Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to play brief excerpts of music recordings to different audiences during invited talks. The first, an audience of at-home care staff for people with dementia. The second, university administrators. I needed no words, as different musical snatches appeared to engage members of the audience in varying ways. This power of music is conspicuous—in interaction with a perceiver’s mood, memory, and lifelong experience—to stimulate and generate, express, move, bond, symbolise, celebrate, protest, mourn, and heal. This is the quotidian—everyday music perception and cognition, encompassing attention, emotion, memory, learning, sensory integration, social cognition, embodiment, and the making of meaning, identity, and culture through sound, text, interaction, and movement. To theorise about, probe, and explain music creation, composition, perception, and performance are conceptual pillars of Music Perception.
The present issue, Issue 5 of Volume 41, conveys some of the breadth of research questions, disciplines, and methods that characterise music science. Gonzalez et al. investigate EEG connectivity networks of expert cellists during real and imagined interpretation of tonal and atonal musical excerpts. Through two experiments, Kubit et al. demonstrate preservation of the speech-to-song illusion over one week, with effects of musical familiarity and evidence of rapid phrase specific learning and long-term memory underpinning the illusion. The influence of experience with pitched or unpitched instruments by musicians with Cantonese background has been demonstrated by Choi et al. in lexical tone discrimination and sequence recall. Bugos and colleagues engaged healthy older adults in a jazz piano training program of 30 hours over 10 days that included improvisation, basic technique, and aural training. The results of the pilot indicate differences in executive function and EEG response for those in the intervention compared with the control group. Finally, through the lens of philosophy, Berkowitz analyses disruption of the music ecosystem by automated musicking—AI—with a call to researchers and educators to deepen our AI literacy and broaden AI ethics. Through education, Berkowitz argues, AI may be harnessed to benefit rather than hinder human enterprise and humanity.
The issue represents a mix of fundamental and translational research, experimental and theoretical scrutiny and, increasingly global, some diversity in populations sampled and the location of sites for data collection.
Topics of current interest to the Music Perception readership may also be gleaned from the list of most read articles since 2020 (according to the journal’s website statistics):
Emotions, Mechanisms, and Individual Differences in Music Listening: A Stratified Random Sampling Approach—Patrik N. Juslin, Laura S. Sakka, Gonçalo T. Barradas, & Olivier Lartillot
Embracing Anti-Racist Practices in the Music Perception and Cognition Community—David John Baker, Amy Belfi, Sarah Creel, Jessica Grahn, Erin Hannon, Psyche Loui, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, Adena Schachner, Michael Schutz, Daniel Shanahan, & Dominique T. Vuvan
Understanding the Relationship Between Catchiness and Groove: A Qualitative Study with Popular Music Creators—Toni A. Bechtold, Lorenz Kilchenmann, Ben Curry, & Maria A. G. Witek
Singing in the Brain: Investigating the Cognitive Basis of Earworms—Callula Killingly, Philippe Lacherez, & Renata Meuter
What Drives Narrative Engagement With Music?—J. Devin McAuley, Patrick C. M. Wong, Lucas Bellaiche, & Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis
Reflections 2017–2024
It is seven years since my first editorial in Music Perception with this the last as I conclude my term as Editor. To work closely with brilliant researchers in their role as authors, reviewers, and editors has been an honour and a career highpoint. The delight I continue to experience as I convey a set of encouraging and constructive reviews, or communicate acceptance of a manuscript for publication, signals that this is exactly the right time to pass the baton.
Building on the solid reputation of the journal and the work and esteem of previous Editors, Professors Lola L. Cuddy (2002–2017), Robert Gjerdingen (1998–2002), Jamshed J. Bharucha (1995–1998), and Founding Editor, Professor Diana Deutsch (1983–1995), the Associate Editors and I have introduced open science practices including Registered Reports, the first, Lahdelma and Eerola (2024), and publishing papers that report replication. We have made available free issues during major conferences, introduced virtual thematic issues, Meet-the-Editors panels at conferences to demystify academic publishing especially for early career academics and graduate students, the promotion of journal issues and articles through social media, and the occasional publication of invited commentaries on debated topics. We transitioned to the Scholar One platform in 2017 and shortly we will begin to receive and manage manuscripts through the platform, Scholastica. Issue 5 of each volume has listed acknowledged reviewers for their contribution to papers published across the volume; see p. 413 of this issue.
The journal is enjoying a high rate of new submissions each year with more than 200 in 2023. Feedback is provided in some form on each new manuscript that is received. I provide brief feedback on manuscripts that are outside the aims and scope of the journal, with more detailed feedback on those manuscripts provided occasionally by an Associate Editor. Manuscripts sent for review receive two reviews as well as comments from an Associate Editor. The journal’s acceptance rate at present is 27%. Reviewer turn-around time for an original submission, on average, is 31 days and for a resubmission, 25 days. An additional 20–30 days in total is needed for the Editor to invite an Associate Editor to be the Action Editor, for the Action Editor to invite and secure reviewers, collate the set of reviews, prepare advice to authors, and make a decision, which are then ratified and dispatched by the Editor. Once an article is accepted for publication in Music Perception, it tends to appear within three to six months.
Thinking back to 2017 and for many, there have been years of change and disruption, times of isolation and loss, as well as achievement and hope. Events that come to mind include extreme weather through climate change, Covid-19, xenophobia, racism, an increasing presence and awareness of AI, the rise of synthetic media, widespread cultural appropriation and extractivism, austerity, poverty, war. If we consider that the disciplines that contribute to our field are often human-centred and relational, it is not surprising that the field has grown, and questions, methods, teams, have somewhat diversified.
Let’s applaud and join with researchers who are championing and modelling access, inclusion, and diversity in all aspects of research on music perception and cognition; see for example, Baker et al. (2020), Jacoby et al. (2020), Sauvé et al (2023), and Agrawal et al. (2024).
Acknowledgements and Announcing a New Editor
I continue to be inspired by academia at its best, with colleagues sharing ideas and critiques with intellectual generosity and respect. To oversee the processes of review, feedback, revision, arbitration, and enthusiastic acceptance has been an immense privilege. My thanks to all who have submitted, managed, and reviewed manuscripts for Music Perception during my term as Editor.
Like our authors, I am deeply grateful for the support, hard work, and professionalism of the journal’s Associate/Action Editors, and for the careful and brilliant work of the journal’s Managing Editor, Dr. Christine Koh. The journal’s Editorial Assistant, Dr. Karen Hutchings, has helped things stay on track with administrative aplomb. The journal team at University of California Press (UCP) brings our authors’ work to published form and, through the team’s trust in us and good humour, they feel like close friends—thank you, David Famiano, Cheryl Owen Swope, Lorraine Weston, Gabe Alvaro, Krystal Farmer, and Rachel Lee.
Now that the UC Press search for an Editor has successfully concluded, the journal’s Associate Editors, Consulting Editors, and I look forward, eagerly, to the stewardship and leadership from Editor-elect, Texas Tech University Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts, David Sears.
University of California Press