Music Psychology Research Research Articles

How do adolescents engage with music in spare time? Leisure patterns and their relation with socio-demographic characteristics, well-being, and risk behaviors

This research focuses on four types of adolescents’ leisure pursuits related to music: listening to music; following music topics in the media; and extracurricular activities and hobbies related to music. Our main goal was not only to identify behavioral patterns representing adolescents’ engagement with music in leisure time but also to establish their relationship with relevant socio-demographic variables and indicators of well-being and risk behaviors. The sample comprised 1,358 secondary school students (aged 15 and 17). Five behavioral patterns were identified by principal component analysis. Three represent preferences for listening to music and are labeled rebellious, sophisticated, and energetic music preferences, whereas the fourth, following music, represents adolescents’ interest in music-related topics via media and preferences for pop and, to a lesser extent, folk music. The fifth factor, music-making, describes an active commitment to music as an extracurricular activity or hobby. The regression analysis was used to relate extracted leisure patterns not only with adolescents’ gender, age, and attendance at specific schools but also with the parameters of well-being and risk behaviors. The results are discussed in light of previous research in music psychology, leisure studies, and positive psychology. Major implications are related to music as a protective factor in a sensitive period of adolescence and adults’ responsibility not only to cherish but also to cultivate youth’s interest in it.

The Danish Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index: Validation in Samples with Different Degrees of Representativeness

Convenience sampling is often used in music psychology research, leading to an overrepresentation of young participants with high socio-economic status and potentially compromising the generalizability of empirical findings to the broader population. Fortunately, analysis techniques enable matching biased samples to known population characteristics, for example, age, gender, and employment status. This study’s aim is twofold. First, we validate the Danish version of the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI-da), a self-report inventory assessing various aspects of musical sophistication on continuous scales in the general population. Then, we demonstrate the use of stratification techniques and quantify the influence of sample composition by comparing results from analyses performed on our biased sample to similar analyses performed using stratified subsampling and poststratification weights to increase representativeness. The bifactor structure of the Gold-MSI-da was consistently replicated, showing similar subscale percentiles in three sample variants. Psychometric benchmarks of internal consistency aligned with benchmarks from other language versions, and although model fits were weaker in the most representative sample, they were still acceptable. Interestingly, the sizes of the effect of self-reported musical training and expertise on musical listening abilities diminished with increasing sample representativeness, indicating potential overestimation when relying on non-representative samples. We conclude that the Gold-MSI-da is a valid tool for assessing musical sophistication in the Danish general population.

Analysis of the History and Situation of Music Psychology Research

As a branch of educational psychology, music psychology has experienced a long process of development, which is based on educational psychology and combines the theories and methods of human physiology, biological genetics, aesthetics and other related disciplines to study and deeply explore musical activities of human and behaviors by using experimental psychology and other means. At present, music psychology has become a very important research topic in the development of psychology in China, and it is also a research hotspot that many scholars pay close attention to. And the paper summarizes the research history of music psychology and analyzes the current research situation of music psychology.

Universals and variations in musical preferences: A study of preferential reactions to Western music in 53 countries.

Are there universal patterns in musical preferences? To address this question, we built on theory and research in personality, cultural, and music psychology to map the terrain of preferences for Western music using data from 356,649 people across six continents. In Study 1 (N = 284,935), participants in 53 countries completed a genre favorability measure, and in Study 2 (N = 71,714), participants in 36 countries completed an audio-based measure of preferential reactions to music. Both studies included self-report measures of the Big Five personality traits and demographics. Results converged to show that individual differences in preferences for Western music can be organized in terms of five latent factors that are invariant (i.e., universal) across countries and that generalize across assessment methods. Furthermore, the patterns of correlations between personality traits and musical preferences were largely consistent across countries and assessment methods. For example, trait Extraversion was correlated with stronger reactions to Contemporary musical styles (which feature rhythmic, upbeat, and electronic attributes), whereas trait Openness was correlated with stronger reactions to Sophisticated musical styles (which feature complex and cerebral attributes often heard in improvisational and instrumental music). The patterns of correlations between musical preferences and gender differences, ethnicity, and other sociodemographic metrics were also largely invariant across countries. Together, these findings strongly suggest that there are universal patterns in preferences for Western music, providing a foundation on which to develop and test hypotheses about the interactions between music, psychology, biology, and culture. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

How Can Music Help Us to Address the Climate Crisis?

Musicians and music psychologists are acutely aware of the power of music and its ability to influence our emotions, moods, thoughts, wellbeing, identity, and behaviour towards others. Indeed, music is often used to help address specific problems, especially within health and wellbeing. The problem of climate change is becoming increasingly well-established in public discourse, and yet individuals frequently fail to act in an environmentally-friendly manner. Within the field of environmental psychology, several empirically-based theories have been developed to aid the understanding of why individuals behave in the ways that they do in relation to the environment. This article examines a selection of these theories, and makes an attempt to identify areas in which research in music psychology provides evidence to suggest that music could play a role in influencing environment-related beliefs and behaviours.

Exploring Music Video Experiences and Their Influence on Music Perception

Streaming music videos on the internet is an increasingly popular music listening activity that has remained virtually unexplored within music psychology. Studies of the role of music in film, as well as empirical research investigating the influence of audio-visual media and memory, have shown that visual information can have a profound effect on how music is perceived and remembered. The current study aimed to create a framework for understanding music video (MV) experiences by finding out when and why individuals choose to engage with this form of media, how these experiences contribute to the perception of musical meaning and influence affective outcomes, and whether these effects carry over to subsequent listening experiences. An online questionnaire study was designed, and data were collected from 34 participants with a mean age of 22.4 years (SD = 2.79). Abductive analysis of the qualitative data was conducted based on theories derived from topical areas of music psychology research. A framework was devised which illustrates MV listening experiences over four temporal stages: Intention, Attention, Reaction, and Retention (IARR). The IARR framework provides novel insights into MV listening experiences and outcomes by shedding light on how extra-musical information can have a long-term influence on the perception of music's meaning and affective quality.

Perceiving Sound Objects in the Musique Concrète.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there emerged a radically new kind of music based on recorded environmental sounds instead of sounds of traditional Western musical instruments. Centered in Paris around the composer, music theorist, engineer, and writer Pierre Schaeffer, this became known as musique concrète because of its use of concrete recorded sound fragments, manifesting a departure from the abstract concepts and representations of Western music notation. Furthermore, the term sound object was used to denote our perceptual images of such fragments. Sound objects and their features became the focus of an extensive research effort on the perception and cognition of music in general, remarkably anticipating topics of more recent music psychology research. This sound object theory makes extensive use of metaphors, often related to motion shapes, something that can provide holistic representations of perceptually salient, but temporally distributed, features in different kinds of music.

Theoretical Framework for Facilitating Young Musicians' Learning of Expressive Performance.

Since communication and expression are central aspects of music performance it is important to develop a systematic pedagogy of teaching children and teenagers expressiveness. Although research has been growing in this area a comprehensive literature review that unifies the different approaches to teaching young musicians expressiveness has been lacking. Therefore, the aim of this article is to provide an overview of literature related to teaching and learning of expressiveness from music psychology and music education research in order to build a new theoretical framework for teaching and learning expressive music performance in instrumental music lessons with children and teenagers. The article will start with a brief discussion of interpretation and expression in music performance, before providing an overview of studies that investigated teaching and learning of performance expression in instrumental music education with adults and children. On the foundation of this research a theoretical framework for dialogic teaching and learning of expressive music performance will be proposed and the rationale explained. Dialogic teaching can be useful for scaffolding young musicians’ learning of expressivity as open questions can stimulate thinking about the interpretation and may serve to connect musical ideas to the embodied experience of the learner. A “toolkit” for teaching and learning of expressiveness will be presented for practical application in music lessons. In addition, a theoretical model will be proposed to further our understanding of teaching and learning of expressive music performance as a multifaceted and interactive process that is embedded in the context of tutors’ and learners’ experiences and environment. Finally, implications of this framework and suggestions for future research will be discussed.

Making a Difference with Music Psychology Research: Strategy, Serendipity, and Surviving a Global Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced researchers around the globe in every discipline imaginable into a position, where they have to provide justification for the relevance of their work. This represents a sharp acceleration in an underlying trend toward demonstrating greater impact for research, as evidenced in the UK by assessments such as Pathways to Impact statements in grant applications and Research Excellence Framework (REF) Impact Case Studies. Music psychology is ideally positioned at the nexus of a number of different larger fields to afford strategic relevance of some kind, and some work is more obviously placed to do so, such as the many intervention projects harnessing instrumental benefits of music which are explicitly designed to improve people’s lives. However, I argue that the fundamental power of music (in and of itself as well as in other areas) provides everyone in the field with inherent potential impact. Using the case study of a recent project, I am leading on people’s favorite music choices, which turned into something of value to many of its participants almost overnight, I illustrate how serendipity can be developed into strategy. Drawing on insights from analysis of people’s accounts of their favorite music, I show how the fundamental premise that music matters to people gives music psychology research a head start in its quest for relevance, placing this in wider debates about the relevance of music, the arts, and culture to post-COVID-19 life.

A Dynamical Systems Approach to Spectral Music: Modeling the Role of Roughness and Inharmonicity in Perception of Musical Tension

Tension-resolution patterns seem to play a dominant role in shaping our emotional experience of music. In traditional Western these patterns are mainly expressed through harmony and melody. However, many contemporary musical compositions employ sound materials lacking any perceivable pitch structure, rendering the two compositional devices useless. Still, composers like Tristan Murail or Gerard Grisey manage to implement the patterns by manipulating attributes like roughness and inharmonicity. However, in order to understand the music of theirs and the other proponents of the so-called spectral music, one has to eschew traditional categories like pitch, harmony, and tonality in favor of a lower-level, more general representation of sound -- which, unfortunately, music-psychological research has been reluctant to do. In the present study, motivated by recent advances in music-theoretical and neuroscientific research into a the highly related phenomenon of dissonance, we propose a neurodynamical model of musical tension based on a representation of sound which reproduces existing empirical results on correlates of tension. By virtue of being neurodynamical, the proposed model is generative in the sense that it can simulate responses to arbitrary sounds.

A Set of 200 Musical Stimuli Varying in Balance, Contour, Symmetry, and Complexity: Behavioral and Computational Assessments.

We present a novel set of 200 Western tonal musical stimuli (MUST) to be used in research on perception and appreciation of music. It consists of four subsets of 50 stimuli varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity. All are 4 s long and designed to be musically appealing and experimentally controlled. We assessed them behaviorally and computationally. The behavioral assessment (Study 1) aimed to determine whether musically untrained participants could identify variations in each attribute. Forty-three participants rated the stimuli in each subset on the corresponding attribute. We found that inter-rater reliability was high and that the ratings mirrored the design features well. Participants' ratings also served to create an abridged set of 24 stimuli per subset. The computational assessment (Study 2) required the development of a specific battery of computational measures describing the structural properties of each stimulus. We distilled nonredundant composite measures for each attribute and examined whether they predicted participants' ratings. Our results show that the composite measures indeed predicted participants' ratings. Moreover, the composite complexity measure predicted complexity ratings as well as existing models of musical complexity. We conclude that the four subsets are suitable for use in studies that require presenting participants with short musical motifs varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity, and that the stimuli and the computational measures are valuable resources for research in music psychology, empirical aesthetics, music information retrieval, and musicology. The MUST set and MATLAB toolbox codifying the computational measures are freely available at osf.io/bfxz7.

Towards a common terminology for music branding campaigns

ABSTRACTOur contribution involves the development and validation of a standardised terminology for the description and comparison of music branding communication aims. We initially review relevant literature from marketing and music psychology research, and then carry out two empirical studies. In the first, an expert focus group develops an inventory of categories and adjectives representing all aspects of brand identities that can be conveyed through music, the multi-lingual Music Branding Expert Terminology (MBET). The second one is an online survey with 305 marketing experts that successfully confirms the terminology’s relevance across different product and service sectors. Finally, we describe how the practical application of the MBET can help to ease communication between all stakeholders in the music branding sector and how this will potentially increase the effectiveness of music branding campaigns.

SEMPRE Autumn 2020 Conference: The Role of Music Psychology Research in a Complex World

Each year, the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research (SEMPRE) hosts two conferences, covering a range of themes within music education and psychology research. The Autumn 2020 conference took place on September 9–11. The theme of the conference was ‘The role of music psychology research in a complex world: Implications, applications, and debates’; a particularly appropriate theme given the complex and challenging nature of 2020. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, this conference was hosted virtually by the University of Leeds. This report provides an overview of the conference, reflects on its key themes, and discusses the opportunities and challenges of online conferencing.

Decolonizing African music with visualizations and sonifications using beat-class theory

In a recent paper, we introduced mathematical music theory as a suitable new approach to analyze the music of Nigeria (Igbo) (Calilhanna et al., 2019). This paper revisits those materials and extends the ideas to further discuss why Nigerian music can be studied more suitably using mathematical music theory. We address a key issue facing music curriculum development: the perpetuation of traditional Western music theory to analyze and understand all music around the world. Our paper aims to demonstrate how Western music theory is inadequate for analyzing Nigerian music and we present some ways Western music theory has evolved. We explain how new music theory combines understandings of both music and mathematics and with a focus on musical meter we present a student-centred approach to learning. We achieve this through visualizations and sonifications of beat-class theory, using ski-hill graphs and circular cyclic graphs. This approach enables the listener to accurately articulate their subjective embodied psychoacoustic experience of music, meter and mathematics and incorporates research in neuroscience, music education, music psychology and music acoustics, which consistently indicates the importance of music for the well-being of the individual, school, workplace, and community.

The Chinese version of the Gold-MSI: Adaptation and validation of an inventory for the measurement of musical sophistication in a Taiwanese sample

This study presents the Chinese adaptation of the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI), an instrument for measuring individual differences in musical ability and skilled musical behaviour. Its psychometric properties were examined with a Taiwanese sample. The Gold-MSI inventory was translated into Chinese following recommendations from the literature on cross-cultural test development. Subsequently, the psychometric properties of the Chinese Gold-MSI self-report inventory, including the Melody Memory Task and the Beat Alignment Perception Task, were evaluated using an online survey with 1,065 participants. Results of confirmatory factor analysis suggest that the original factor structure of the Gold-MSI inventory showed an acceptable fit with the data from the Chinese-speaking sample. In addition, the Chinese Gold-MSI inventory shows good reliability. The Melody Memory Task and the Beat Alignment Perception Task also have sufficient test-retest reliability. Finally, correlations between the Chinese Gold-MSI inventory and the Musical-Rhythmic Intelligence subscale of the Eight Multiple Intelligences Questionnaire as well as the two additional music tests provide evidence for convergent and divergent validity. Overall, the data suggest that the Chinese Gold-MSI has good psychometric properties. Percentile norms for the Gold-MSI inventory and the music tests from the present sample are reported for use in future studies. The present study thus makes a valuable contribution to cross-cultural research in music psychology by enabling the comparison between Chinese and Western studies of individual differences in musical ability.

Collaborative approaches to music and wellbeing research

CONFERENCE DETAILSCollaborative approaches to music and wellbeing researchSociety for Education and Music Psychology Research (SEMPRE)University of Leeds9-10 November 2018, Leeds, UK

Visualizing Music Psychology: A Bibliometric Analysis of Psychology of Music, Music Perception, and Musicae Scientiae from 1973 to 2017

Music psychology has grown drastically since being established in the middle of the 19th century. However, until now, no large-scale computational bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature in music psychology has been carried out. This study aims to analyze all published literature from the journals Psychology of Music, Music Perception, and Musicae Scientiae. The retrieved literature comprised a total of 2,089 peer-reviewed articles, 2,632 authors, and 49 countries. Visualization and bibliometric techniques were used to investigate the growth of publications, citation analysis, author and country productivity, collaborations, and research trends. From 1973 to 2017, with a total growth rate of 11%, there is a clear increase in music psychology research (i.e., number of publications, authors, and collaborations), consistent with the general growth observed in science. The retrieved documents received a total of 33,771 citations ( M = 16.17, SD = 26.93), with a median (Q1—Q3) of 7 (2—20). Different bibliometric indicators defined the most relevant authors, countries, and keywords as well as how they relate and collaborate with each other. Differences between the three journals are also discussed. This type of analysis, not without its limitations, can help understand music psychology and identify future directions within the field.

Psychophysiological Responses to “Happy” and “Sad” Music

Lundqvist, Carlsson, Hilmersson, and Juslin (2009) presented evidence of differential autonomic emotional responses to “happy” and “sad” music in healthy adult listeners. The present study sought to replicate and extend these findings by employing a similar research design and measurement instruments. Therefore, we used instrumental film music instead of vocal music, and assessed listeners’ music expertise. The present results show similarities and differences in patterns of psychological and physiological responses as compared to the previous work. Happy music evoked more happiness, higher skin conductance level, higher respiratory rate, and more zygomatic facial muscle activity than sad music, whereas sad music generated higher corrugator muscle activity than happy music. Influences of music sophistication as well as of sex were negligible. Taken together, these results further support the hypothesis that music induces differential autonomic emotional responses in healthy listeners. They also highlight the importance of replication or multi-site studies to strengthen the empirical basis of fundamental issues in music psychological research.

Conceptual integration of sound and image: A model of perceptual modalities

Based on Conceptual Blending Theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and drawing on a rich body of empirical material from music psychology and ongoing fieldwork research data collected in three countries, we review visual representations of music as a blended domain between music and 2d images, giving rise to the concept of musical shape. As we describe the mechanisms that seem to influence this blend, based on physiological parameters (primary sensory motor skills) and variable cultural denominators with a particular emphasis on the representation of time, we put forward a “Model of Perceptual Modalities”. Here, music interacts with components of other domain spaces (imagery) while being informed by cognitive metaphors (both culturally specific and human-universal) so as to provide a simple but enriched theoretical understanding of the relation between music and shape.

Understanding music-selection behavior via statistical learning

Music psychological research has either focused on individual differences of music listening behavior or investigated situational influences. The present study addresses the question of how much of people's listening behavior in daily life is due to individual differences and how much is attributable to situational effects. We aimed to identify the most important factors of both levels (i.e., person-related and situational) driving people's music selection behavior. Five hundred eighty-seven participants reported three self-selected typical music listening situations. For each situation, they answered questions on situational characteristics, functions of music listening, and characteristics of the music selected in the specific situation (e.g., fast - slow, simple - complex). Participants also reported on several person-related variables (e.g., musical taste, Big Five personality dimensions). Due to the large number of variables measured, we implemented a statistical learning method, percentile-Lasso, for variable selection, which prevents overfitting and optimizes models for the prediction of unseen data. Most of the variance in music selection behavior was attributable to differences between situations, while individual differences accounted for much less variance. Situation-specific functions of music listening most consistently explained which kind of music people selected, followed by the degree of attention paid to the music. Individual differences in musical taste most consistently accounted for person-related differences in music selection behavior, whereas the influence of Big Five personality was very weak. These results show a detailed pattern of factors influencing the selection of music with specific characteristics. They clearly emphasize the importance of situational effects on music listening behavior and suggest shifts in widely-used experimental designs in laboratory-based research on music listening behavior.