People Listen Research Articles

Impact of FM Radio on Political Awareness and Engagement among University Students: A Socio-Political Study

This research examines the role of FM radio in shaping the awareness and engagement about politics among university students in Lahore, by focusing on the influence of socio-political aspects. The study purposes to recognize the history of FM radio and its effectiveness to address the socio-political issues. The sample size of 600 students between the ages of 18 and 32 from three private universities of Lahore (University of South Asia, University of Management and Technology, Superior University). The statistics were attained by the technique of purposive sampling; the research finds that FM radio upholds a noteworthy occurrence in spite of the rise of new media. The majority of people listen to FM radio for entertainment, information, education, and development. The findings show that FM radio is an effective medium for raising socio-political awareness and encouraging political connection among youngsters.

Change starts with the body: Interoceptive appreciation mediates the effect of mindfulness training on behavior change – an effect moderated by depression severity

Mindfulness catalyzes health behavior change. Yet, interoception is dysregulated in depression, potentially impairing behavioral activation. We examined the mediating role of interoceptive appreciation, as measured by how much one trusts and listens to internal bodily signals, on behavior change. Primary care patients with depression, anxiety, or stress disorders related to chronic illness were randomized to Mindfulness Training for Primary Care (MTPC) using the Mindful Behavior Change curriculum or a low-dose mindfulness comparator. Participants (N = 274) completed the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) at 0 and 8 weeks. At week 7, participants chose a health behavior action plan. During weeks 8–10, participants reported their action plan initiation (API) level. We investigated the effect of MTPC on API level (MTPC-API), the mediating role of interoceptive appreciation (Body Listening [MAIA-BL] + Trusting [MAIA-T]), and baseline depression severity as a moderator. MTPC had a significant direct effect on API. Interoceptive appreciation (MAIA-BL + MAIA-T) had a significant indirect effect on API (CI=0.15–0.56). Without depression (n = 76), MAIA-BL partially mediated MTPC-API (CI=0.02–0.87). With moderate-to-severe depression (n = 132), MAIA-T partially mediated MTPC-API (CI=0.01–0.85). Interoceptive appreciation helps people listen to motivating bodily signals. In depression, regaining body trust may be an important step on a mindful path towards change.

LipPrint: Using Lip Movements as a Silent Password

Authentication and confidentiality are critical elements in many systems, and passwords are used to protect these systems. One way to enter the password into the system is via voice. The problem with this type of password is that people listen to it easily. The general purpose of this study was to make the password based on lip movement instead of sound. To address this problem, a visual speech recognition (VSR) system was proposed that detects speech from lip movement as a silent password. The proposed system consists of preprocessing the captured video via the proposed algorithms and feature extraction and classification of spoken digits via a modified VGG16. Fairness, robustness, and privacy are also considered in the proposed system. Research has focused on Arabic digits because there is little research on Arabic visual speech recognition. The reported results of the model show remarkable performance, with a validation accuracy of 96.74%. It was concluded that the proposed system, which relies on analysing lip movement instead of sound, increases security by preventing others from hearing the spoken password.

Students' Strategies for Improving Their Listening Comprehension

In order to navigate many of the circumstances that arise in everyday life, one must practice active listening. People listen to audio for a variety of reasons, including amusement, learning in scholarly fields, or gathering important information. Students with a wide variety of hearing problems often show symptoms when they try to comprehend the content delivered in English. Children often find it difficult to absorb spoken information since schools place a strong focus on language, reading, and writing. Most course guides and lecturers tend to downplay the importance of listening. The challenges with auditory perception, particularly those pertaining to hearing, actively processing, and comprehending spoken information, are the main focus of this research. Teachers who are aware of the difficulties that their pupils encounter in the classroom may assist their students more successfully in order to help them improve their comprehension of spoken language and acquire excellent listening skills. This is a result of the teachers' improved ability to relate to and comprehend the emotions and experiences of their students. The significance of helping students develop efficient study habits and improve their English listening abilities is emphasized in this article review. Students who are struggling in other courses could get help from teachers who specialize in teaching English as a second language. In the conclusion, the researcher made suggestions for instructional exercises that both professors and pupils need to partake in.

Socially-Motivated Music Recommendation

Extensive literature spanning psychology, sociology, and musicology has sought to understand the motivations for why people listen to music, including both individually and socially motivated reasons. Music's social functions, while present throughout the world, may be particularly important in collectivist societies, but music recommender systems generally target individualistic functions of music listening. In this study, we explore how a recommender system focused on social motivations for music listening might work by addressing a particular motivation: the desire to listen to music that is trending in one’s community. We frame a recommendation task suited to this desire and propose a corresponding evaluation metric to address the timeliness of recommendations. Using listening data from Spotify, we construct a simple, heuristic-based approach to introduce and explore this recommendation task. Analyzing the effectiveness of this approach, we discuss what we believe is an overlooked trade-off between the precision and timeliness of recommendations, as well as considerations for modeling users' musical communities. Finally, we highlight key cultural differences in the effectiveness of this approach, underscoring the importance of incorporating a diverse cultural perspective in the development and evaluation of recommender systems.

Exploring neural tracking of acoustic and linguistic speech representations in individuals with post-stroke aphasia.

Aphasia is a communication disorder that affects processing of language at different levels (e.g., acoustic, phonological, semantic). Recording brain activity via Electroencephalography while people listen to a continuous story allows to analyze brain responses to acoustic and linguistic properties of speech. When the neural activity aligns with these speech properties, it is referred to as neural tracking. Even though measuring neural tracking of speech may present an interesting approach to studying aphasia in an ecologically valid way, it has not yet been investigated in individuals with stroke-induced aphasia. Here, we explored processing of acoustic and linguistic speech representations in individuals with aphasia in the chronic phase after stroke and age-matched healthy controls. We found decreased neural tracking of acoustic speech representations (envelope and envelope onsets) in individuals with aphasia. In addition, word surprisal displayed decreased amplitudes in individuals with aphasia around 195 ms over frontal electrodes, although this effect was not corrected for multiple comparisons. These results show that there is potential to capture language processing impairments in individuals with aphasia by measuring neural tracking of continuous speech. However, more research is needed to validate these results. Nonetheless, this exploratory study shows that neural tracking of naturalistic, continuous speech presents a powerful approach to studying aphasia.

Context Aware Music Recommendation and Playlist Generation

There are many reasons people listen to music, and the type of music is largely determined by what the listener may be doing while they listen. For example, one may listen to one type of music while commuting, another while exercising, and yet another while relaxing. Without access to the physiological state of the user, current music recommendation methods rely on collaborative filtering - recommending music based on what other similar users listen to - and content based filtering - recommending songs based on their similarities to songs the user already prefers. With the rise in popularity of smart devices and activity trackers, physiological context can be a new channel to inform music recommendations. We propose deep learning solutions for context aware recommendation and playlist generation. Specifically, we use variational autoencoders (VAEs) to create a song embedding. We then explore multi-task multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) and Gaussian mixture models to recommend songs based on context. We generate artificial user data to train and test our models in online learning and supervised learning settings.

Management Strategy and Challenges for Religious Radio Stations in Malaysia

The landscape of radio transmission has changed as a result of the advent of digital technologies. It has indirectly affected how people listen to the radio. This study seeks to understand how religious radio stations stay relevant in radio industry when commercial radio rules. Hence, this research aims to determine the factors contributing to religious radio sustainability and its challenges in the digital age. This research used a qualitative approach by interviewing religious radio station managers. The findings reveal that management strategy is the core factor influencing community response to religious radio. Even though commercial radio dominates the radio business in the country, there is no competition between religious and commercial radio. Nevertheless, the commercial radio seeks to emulate religious radio strategy, unexpectedly. By defining the target listeners and using a good scheduling structure, management has proven to be the cornerstone of religious radio stations' success.

Exploring the subjective experience of rave party participants in Israel who consume psychedelic drugs: a qualitative inquiry

BackgroundRave music parties (RMP) are a world-wide socio-cultural phenomenon, where people listen to rave music while frequently consuming psychedelic drugs. Epidemiological studies have emphasized the hazardous consequences following the consumption of psychedelic drugs at RMP, and qualitative studies have shown social and psycho-spiritual experiences. Yet, phenomenological inquiry into subjective experiences of attendees is scant. This study aimed to examine physical, emotional, perceptual and social experiences of RMP participants in Israel, and their view on Israel’s policy toward rave events. In addition, the study aimed to contribute useful information for policymakers and society on rave music and psychedelic drugs experiences at RMP.MethodInterpretative phenomenological analysis was used to analyze transcriptions of semi-structured interviews with 27 individuals attending RMP regularly and consume psychedelic drugs.ResultsAnalysis revealed four significant themes: the first theme, the impact of Israel’s drug policy on participants’ sense of safety, relates to participants’ sense of insecurity and anxiety at Israeli RMP due to government drug ban policy. The second theme, the stigma on rave culture, relates to participants’ perception regarding the stigma on rave culture in law enforcement agencies and in society in general. The third theme, negative experiences, describes short-term experiences after consuming psychedelics at RMP, including hallucinations and disorientation. The fourth theme, positive experiences, describes positive sensory, emotional and self/world attitudinal aspects after consuming psychedelics at RMP. Sensory experiences included intensified auditory, visual and tactile experiences; emotional experiences included positive feelings toward others, reduced stress and ability to vent difficult emotions; self/world attitudinal aspects included self-acceptance, higher appreciation of life and connectedness to nature.ConclusionsThe study highlights RMP participants’ sense of insecurity due to Israel’s strict drug policy and absence of harm reduction strategies at rave scenes. The study also notes participants’ experience of stigmatization as drug addicts by society and law enforcement agencies. Reducing police presence and adopting harm reduction policies at rave scenes in Israel may increase participants’ sense of security, reduce stigmatization and decrease overdose risk. Hence, the findings may contribute to new knowledge useful for policymakers and society concerning RMP and the use of psychedelics.

Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen

Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen

Exposure to robot preachers undermines religious commitment.

Over the last decade, robots continue to infiltrate the workforce, permeating occupations that once seemed immune to automation. This process seems to be inevitable because robots have ever-expanding capabilities. However, drawing from theories of cultural evolution and social learning, we propose that robots may have limited influence in domains that require high degrees of "credibility"; here we focus on the automation of religious preachers as one such domain. Using a natural experiment in a recently automated Buddhist temple (Study 1) and a fully randomized experiment in a Taoist temple (Study 2), we consistently show that religious adherents perceive robot preachers-and the institutions which employ them-as less credible than human preachers. This lack of credibility explains reductions in religious commitment after people listen to robot (vs. human) preachers deliver sermons. Study 3 conceptually replicates this finding in an online experiment and suggests that religious elites require perceived minds (agency and patiency) to be credible, which is partly why robot preachers inspire less credibility than humans. Our studies support cultural evolutionary theories of religion and suggest that escalating religious automation may induce religious decline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Influencing Factors of "Xiao Dian" on Users under the Background of Social Media Platform

With the development of social media, social media platforms become a great carrier of transmission of information. Especially, as a hot creative category spread by social media, funny works have an important impact on peoples lives and physical and mental health. And, in this regard, punchlines play an important role. Actually, different people have different Xiao Dian, which are mainly affected by age, character, experience, education degree. and also cover the feeling when people listen or watch the funny works. Therefore, this article aims to analyze the influence factors of Xiao Dian and how different level of Xiao Dian influences peoples physics and mental health and taking funny works as an example. In addition, with the advent of an increasing number of funny works, there are numerous homogenized contents, which also can influence peoples Xiao Dian, also could impact peoples physics and mental health.

White psychodrama

White psychodrama

Music, Pleasure, and Meaning: The Hedonic and Eudaimonic Motivations for Music (HEMM) Scale

Many people listen to music that conveys challenging emotions such as sadness and anger, despite the commonly assumed purpose of media being to elicit pleasure. We propose that eudaimonic motivation, the desire to engage with aesthetic experiences to be challenged and facilitate meaningful experiences, can explain why people listen to music containing such emotions. However, it is unknown whether music containing violent themes can facilitate such meaningful experiences. In this investigation, three studies were conducted to determine the implications of eudaimonic and hedonic (pleasure-seeking) motivations for fans of music with violent themes. In Study 1, we developed and tested a new scale and showed that fans exhibit high levels of both types of motivation. Study 2 further validated the new scale and provided evidence that the two types of motivations are associated with different affective outcomes. Study 3 revealed that fans of violently themed music exhibited higher levels of eudaimonic motivation and lower levels of hedonic motivation than fans of non-violently themed music. Taken together, the findings support the notion that fans of music with violent themes are driven to engage with this music to be challenged and to pursue meaning, as well as to experience pleasure. Implications for fans' well-being and future applications of the new measure are discussed.

Subtle but Pervasive; the Impact of Stakeholders Interest on Radio Programing Diversity in Kenya

Purpose: Radio stations in Kenya are confronted with financial problems due to the business model still grounded on advertising. The advertiser as a major stakeholder has potential influence over any medium which seeks his patronage, through his control of the purse strings. People listen to the radio for the programmes rather than advertisements and radio advertisements are not heard in isolation, but generally appear within the context of programmes. The subtle pressures on media enterprises by advertisers lead to the assumption that decisions concerning radio programming are much more frequently taken under the influence of economic principles shaped by the advertising industry and not under the perspective of journalistic news values. The study was anchored on the political economy of the media theory
 Methodology: The study adopted a mixed research design method, data was gathered through questionnaires and interviews and analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics.
 Findings: The study established that there was a statistically significant positive relationship between stakeholders and radio programming diversity. The study found that through his control of the purse strings, the advertiser as a stakeholder has potential influence over radio programming decisions.
 Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The empirical findings contribute to our understanding of the subtle influence of the advertisers on radio programming decisions due to their ability to withhold sponsorship. The study also contributes to our understanding of the question of how media organizations specifically radio are funded.

Students' Strategies for Improving Their Listening Comprehension: A Review of Literature

Listening is essential for functioning in various contexts throughout one's everyday life. People listen to audio for several reasons, including for their amusement, to learn academic material, or to acquire information that is valuable to them. When students seek to comprehend what they are taught in English, they often display a wide variety of hearing impairments. Because reading, writing, and language are stressed so heavily in schools, students often have trouble comprehending what they hear. Most course books and teachers do not emphasize how important it is to listen. This research focuses on challenges associated with hearing, listening, and comprehending what is being said. When instructors are aware of the obstacles their students confront in the classroom, they can better assist their students in creating effective listening habits and increasing their listening comprehension. This is because teachers are more able to empathize with their students' experiences. This article review highlights the significance of assisting students in developing efficient learning strategies and building their English listening capabilities. Students struggling with other topics may be seen by teachers who instruct English to foreign language speakers. In conclusion, the researcher provided some suggestions for educational activities that should be participated in by both students and instructors.

Observation of Boredom during Repetitive Listening of the Same Music in Various Time Spans

Streaming services repetitively provide similar kinds of music, and listeners might get tired of them quickly. This is one of the serious problems for streaming services today. Boredom is developed with repetition, and it depends on personal preference. Therefore, boredom development depends on the time spans of the repetition and personal preferences when people listen to the same music over days. This study conducts an experiment that the participants repetitively listen to one music piece 294 times for seven days in a row to observe boredom development. We measured the boredom level as the reactional factor of the failure to keep the concentration and motivation of listening. As a result, the concentration decreased in the short-term, whereas the motivation decreased in the long-term. Therefore, we could distinguish the state of boredom by the length of the time span. In addition, compared to repetitive listening with a day as the short-term, repetitive listening every day in a week as the long-term had an equal or slightly higher power to generate boredom, but there is a weak correlation between boredom and preference for a music piece. In conclusion, the results showed that the amount of repetition had a stronger effect than personal preference for music, and people may get bored even with their favorite music when they listen too many times. Moreover, the behavior of the low-frequency alpha wave in the brain had only a weak relationship to the amount of listening within a day, not in the week.

Analyzing and predicting success of professional musicians

The emergence of streaming services, e.g., Spotify, has changed the way people listen to music and the way professional musicians achieve fame and success. Classical music has been the backbone of Western media for a long time, but Spotify has introduced the public to a much wider variety of music, also opening a new venue for professional musicians to gain exposure. In this paper, we use open-source data from Spotify and Musicbrainz databases to construct collaboration-based and genre-based networks. We call genres defined in these databases primary genres. Our goal is to find the correlation between various features of each professional musician, the current stage of their career, and the level of their success in the music field. We build regression models using XGBoost to first analyze correlation between features provided by Spotify. We then analyze the correlation between the digital music world of Spotify and the more traditional world of Billboard charts. We find that within certain bounds, machine learning techniques such as decision tree classifiers and Q-based models perform quite well on predicting success of professional musicians from the data on their early careers. We also find features that are highly predictive of their success. The most prominent among them are the musicians’ collaboration counts and the span of their career. Our findings also show that classical musicians are still very centrally placed in the general, genre-agnostic network of musicians. Using these models and success metrics, aspiring professional musicians can check if their chances for career success could be improved by increasing their specific success measures in both Spotify and Billboard charts.

Recensão a] Hart, Roderick (2020). Trump and us: What he says and why people listen. Cambridge University Press

Recensão a] Hart, Roderick (2020). Trump and us: What he says and why people listen. Cambridge University Press

Nocoastjazz

Nocoastjazz