Musical timbre is often described using terms from non-auditory senses, mainly vision and touch; but it is not clear whether crossmodality in timbre semantics reflects multisensory processing or simply linguistic convention. If multisensory processing is involved in timbre perception, the mechanism governing the interaction remains unknown. To investigate whether timbres commonly perceived as “bright-dark” facilitate or interfere with visual perception (darkness-brightness), we designed two speeded classification experiments. Participants were presented consecutive images of slightly varying (or the same) brightness along with task-irrelevant auditory primes (“bright” or “dark” tones) and asked to quickly identify whether the second image was brighter/darker than the first. Incongruent prime-stimulus combinations produced significantly more response errors compared to congruent combinations but choice reaction time was unaffected. Furthermore, responses in a deceptive identical-image condition indicated subtle semantically congruent response bias. Additionally, in Experiment 2 (which also incorporated a spatial texture task), measures of reaction time (RT) and accuracy were used to construct speed-accuracy tradeoff functions (SATFs) in order to critically compare two hypothesized mechanisms for timbre-based crossmodal interactions, sensory response change vs. shift in response criterion. Results of the SATF analysis are largely consistent with the response criterion hypothesis, although without conclusively ruling out sensory change.

In recent empirical research, the experience of groove (i.e., the pleasant sense of wanting to move along with the music) has come into focus. By developing the new Experience of Groove Questionnaire (EGQ), Senn et al. (2020) have provided a standardized and validated research instrument for future studies, consisting of the two correlated factors Urge to Move and Pleasure. The present study reports the translation of the English version into German and a validation with a German sample ( N = 455). The original version’s factor structure was confirmed by the German data. Test-retest reliability was found to be high ( r tt > .85) for both factors. To determine convergent validity, two other scales were included: The Drum Pattern Quality Scale ( Frühauf, Kopiez, & Platz, 2013 ) and the Aesthetic Emotions Scale ( Schindler et al., 2017 ) showed high correlations (.78 < r < .87) with the two factors of the EGQ and therefore indicated convergent validity. We conclude that the German version shows good psychometric properties and recommend its use for future research on the experience of groove.

This study tests the respective roles of pitch-class content and bass patterns within harmonic expectation using a mix of behavioral and computational experiments. In our first two experiments, participants heard a paradigmatic chord progression derived from music theory textbooks and were asked to rate how well different target endings completed that progression. The completion included the progression’s paradigmatic target, different inversions of that chord (i.e., different members of the harmony were heard in the lowest voice), and a “mismatched” target, a triad that shared its lowest pitch with the paradigmatic ending but altered other pitch-class content. Participants generally rated the paradigmatic target most highly, followed by other inversions of that chord, with lowest ratings generally elicited by the mismatched target. This suggests that listeners’ harmonic expectations are sensitive to both bass patterns and pitch-class content. However, these results did not hold in all cases. A final computational experiment was run to determine whether variations in behavioral responses could be explained by corpus statistics. To this end, n -gram chord-transition models and frequency measurements were compiled for each progression. Our findings suggest that listeners rate highly and have stronger expectations about chord progressions that occur frequently and behave consistently within tonal corpora.

Among the three primary tonal functions described in modern theory textbooks, the pre-dominant has the highest number of representative chords. We posit that one unifying feature of the pre-dominant function is its attraction to V, and the experiment reported here investigates factors that may contribute to this perception. Participants were junior/senior music majors, freshman music majors, and people from the general population recruited on Prolific.co. In each trial, four Shepard-tone sounds in the key of C were presented: 1) the tonic note, 2) one of 31 different chords, 3) the dominant triad, and 4) the tonic note. Participants rated the strength of attraction between the second and third chords. Across all individuals, diatonic and chromatic pre-dominant chords were rated significantly higher than non-pre-dominant chords and bridge chords. Further, music theory training moderated this relationship, with individuals with more theory training rating pre-dominant chords as being more attracted to the dominant. A final data analysis modeled the role of empirical features of the chords preceding the V chord, finding that chords with roots moving to V down by fifth, chords with less acoustical roughness, and chords with more semitones adjacent to V were all significant predictors of attraction ratings.

Historical listening has long been a topic of interest for musicologists. Yet, little attention has been given to the systematic study of historical listening practices before the common practice era (c. 1700–present). In the first study of its kind, this research compared a model of medieval perceptions of “sweetness” based on writings of medieval music theorists with modern day listeners’ aesthetic responses. Responses were collected through two experiments. In an implicit associations experiment, participants were primed with a more or less consonant musical excerpt, then presented with a sweet or bitter target word, or a non-word, on which to make lexical decisions. In the explicit associations experiment, participants were asked to rate on a three-point Likert scale perceived sweetness of short musical excerpts that varied in consonance and sound quality (male, female, organ). The results from these experiments were compared to predictions from a medieval perception model to investigate whether early and modern listeners have similar aesthetic responses. Results from the implicit association test were not consistent with the predictions of the model, however, results from the explicit associations experiment were. These findings indicate the metaphor of sweetness may be useful for comparing the aesthetic responses of medieval and modern listeners.