To perform reliably and confidently from memory, musicians must able to recover from mistakes and memory failures. We describe how an experienced singer (the second author) recovered from mistakes and gaps in recall as she periodically recalled the score of a piece of vocal music that she had memorized for public performance, writing out the music six times over a five-year period following the performance

The purpose of this study was to investigate how professional pianists practice music for a concert, and whether their individual cognitive orientations in such practice processes can be identified accurately from the resulting performances. In Study I, four pianists, previously found to be skilled music memorizers, practiced and performed a short piece by André Jolivet over the course of two weeks

Traditionally, various Hindustani (North Indian) ragas have been performed at specific times of day, such as dawn, dusk, midday, and evening. Human physiology also exhibits common circadian patterns, with reduced arousal at night, rising during the morning, culminating in peak arousal, and then declining arousal towards the end of the day. This raises the question of how and whether the musical features

Understanding children’s emotional perceptions of creative tasks can contribute to the optimal design of music programs. Little is known of how young children perceive vocal tasks, and whether music training changes their emotional perceptions. This research examined children’s facial expressions while performing vocal imitation and improvisation tasks before and after music training. Young children

This article examines the ways in which music making can inspire and facilitate social change amongst the “society of captives.” It explores the social dynamics of prison music projects, and then looks at the ways in which music making can begin to transform the wider social world of prison. It reports a qualitative investigation of two such projects delivered by the Irene Taylor Trust (ITT) in a medium-security

This article reports a two-part study into the prosocial impacts of third sector cultural activities with children and adolescents in impoverished and violence-stricken urban neighbourhoods in Cali, Colombia. First, a year-long field study set out to compare a pre-existing music-training programme with a dance-training programme and a football-training programme with 9–14 year olds, to determine the

This paper reports an analysis of the roles of music performance in traditional patron saint celebrations from Afro-Colombian communities originally from the Pacific region but who currently live in the capital city of Bogotá. Since the late 1980s, a group of Afro-Colombian cultural leaders have used local traditional expressive cultural practices to construct social cohesion and a sense of collectivity

This study investigated the perception and learning of relative pitch using vibrotactile stimuli by musicians with and without a hearing impairment. Notes from C3 to B4 were presented to the fingertip and forefoot. Pre- and post-training tests in which 420 pairs of notes were presented randomly were carried out without any feedback to participants. After the pre-training test, 16 short training sessions

Music consumption is widely recognized as an important facet of everyday life, and the use of algorithms by online streaming services to suggest songs has aroused a growing scientific interest in how musical preferences are structured. However, existing studies have failed to include Latin genres of music. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop and validate a measure to assess the musical

It is currently believed that timbre plays a primary role in the identification of songs from very brief excerpts of music. However, its specific contribution, and those of other characteristics of the music, remain unclear. The aim of the present study was to investigate the contributions of timbre and chord type, voicing, and duration to participants’ ability to identify songs from their opening

We employed the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) method to systematically review research on music practice from 1928 until June 2020 and identified a total of 3,102 records using our inclusion criteria, of which a total of 296 were eventually selected for the final analysis. We tabulated percentages and frequencies of (a) publications in ten-year periods

This paper offers a series of characterizations of prototypical musical timbres, called Timbre Trait Profiles, for 34 musical instruments common in Western orchestras and wind ensembles. These profiles represent the results of a study in which 243 musician participants imagined the sounds of various instruments and used the 20-dimensional model of musical instrument timbre qualia proposed by Reymore

The objective of this study was to analyse the changes in social fabric caused by the armed conflict in Colombia among people who had been the victims of forced displacement and who, when arriving in the new places, participate in a musical-social programme. The study was conducted using testimonies from interviews and in the form of sound postcards, an ethnographic research tool. Twenty-one interviews

In this paper we argue that our comprehension of musical participation—the complex network of interactive dynamics involved in collaborative musical experience—can benefit from an analysis inspired by the existing frameworks of dynamical systems theory and coordination dynamics. These approaches can offer novel theoretical tools to help music researchers describe a number of central aspects of joint

The recent COVID-19 health emergency has forced many music teachers to adopt remote teaching methods. The present paper investigates the practices and strategies used by conservatory-level music teachers to give lessons online in different European countries and the USA. Data from an exploratory qualitative study were collected using semi-structured interviews covering aspects such as curriculum design

This study investigated whether reading biographical information about the composer Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745) before listening to his music would influence listeners’ self-reported emotional responses. The study involved 179 participants who completed an online listening exercise in which they read either a negative or a neutral biography of Zelenka, or no biography, before listening to two short

Little is known about the relationship between the personality and the emotional experiences of people with broader autism phenotype (BAP) or autistic traits. Given that music is a powerful vehicle for conveying emotions and that several studies show that people with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) typically respond to music in similar ways, the present study examines the relationship between

Human emotional weeping, or crying, occurs in response to a wide array of antecedents. Although music is often mentioned specifically as a stimulus that may make individuals cry, few studies have systematically explored the characteristics of these crying episodes. The present study examines crying over music. Participants (N = 2778; 1716 women) completed a survey asking about the last time they cried

Background: Music is thought to be beneficial as a sleep aid. However, little research has explicitly investigated the specific characteristics of music that aid sleep and some researchers assume that music described as generically sedative (slow, with low rhythmic activity) is necessarily conducive to sleep, without directly interrogating this assumption. This study aimed to ascertain the features

Recent research has explored the role of empathy in the context of music listening. Here, through an empathy priming paradigm, situational empathy was shown to act as a causal mechanism in inducing emotion, although the way empathy was primed had low levels of ecological validity. We therefore conducted an online experiment to explore the extent to which information about a composer’s expressive intentions

Understanding how musicians can coordinate their musical actions when they improvise together remains an important theoretical and empirical challenge. In this article, we suggest a broad theoretical framework, compatible with up-to-date research on joint action, which can account for coordination in collective improvisation, especially in the hard case of so-called collective free improvisation. This

Learning to write music in the staff notation used in Western classical music is part of a musician’s training. However, writing music by hand is rarely taught formally, and many musicians are not aware of the characteristics of their musical handwriting. As with any symbolic expression, musical handwriting is related to the underlying cognition of the musical structures being depicted. Trained musicians

Developing musicians are expected to accumulate many hours of self-regulated practice to attain expertise on a musical instrument. The ability to choose appropriate strategies based on the internal and external feedback obtained while performing in the absence of the teacher’s support constitutes an important aspect of self-regulated practice. Nevertheless, performing and simultaneously monitoring

Evidence of the high prevalence of physical and psychological problems among professional and student classical musicians has led to investigations of music students’ health-promoting behaviours. These have indicated lower levels of engagement in health-promoting behaviours among music students compared to non-music students and resulted in the recent introduction of health education courses in a number

Extreme metal and rap music with violent themes are sometimes blamed for eliciting antisocial behaviours, but growing evidence suggests that music with violent themes can have positive emotional, cognitive, and social consequences for fans. We addressed this apparent paradox by comparing how fans of violent and non-violent music respond emotionally to music. We also characterised the psychosocial functions

The purpose of this study was to theorise on a composer’s corporeality from the point of view of the embodied, enacted, embedded, and extended cognition paradigm, in the light of empirical data that cover the compositional process of creating one particular piece of music. The data include related manuscripts and the composer’s verbal account of those manuscripts. Composition is seen as an interactive

This article presents a sensorimotor account of music-colour synaesthesia, proposing a radically different perspective than is commonly provided. Recent empirical and theoretical work in music cognition moves away from cognitivist accounts, rejects representationalism and embraces an embodied standpoint. It has been shown that some forms of synaesthesia may be elicited from a concept alone and are

Affective responses to music have been shown to be influenced by the psychoacoustic features of the acoustic signal, learned associations between musical features and emotions, and familiarity with a musical system through exposure. The present article reports two experiments investigating whether short-term exposure has an effect on valence and consonance ratings of unfamiliar musical chords from

Since the establishment of a classical music canon in the 19th century, classical music culture has historically been focused on a stable set of masterpieces by genius composers predominantly from the classical and romantic periods. A small number of composers continue to dominate programming to this day. Many classical music organisations are keen to programme music beyond this narrow repertoire and

In a qualitative study, we explored the range of reflections and experiences involved in the composition of score-based music by administering a 15-item, open-ended, questionnaire to seven professional composers from Europe and North America. Adopting a grounded theory approach, we organized six different codes emerging from our data into two higher-order categories (the act of composing and establishing

To become an expert in music, an individual goes through different phases of deliberately practising domain-specific activities with the support of actors within his or her network. These network actors are often referred to in the research literature as “persons in the shadow,” because they are for the most part unnoticeable to an audience. Systematic research on popular music does not touch upon

The aim of our experiment was to investigate the effect of a music training program on motoric inhibition in German preschoolers. Studies have shown that in children, music lessons and inhibition are associated, and that music training might have the potential to improve inhibition. Improving executive functions is particularly useful in young children as they are highly relevant for success in school

Pitch syntax is an important part of musical syntax. It is a complex hierarchical system that involves generative production and perception based on pitch. Because hierarchical systems are also present in language grammar, the processing of a pitch hierarchy is predominantly explained by the activity of cognitive mechanisms that are not solely specific to music. However, in contrast to the processing

Mindfulness courses are beneficial in clinical domains for anxiety and depression and are becoming more prevalent as interventions in education. However, little is known about what effects mindfulness might have on musicians. In an exploratory study, 25 music students, who completed one of four 8-week MBSR/MBCT mindfulness courses adapted for musicians at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, completed

Psycholinguistic inquiry can provide insight into the way the words people use reflect psychological states, including emotional states. There is limited research on the use of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to investigate the psycholinguistic properties of emotional memories related to music. The purpose of this study was to test the extent to which LIWC can be used in the analysis

As populations age, it is critical to understand how psycho-social wellbeing supports successful ageing. The health sector is increasingly asking how best to improve social connection and affective state because of their positive influence on overall health. Choral participation has been proposed as a particularly effective way to improve socio-emotional wellbeing, due to benefits of music exposure

Background:Music training has been found to be beneficial for young and healthy participants but the associations between musical training and the cognitive functioning of elderly participants have...

To play a musical instrument in the way that one would sing is a goal that has been shared and documented by performers of Western classical music for several centuries. It is still common to hear ...

Most cross-cultural research on music and emotions is targeted at examining participants’ ability to perceive the emotional intent of the music or the musician. Fewer studies, however, have investi...

Currently, no formal music performance anxiety (MPA) prevalence rates exist for children and adolescent musicians. Factors contributing to distinct MPA experiences (maladaptive versus adaptive) are...

Background:Although people self-administer music for affect enhancement and self-regulation, there is a dearth of empirical inquiry investigating whether music-based regulatory factors and healthy ...

Members of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Imperial Board of Education had serious concerns about the growing fame of Kluge Hans (Clever Hans), a horse that was able, by tapping a foreleg, to solve problems like “What is three plus one?” How could a horse perform arithmetic better than some of the Kaiser’s own subjects? Calls arose for a formal inquiry, and so government ministers sought a famous, widely respected

In this study, we examined how audiences for different types of concerts structure their musical preferences according to specific cultural logics and how this relates to the motives for going to t...

Previous studies using an affective priming paradigm have shown that valenced chords (e.g., consonant–positive; dissonant–negative) facilitate the evaluation of similarly valenced target words. The role of numerosity (the total number of pitches in a chord) and timbre has not yet been systematically investigated in previous priming studies using consonant/dissonant chords. An experiment was conducted

Music acts as a prominent element of advertising, but its simple presence does not automatically improve the effects of advertising. The concept of musical fit was developed more than 25 years ago ...

The purpose of this paper is to explore authoritative discourses in advanced studio lessons. Authoritative approaches have been described variously as systematic instruction, direct teaching and te...

Philosophers have long wrestled with the apparent paradox of the enjoyment of negative emotional portrayals in the arts. An example of this apparent paradox is the enjoyment among some listeners of...

Whenever we celebrate in a group, music and dance are usually part of it. Music making is a highly social activity and even listening to recorded music in a group still gives us a sense of feeling ...

The purpose of this study was to review flow research in music contexts from 1975 until the first quarter of 2019. Specifically, frequencies/percentages were calculated for (a) output in five-year ...

The present studies investigated the effects of personal (i.e., self-selected) music and music pre-selected by the researcher on the induction of sadness and joy while taking into consideration the...

People differ from each other, and this includes performers of music. The study of individual differences is well established in many social science disciplines but has been largely neglected in mu...

Increasing the duration of an intervening key has a negative effect on memory for the original, nonadjacent key. Evidence suggests the recollection of a key only remains for 20 seconds after modula...

This article describes how aesthetic enjoyment accompanying musical activities can empower individuals in health and disease. First, we explain the biological determinants of music enjoyment and how they can be studied. In doing so, we distinguish between core sensory pleasure and conscious liking, and we illustrate their respective contributions to aesthetic appreciation and expressive interaction

Two complementary aspects of interpersonal entrainment – synchronization and movement coordination – are explored in North Indian classical instrumental music, in the auditory and visual domains respectively. Sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) is explored by analysing pairwise asynchronies between the event onsets of instrumental soloists and their tabla accompanists, and the variability of asynchrony

Sensorimotor integration tasks, such as body movements in time with music, can foster the experience of flow – a pleasurable state of full engagement and concentration occurring during a seemingly effortless and automatic activity. As it can be argued that both music and flow are embodied phenomena, perception-action coupling might be the core of the intimate relationship between flow and music. The

Running with musical accompaniment is becoming increasingly popular and several pieces of software have been developed that match the music tempo to the exerciser’s running cadence, that is, foot strikes per minute. Synchronizing music with running cadence has been shown to affect several aspects of performance output and perception. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of synchronous

Concerns have been raised that persistent exposure to violent media can lead to negative outcomes such as reduced empathy for the plight of others. The present study investigated whether fans of ag...

Prior research suggests that underdogs elicit from others an increased affiliation (e.g., liking, identification) as well as an increased desire for success (e.g., support). In the present study, w...

The purpose of this study was to examine differential item functioning (DIF) in a rubric used to assess middle-school solo and ensemble performances. This study was guided by the following research...

For many music students, the transition to university-level studies can be a time characterized by high levels of stress as they adjust to academic standards and the challenges of demanding perform...