Music Perception Research Articles

Exploring the neural underpinnings of chord prediction uncertainty: an electroencephalography (EEG) study

Predictive processing in the brain, involving interaction between interoceptive (bodily signal) and exteroceptive (sensory) processing, is essential for understanding music as it encompasses musical temporality dynamics and affective responses. This study explores the relationship between neural correlates and subjective certainty of chord prediction, focusing on the alignment between predicted and actual chord progressions in both musically appropriate chord sequences and random chord sequences. Participants were asked to predict the final chord in sequences while their brain activity was measured using electroencephalography (EEG). We found that the stimulus preceding negativity (SPN), an EEG component associated with predictive processing of sensory stimuli, was larger for non-harmonic chord sequences than for harmonic chord progressions. Additionally, the heartbeat evoked potential (HEP), an EEG component related to interoceptive processing, was larger for random chord sequences and correlated with prediction certainty ratings. HEP also correlated with the N5 component, found while listening to the final chord. Our findings suggest that HEP more directly reflects the subjective prediction certainty than SPN. These findings offer new insights into the neural mechanisms underlying music perception and prediction, emphasizing the importance of considering auditory prediction certainty when examining the neural basis of music cognition.

Patients’ preferences, feelings, and benefits on Music-Based Intervention: A Pilot Study in COVID-19 Hospitalization

Introduction: COVID-19 patients survive in isolation with stringent measures of infection containment, leading to anxiety, fear, stress, loneliness, and depression. Music is recognized as useful to promote multiple health outcomes, including anxiolytic effects, pain-relieving, and relaxing effects that favour well-being and social interaction in healthcare settings. Objective: This study aimed to determine the impact of a pre-recorded music-based intervention on the music perception in hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Music appreciation, evoked emotions, and self-reported effects were explored and compared before and after music-based intervention, also considering the gender of the patients. Methods: This prospective study consisted of a pre-recorded music-based intervention administered to 272 patients hospitalized for COVID-19 by piping the music into rooms of inpatient medical area. Pre-recorded musical pieces of were selected by a music therapist considering specific formal and parametric characteristics, with the purposes of distraction, entertainment, relaxation, and emotional support. The patients’ opinions were collected using an ad hoc self-report questionnaire and a short data survey that followed the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) guidelines. Results: Music resulted to be the preferred entertainment activity during hospitalization by 84.6% of patients, with 96.6% of them expecting a positive effect and a very high grade of usefulness attributed to music before hospitalization and even higher afterwards. The music intervention significantly changed the patients’ perception of music from everyday life to hospitalization (p<0.0001). It proved successful in evoking pleasure and fun, which raised from 18.4% of everyday life to 41.1% during hospitalization. The usefulness of listening music to alleviate unpleasant feelings including anxiety, fear, loneliness, and low mood in COVID-19 disease, had a significant increase from 22.5% to 60.0% after the music intervention. Conclusion: Music-based intervention, directed according to reference frameworks, provides self-reported social and emotional support in hospitalized patients for COVID-19.

“I’ve Sat in Your Seat Before”: A Study of the Experiences of Three Black Women Music Educators

This descriptive collective case study explored the experiences of three Black women music educators through the framework of community cultural wealth. Analysis of data collected through Seidman’s three-stage phenomenological interview model revealed three themes. The first, “path to teaching,” represented the formative experiences that shaped participants’ development, including a deep level of embodied musical knowledge in multiple genres and the development of resilience. The second, “navigating the academy,” represented the experiences of participants during their collegiate programs, including mentorship and support they had received, perseverance through difficult challenges, and intersections of their experience with existing and often problematic structures in music schools. The final theme, “pedagogical approach,” represented the ways that participants wove aspects of their individual capital and experience into their pedagogical approach, including knowledge of families and community, ethnoracial representation for their students, culturally responsive approaches to pedagogy, and passing along tools for navigational success to their students. Alignment of the data with the framework of community cultural wealth is discussed, emphasizing participants’ prominent uses of both navigational and resistant capital and the development of “Black musical capital.” Implications for music education are discussed.

Listening Effort for Speech in Noise Perception Using Pupil Dilation: A Comparison Among Percussionists, Non-Percussionists, and Non-Musicians.

Most studies in literature attribute the benefits of musical training on speech in noise (SIN) perception to "experience-based" plasticity, which assists in the activation of speech-processing networks. However, whether musicianship provides an advantage for the listening effort (LE) required to comprehend speech in degraded environments has received less attention. The current study aimed to understand the influence of Indian classical music training on SIN perception and its related LE across percussionists, non-percussionists, and non-musicians. A quasi-experiment was conducted on 16 percussionists, 17 non-percussionists, and 26 non-musicians aged 18-35 years with normal hearing. In phase 1, musical abilities were assessed using Mini-Profile of Music Perception Skills (Mini-PROMS). Phase 2 examined SIN using Tamil Phonemically-Balanced Words and Tamil Matrix Sentence Test at +5 dB, 0 dB, and -5 dB SNR and LE using pupillometry, measuring pupil dilations with an eye-tracker. Fractional Logit and Linear Regression models demonstrated that percussionists outperformed non-percussionists in Tuning and Speed subsets of Mini-PROMS. Percussionists outperformed non-percussionists and non-musicians in SIN and LE at -5 dB SNR for words and at 0 dB and -5 dB SNR for sentences. Percussionists have the greatest advantage in decoding SIN with reduced LE followed by non-percussionists and non-musicians, demonstrating musician-advantage in most challenging listening conditions.

Leadership lessons through a lyrical lens

PurposeThe purpose of this manuscript is to explore an assignment given to students in an online gender and leadership graduate course as a tool to help them think critically about how music influences perceptions of gender roles in both society and leadership.Design/methodology/approachThe assignment directs students to review the current Billboard “Hot 100” chart, which lists the top 100 songs in the United States each week based on sales and streams. Students are prompted to identify a song with gendered themes and discuss how the song portrays women and/or men, what gender stereotypes the song supports or refutes, and whether the messaging is positive or negative in nature. Finally, the students discuss ways that the message in the song could influence the listener’s opinion about gender stereotypes and what effect that could have on gendered leadership issues.FindingsStudents use this assignment as an opportunity to apply the course material that relates to the importance of gender representation and the influence of media on gender issues in leadership.Originality/valueRecommendations are provided to inspire creative ideas for leadership educators who seek to prepare students to understand organizational challenges related to gender issues in leadership.

Technology-Mediated Hindustani Dhrupad Music Education: An Ethnographic Contribution to the 4E Cognition Perspective

Embodiment lies at the core of music cognition, prompting recent pedagogical shifts towards a multi-sensory, whole-body approach. However, the education of oral music genres that rely exclusively on direct teacher–disciple transmission through live demonstration and imitation is now undergoing a transformation by rapidly adapting to technology-mediated platforms. This paper examines challenges in embodied facets of video-mediated synchronous distance Hindustani music pedagogy. For this, it takes an ethnomusicological stance and showcases a thematic analysis of interviews featuring Dhrupad music practitioners. The analysis is driven and organized by the 4E Cognition principles, which stress the intimate relationship between body, mind, and environment. Findings indicate that while this adaptation aims to make music content more widely accessible, it comes at the cost of reducing opportunities for multi-modal engagement and interaction among participants. Results reveal limitations in transmitting non-verbal, embodied, multi-sensory cues, along with visual and acoustic disruptions of a sense of shared spatial and physical context, that hinder effective interaction and a sense of immersion, elements that are deemed vital in music education. They prompt concerns about the suitability of conventional videoconferencing platforms and offer key insights for the development of alternative technologies that can better assist embodied demands of the pedagogical practices involved.

From Musical Writings To Writing Music: Book-Writing Leading to Music School in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta

Print created the urge to innovate new modalities of musical knowledge production and dissemination in nineteenth-century Bengal. Publication of music books made the bifurcation between music theory and practice clearer, but only as a textual category. As the literature suggests, these were two categories for organizing musical knowledge, intimately entwined, where one produces the other and also doesn't exist without each other. The technology of ‘swaralipi’ (musical notation) used in the modern printed books materialized the project of disseminating music to the reader who could now ‘read’ the music from the book. For some book writers, music books were meant to be a replacement for the oral tutelage, published as ‘self-instructors’. But, on the contrary, the most prolific book-writers of the time used their books as the basis of oral tutelage in the music school. In the modern setting of the music school, the person of the ‘guru’ or ‘ustad’ was replaced by the formalized, systematic teaching of the ‘professors’ of music. Music books, as the medium of modern music pedagogy, thus changed not only the way students learned – making it possible to learn from the book with no instructor – but also the role of teachers, whose teaching was validated by the book. The music books came to function as the ‘modern shastras’ – to exercise regulatory authority over music practice, and how music is learned and taught. The ‘orality’ of music emerges as a liminal space in the gap between the writings on music and the writing of music. What emerges is an unlikely milieu where a new form of musical education is devised, the possibility of an education without a guru is conceived, and the schema of musical notation brings the entire process to life.

Syncopation as structure bootstrapping: the role of asymmetry in rhythm and language.

Syncopation - the occurrence of a musical event on a metrically weak position preceding a rest on a metrically strong position - represents an important challenge in the study of the mapping between rhythm and meter. In this contribution, we present the hypothesis that syncopation is an effective strategy to elicit the bootstrapping of a multi-layered, hierarchically organized metric structure from a linear rhythmic surface. The hypothesis is inspired by a parallel with the problem of linearization in natural language syntax, which is the problem of how hierarchically organized phrase-structure markers are mapped onto linear sequences of words. The hypothesis has important consequences for the role of meter in music perception and cognition and, more particularly, for its role in the relationship between rhythm and bodily entrainment.

Validation of the abbreviated version of the Profile of Musical Perception Skills (Mini-PROMS) in a Spanish sample of musicians and non-musicians

Despite the efforts made throughout the 20th century to develop standardized batteries to measure musical ability, there seems to be no consensus as to the construct’s gold standard. The Profile of Music Perception Skills (PROMS) was created with the aim of overcoming some of the limitations of previous assessment tests. The Mini-PROMS is the shortened version of the full battery and has a shorter application time. The aim of the present study was to validate the Mini-PROMS battery with a sample of Spanish musicians and non-musicians in order to provide useful scales for the development of research in the field of musical skills in the Spanish population. The results show that Mini-PROMS in Spanish is a reliable and valid tool for measuring the musical ability of musicians and non-musicians. Furthermore, this study provides information on some of the differences between musicians and non-musicians, offering useful scales for comparing the results of individuals with those of their reference population.

Cochlear Implant Users Experience the Sound-To-Music Effect

ABSTRACT The speech-to-song illusion is a robust effect where repeated speech induces the perception of singing; this effect has been extended to repeated excerpts of environmental sounds (sound-to-music effect). Here, we asked whether repetition could elicit musical percepts in cochlear implant (CI) users, who experience challenges with perceiving music due to both physiological and device limitations. Thirty adult CI users and thirty age-matched controls with normal hearing (NH) completed two repetition experiments for speech and nonspeech sounds (water droplets). We hypothesized that CI users would experience the sound-to-music effect from temporal/rhythmic cues alone, but to a lesser magnitude compared to NH controls, given the limited access to spectral information CI users receive from their implants. We found that CI users did experience the sound-to-music effect but to a lesser degree compared to NH participants. Musicality ratings were not associated with musical training or frequency resolution, and among CI users, clinical variables like duration of hearing loss also did not influence ratings. Cochlear implants provide a strong clinical model for disentangling the effects of spectral and temporal information in an acoustic signal; our results suggest that temporal cues are sufficient to perceive the sound-to-music effect when spectral resolution is limited. Additionally, incorporating short repetitions into music specially designed for CI users may provide a promising way for them to experience music.

Similarity visualization of soundscapes in ecology and music

The concept of a soundscape is found in both ecology and music studies. Nature soundscapes and soundscape compositions are analyzed by both disciplines, respectively, to understand their biological diversity and ecosystem functioning and to interpret their compositional structure. A major challenge for both disciplines is visualizing the information embedded in a large variety of soundscapes and to share it with different audiences, from non-professionals to experts. To analyze soundscapes, both disciplines have independently developed similarity visualizations. However, no attempt has been made yet to combine these two fields of research to improve our ecological and musical perception of environmental sounds through shared similarity analysis methods. In this paper, we introduce a new visualization tool, the soundscape chord diagram (SCD), a circular similarity representation method that can be applied to any type of soundscape, either in ecoacoustics or electroacoustic studies. Our approach consists of visualizing spectral similarities between predefined sound segments based on the computation of a β-diversity acoustic index and on automatic clustering. SCDs were tested on two ecoacoustic forest databases and two electroacoustic soundscape compositions. SCDs were performant for the identification of specific acoustic events and highlighted known diel periods for nature soundscapes and written parts for soundscape compositions. This new visualization tool allows us to easily decipher the structure of musical and ecological acoustic data. SCDs could be applied to a large variety of soundscapes and promote their knowledge and preservation. This study opens a new way of investigating soundscapes at the interface between ecology and music, bringing together science and the arts.

Embodiment in music education

In this article, we give an overview of theoretical and empirical research that exemplifies how and why the body of the student and teacher plays a pivotal role in music learning and teaching processes. We will discuss the concepts of entrainment, alignment, and prediction, that have been developed within the theory of embodied music cognition, and their relation to music learning. Furthermore, we will discuss how physical modelling, gestures and touch are important embodied teaching strategies. The article concludes with some suggestion as to how these concepts and strategies can be put into the music educational practice.

THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES OF FORMING THE SKILLS OF STUDENTS TO WORK ON THEMSELVES IN MUSIC LESSONS

This article provides a theoretical and practical basis for developing students' self-study skills in music lessons. Music culture classes focus on the importance of activities for students to work on a regular basis, and on how students can improve their musical knowledge through music literacy, listening to music, and singing as a group.

Understanding functional brain reorganization for naturalistic piano playing in novice pianists.

Learning to play the piano is a unique complex task, integrating multiple sensory modalities and higher order cognitive functions. Longitudinal neuroimaging studies on adult novice musicians show training-related functional changes in music perception tasks. The reorganization of brain activity while actually playing an instrument was studied only on a very short time frame of a single fMRI session, and longer interventions have not yet been performed. Thus, our aim was to investigate the dynamic complexity of functional brain reorganization while playing the piano within the first half year of musical training. We scanned 24 novice keyboard learners (female, 18-23 years old) using fMRI while they played increasingly complex musical pieces after 1, 6, 13, and 26 weeks of training. Playing music evoked responses bilaterally in the auditory, inferior frontal, and supplementary motor areas, and the left sensorimotor cortex. The effect of training over time, however, invoked widespread changes encompassing the right sensorimotor cortex, cerebellum, superior parietal cortex, anterior insula and hippocampus, among others. As the training progressed, the activation of these regions decreased while playing music. Post hoc analysis revealed region-specific time-courses for independent auditory and motor regions of interest. These results suggest that while the primary sensory, motor, and frontal regions are associated with playing music, the training decreases the involvement of higher order cognitive control and integrative regions, and basal ganglia. Moreover, training might affect distinct brain regions in different ways, providing evidence in favor of the dynamic nature of brain plasticity.

Learning Experience of University Music Course Based on Emotional Computing

Identification and analysis of piano performance music are essential activities in the study of music knowledge and enjoyment. The goal of this study is to employ recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to create a multimedia identification and analysis method for piano performance music. RNNs excel at capturing the temporal relationships and dynamics seen in musical performances. The project entails gathering a large dataset of piano performance recordings that spans a variety of genres, performers, and playing techniques. The audio and video components of the performances are pre-processed in order to extract pertinent information. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), an RNN architecture, is used to mimic the sequential nature of the performances. The RNN is trained on the features that were retrieved in order to discover the patterns and traits connected to various piano performances. The similarity between the performance representations may be measured using similarity measures using Euclidean distance. The RNN-based system may be further developed to do tasks like score following, expressive performance analysis, and stylistic variation creation to aid in performance analysis. The system may provide insights into timing accuracy, dynamics, phrasing, and other expressive qualities of the piano performances by matching performance data with related musical scores. The proposed method RNN-LSTM provides accuracy about 99%, precision about 97% , recall about 98.9% and F1 Score of 97.6%.

Music recommendation algorithms based on knowledge graph and multi-task feature learning

During music recommendation scenarios, sparsity and cold start problems are inevitable. Auxiliary information has been utilized in music recommendation algorithms to provide users with more accurate music recommendation results. This study proposes an end-to-end framework, MMSS_MKR, that uses a knowledge graph as a source of auxiliary information to serve the information obtained from it to the recommendation module. The framework exploits Cross & Compression Units to bridge the knowledge graph embedding task with recommendation task modules. We can obtain more realistic triple information and exclude false triple information as much as possible, because our model obtains triple information through the music knowledge graph, and the information obtained through the recommendation module is used to determine the truth of the triple information; thus, the knowledge graph embedding task is used to perform the recommendation task. In the recommendation module, multiple predictions are adopted to predict the recommendation accuracy. In the knowledge graph embedding module, multiple calculations are used to calculate the score. Finally, the loss function of the model is improved to help us to obtain more useful information for music recommendations. The MMSS_MKR model achieved significant improvements in music recommendations compared with many existing recommendation models.

TenseMusic: An automatic prediction model for musical tension.

The perception of tension and release dynamics constitutes one of the essential aspects of music listening. However, modeling musical tension to predict perception of listeners has been a challenge to researchers. Seminal work demonstrated that tension is reported consistently by listeners and can be accurately predicted from a discrete set of musical features, combining them into a weighted sum of slopes reflecting their combined dynamics over time. However, previous modeling approaches lack an automatic pipeline for feature extraction that would make them widely accessible to researchers in the field. Here, we present TenseMusic: an open-source automatic predictive tension model that operates with a musical audio as the only input. Using state-of-the-art music information retrieval (MIR) methods, it automatically extracts a set of six features (i.e., loudness, pitch height, tonal tension, roughness, tempo, and onset frequency) to use as predictors for musical tension. The algorithm was optimized using Lasso regression to best predict behavioral tension ratings collected on 38 Western classical musical pieces. Its performance was then tested by assessing the correlation between the predicted tension and unseen continuous behavioral tension ratings yielding large mean correlations between ratings and predictions approximating r = .60 across all pieces. We hope that providing the research community with this well-validated open-source tool for predicting musical tension will motivate further work in music cognition and contribute to elucidate the neural and cognitive correlates of tension dynamics for various musical genres and cultures.

Objective and Subjective Assessment of Music Perception and Musical Experiences in Young Cochlear Implant Users.

For many individuals, music has a significant impact on the quality and enjoyability of life. Cochlear implant (CI) users must cope with the constraints that the CI imposes on music perception. Here, we assessed the musical experiences of young CI users and age-matched controls with normal hearing (NH). CI users and NH peers were divided into subgroups according to age: children and adolescents. Participants were tested on their ability to recognize vocal and instrumental music and instruments. A music questionnaire for pediatric populations (MuQPP) was also used. CI users and NH peers identified a similar percentage of vocal music. CI users were significantly worse at recognizing instruments (p < 0.05) and instrumental music (p < 0.05). CI users scored similarly to NH peers on the MuQPP, except for the musical frequency domain, where CI users in the children subgroup scored higher than their NH peers (p = 0.009). For CI users in the children subgroup, the identification of instrumental music was positively correlated with music importance (p = 0.029). Young CI users have significant deficits in some aspects of music perception (instrumental music and instrument identification) but have similar scores to NH peers in terms of interest in music, frequency of music exposure, and importance of music.

The influence of psychoacoustic features on the formation of technical and emotionally expressive skills in piano teaching: integrative analysis in the context of sensorimotor integration and musical perception

The influence of psychoacoustic features on the formation of technical and emotionally expressive skills in piano teaching: integrative analysis in the context of sensorimotor integration and musical perception

Modeling Temporal Lobe Epilepsy during Music Large-Scale Form Perception Using the Impulse Pattern Formulation (IPF) Brain Model

Musical large-scale form is investigated using an electronic dance music piece fed into a Finite-Difference Time-Domain physical model of the cochlea, which again is input into an Impulse Pattern Formulation (IPF) Brain model. In previous studies, experimental EEG data showed an enhanced correlation between brain synchronization and the musical piece’s amplitude and fractal correlation dimension, representing musical tension and expectancy time points within the large-scale form of musical pieces. This is also in good agreement with a FitzHugh–Nagumo oscillator model.However, this model cannot display temporal developments in large-scale forms. The IPF Brain model shows a high correlation between cochlea input and brain synchronization at the gamma band range around 50 Hz, and also a strong negative correlation with low frequencies, associated with musical rhythm, during time frames with low cochlea input amplitudes. Such a high synchronization corresponds to temporal lobe epilepsy, often associated with creativity or spirituality. Therefore, the IPF Brain model results suggest that these conscious states occur at times of low external input at low frequencies, where isochronous musical rhythms are present.