference in a Musical Practice Session Affect Acquisition and Retention?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of three schedules of practice on high-level violinists’ learning. The contextual interference (CI) effect occurs when two or more tasks are practiced in an interleaved manner, which has been shown to impair initial learning but improve retention. How a musician alternates between tasks during practice can have a great impact on learning. This study was designed to explore how an increasing schedule of CI within a practice session would compare to the traditional blocked and random schedules. Sport research has shown a dynamically adaptive schedule to be advantageous, yet this area is relatively unexplored in music. Twenty advanced violinists at a music school practiced three sets of musical excerpts under three practice schedule conditions: blocked (pieces practiced one at a time), increasing contextual interference (blocked and then random), and interleaved (pieces randomly alternating). Recordings were taken at the stages of sight-reading, acquisition (immediately after practice sessions), and retention (24 hours later). Expert ratings of each musician’s recordings revealed no effect at the acquisition stage. However, at the delayed retention test, the blocked condition proved to be most effective. Fifty percent of participants perceived blocked practice to be the most effective.

Recognizing structure in novel tunes: differences between human and rats

A central feature in music is the hierarchical organization of its components. Musical pieces are not a simple concatenation of chords, but are characterized by rhythmic and harmonic structures. Here, we explore if sensitivity to music structure might emerge in the absence of any experience with musical stimuli. For this, we tested if rats detect the difference between structured and unstructured musical excerpts and compared their performance with that of humans. Structured melodies were excerpts of Mozart's sonatas. Unstructured melodies were created by the recombination of fragments of different sonatas. We trained listeners (both human participants and Long-Evans rats) with a set of structured and unstructured excerpts, and tested them with completely novel excerpts they had not heard before. After hundreds of training trials, rats were able to tell apart novel structured from unstructured melodies. Human listeners required only a few trials to reach better performance than rats. Interestingly, such performance was increased in humans when tonality changes were included, while it decreased to chance in rats. Our results suggest that, with enough training, rats might learn to discriminate acoustic differences differentiating hierarchical music structures from unstructured excerpts. More importantly, the results point toward species-specific adaptations on how tonality is processed.

A comparative study of the emotional characteristics of violin and erhu musical excerpts: Influence of playing techniques and instrument

This study investigates the emotional characteristics of the violin and erhu in multiple musical excerpts. Participants assessed 52 musical excerpts played by both instruments using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) scale. Pairwise comparisons explored the impact of playing techniques (Vibrato, Portamento, and Trill) and instrument on emotional perception. Fifty-eight participants evaluated four versions of 13 musical pieces. Significant agreement was found between the emotion categories and Valence-Arousal (VA) ratings. Ambiguity between calmness and sadness emerged, with VA tending to classify ambiguous excerpts as sad. Playing techniques enhanced the energetic qualities of both instruments. The violin consistently evoked more positive and energetic perceptions compared to the erhu, which were further enhanced when playing techniques such as vibrato were employed. Although erhu with playing techniques tended to be more negative, it still elicited greater energy and positivity than erhu without techniques. Valence-Arousal means were used to determine the emotional qualities of the 13 musical pieces. A subsequent pairwise comparison involving 33 participants revealed that versions with playing techniques had stronger emotional impact than those without techniques. Furthermore, emotional impact was higher when the piece was originally composed for the instrument being played, which was manifest in higher Bradley–Terry–Luce (BTL) values.

The Emotion-to-Music Mapping Atlas (EMMA): A systematically organized online database of emotionally evocative music excerpts

Selecting appropriate musical stimuli to induce specific emotions represents a recurring challenge in music and emotion research. Most existing stimuli have been categorized according to taxonomies derived from general emotion models (e.g., basic emotions, affective circumplex), have been rated for perceived emotions, and are rarely defined in terms of interrater agreement. To redress these limitations, we present research that served in the development of a new interactive online database, including an initial set of 364 music excerpts from three different genres (classical, pop, and hip/hop) that were rated for felt emotion using the Geneva Emotion Music Scale (GEMS), a music-specific emotion scale. The sample comprised 517 English- and German-speaking participants and each excerpt was rated by an average of 28.76 participants (SD = 7.99). Data analyses focused on research questions that are of particular relevance for musical database development, notably the number of raters required to obtain stable estimates of emotional effects of music and the adequacy of the GEMS as a tool for describing music-evoked emotions across three prominent music genres. Overall, our findings suggest that 10–20 raters are sufficient to obtain stable estimates of emotional effects of music excerpts in most cases, and that the GEMS shows promise as a valid and comprehensive annotation tool for music databases.

Prokofiev was (almost) right: A cross-cultural investigation of auditory-conceptual associations in Peter and the Wolf

Over recent decades, studies investigating cross-modal correspondences have documented the existence of a wide range of consistent cross-modal associations between simple auditory and visual stimuli or dimensions (e.g., pitch-lightness). Far fewer studies have investigated the association between complex and realistic auditory stimuli and visually presented concepts (e.g., musical excerpts-animals). Surprisingly, however, there is little evidence concerning the extent to which these associations are shared across cultures. To address this gap in the literature, two experiments using a set of stimuli based on Prokofiev’s symphonic fairy tale Peter and the Wolf are reported. In Experiment 1, 293 participants from several countries and with very different language backgrounds rated the association between the musical excerpts, images and words representing the story’s characters (namely, bird, duck, wolf, cat, and grandfather). The results revealed that participants tended to consistently associate the wolf and the bird with the corresponding musical excerpt, while the stimuli of other characters were not consistently matched across participants. Remarkably, neither the participants’ cultural background, nor their musical expertise affected the ratings. In Experiment 2, 104 participants were invited to rate each stimulus on eight emotional features. The results revealed that the emotional profiles associated with the music and with the concept of the wolf and the bird were perceived as more consistent between observers than the emotional profiles associated with the music and the concept of the duck, the cat, and the grandpa. Taken together, these findings therefore suggest that certain auditory-conceptual associations are perceived consistently across cultures and may be mediated by emotional associations.