Sonata and rondo movements are often defined in terms of large-scale form, yet in the classical era, rondos were also identified according to their lively, cheerful character. We hypothesized that sonatas and rondos could be categorized based on stylistic features, and that rondos would involve more acoustic cues for happiness (e.g., higher average pitch height and higher average attack rate). In a corpus analysis, we examined paired movement openings from 180 instrumental works, composed between 1770 and 1799. Rondos had significantly higher pitch height and attack rate, as predicted, and there were also significant differences related to dynamics, meter, and cadences. We then conducted an experiment involving participants with at least 5 years of formal music training or less than 6 months of formal music training. Participants listened to 120 15-second audio clips, taken from the beginnings of movements in our corpus. After a training phase, they attempted to categorize the excerpts (2AFC task). D-prime scores were significantly higher than chance levels for both groups, and in post-experiment questionnaires, participants without music training reported that rondos sounded happier than sonatas. Overall, these results suggest that classical formal types have distinct stylistic and affective conventions.

The study of music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) has grown substantially in recent years. Prior work has used various methods to compare MEAMs to memories evoked by other cues (e.g., images, words). Here, we sought to identify which methods could distinguish between MEAMs and picture-evoked memories. Participants ( N = 18) listened to popular music and viewed pictures of famous persons, and described any autobiographical memories evoked by the stimuli. Memories were scored using the Autobiographical Interview (AI; Levine, Svoboda, Hay, Winocur, & Moscovitch, 2002 ), Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker et al., 2015 ), and Evaluative Lexicon (EL; Rocklage & Fazio, 2018 ). We trained three logistic regression models (one for each scoring method) to differentiate between memories evoked by music and faces. Models trained on LIWC and AI data exhibited significantly above chance accuracy when classifying whether a memory was evoked by a face or a song. The EL, which focuses on the affective nature of a text, failed to predict whether memories were evoked by music or faces. This demonstrates that various memory scoring techniques provide complementary information about cued autobiographical memories, and suggests that MEAMs differ from memories evoked by pictures in some aspects (e.g., perceptual and episodic content) but not others (e.g., emotional content).

In an experimental study, we investigated how well novices can learn from each other in situations of technology-aided musical skill acquisition, comparing joint and solo learning, and learning through imitation, synchronization, and turn-taking. Fifty-four participants became familiar, either solo or in pairs, with three short musical melodies and then individually performed each from memory. Each melody was learned in a different way: participants from the solo group were asked via an instructional video to: 1) play in synchrony with the video, 2) take turns with the video, or 3) imitate the video. Participants from the duo group engaged in the same learning trials, but with a partner. Novices in both groups performed more accurately in pitch and time when learning in synchrony and turn-taking than in imitation. No differences were found between solo and joint learning. These results suggest that musical learning benefits from a shared, in-the-moment, musical experience, where responsibilities and cognitive resources are distributed between biological (i.e., peers) and hybrid (i.e., participant(s) and computer) assemblies.

The OPERA hypothesis theorizes how musical experience heightens perceptual acuity to lexical tones. One missing element in the hypothesis is whether musical advantage is general to all or specific to some lexical tones. To further extend the hypothesis, this study investigated whether English musicians consistently outperformed English nonmusicians in perceiving a variety of Cantonese tones. In an AXB discrimination task, the musicians exhibited superior discriminatory performance over the nonmusicians only in the high level, high rising, and mid-level tone contexts. Similarly, in a Cantonese tone sequence recall task, the musicians significantly outperformed the nonmusicians only in the contour tone context but not in the level tone context. Collectively, the results reflect the selectivity of musical advantage—musical experience is only advantageous to the perception of some but not all Cantonese tones, and elements of selectivity can be introduced to the OPERA hypothesis. Methodologically, the findings highlight the need to include a wide variety of lexical tone contrasts when studying music-to-language transfer.

Integrating methods from experimental social psychology and music perception, we tested the hypothesis that when listeners personally like a musician, they will be more inclined to experience his or her music as both provoking movement and as subjectively pleasurable, the two core features of perceived groove. In Experiment 1, participants were exposed to a set of moderately-syncopated, high-groove drum-breaks which they were led to believe were either produced by a relatively likable or unlikable musician. In line with predictions, participants led to find the musician more versus less likable rated the same drum-breaks as more evocative of both the urge to move and of feelings of pleasure. When participants in a follow-up study (Experiment 2) were administered the exact same manipulation of likability, but exposed to highly-syncopated, low-groove drum-breaks, these effects were eradicated, suggesting that the results of Experiment 1 were not merely due to demand characteristics or response biases. Together, these findings support the notion that listeners are more responsive to “participating in the music” when they are relatively motivated to affiliate with the musician(s). Methodological limitations and directions for future research on the social psychological underpinnings of groove are discussed.

Speech and song have frequently been treated as contrasting categories. We here observe a variety of collective activities in which multiple participants utter the same thing at the same time, a behavior we call joint speech. This simple empirical definition serves to single out practices of ritual, protest, and the enactment of identity that span the range from speech to song and allows consideration of the manner in which such activities serve to ground collectives. We consider how the musical elements in joint speech such as rhythm, melody, and instrumentation are related to the context of occurrence and the purposes of the participants. While music and language have been greatly altered by developments in media technologies—from writing to recordings—joint speech has been, and continues to be, an integral part of practices, both formal and informal, from which communities derive their identity. The absence of joint speech from the scientific treatment of language has made language appear as an abstract intellectual and highly individualized activity. Joint speech may act as a corrective to draw our attention back to the voice in context, and the manner in which collective identities are enacted.

Music expertise has been shown to enhance emotion recognition from speech prosody. Yet, it is currently unclear whether music training enhances the recognition of emotions through other communicative modalities such as vision and whether it enhances the feeling of such emotions. Musicians and nonmusicians were presented with visual, auditory, and audiovisual clips consisting of the biological motion and speech prosody of two agents interacting. Participants judged as quickly as possible whether the expressed emotion was happiness or anger, and subsequently indicated whether they also felt the emotion they had perceived. Measures of accuracy and reaction time were collected from the emotion recognition judgements, while yes/no responses were collected as indication of felt emotions. Musicians were more accurate than nonmusicians at recognizing emotion in the auditory-only condition, but not in the visual-only or audiovisual conditions. Although music training enhanced recognition of emotion through sound, it did not affect the felt emotion. These findings indicate that emotional processing in music and language may use overlapping but also divergent resources, or that some aspects of emotional processing are less responsive to music training than others. Hence music training may be an effective rehabilitative device for interpreting others’ emotion through speech.

In charting the “territory between speech and song,” Cummins (2020) identifies various forms of vocal behavior involving “multiple people uttering the same thing at the same time”—what the author calls “joint speech.” I interrogate this conceptual framework in light of specific examples both musical and linguistic, which suggest a usefully expanded category: “collaborative vocality.” At the same time, I also propose a distinctly musical account of joint speech that ultimately affirms the conventional separation between music and language. Central to this account is an analysis of the unique character of singing and an insistence on the centrality of pleasure in musical experience.

In his article “The Territory Between Speech and Song: A Joint Speech Perspective,” Cummins (2020) argues that research has failed to adequately recognize an important category of vocal activity that falls outside of the domains of language and music, at least as they are typically defined. This category, referred to by Cummins as joint speech , spans a range of vocal activity so broad that it is not possible to define it using musical or phonetic terms. Instead, the feature that draws the varied examples together is vocal activity that is coordinated across participants and embedded in a physical and social context. In this invited commentary, I argue that although joint speech adds an important thread to the discourse on the relations between speech and song by putting an emphasis on the collective, it is ultimately related to a wider class of joint action phenomena found in the animal kingdom.

The pleasurable desire to move to a beat is known as groove and is partly explained by rhythmic syncopation. While many contemporary groove-directed genres originated in the African diaspora, groove music psychology has almost exclusively studied European or North American listeners. While cross-cultural approaches can help us understand how different populations respond to music, comparing African and Western musical behaviors has historically tended to rely on stereotypes. Here we report on two studies in which sensorimotor and groove responses to syncopation were measured in university students and staff from Cape Coast, Ghana and Williamstown, MA, United States. In our experimental designs and interpretations, we show sensitivity towards the ethical implications of doing cross-cultural research in an African context. The Ghanaian group showed greater synchronization precision than Americans during monophonic syncopated patterns, but this was not reflected in synchronization accuracy. There was no significant group difference in the pleasurable desire to move. Our results have implications for how we understand the relationship between exposure and synchronization, and how we define syncopation in cultural and musical contexts. We hope our critical approach to cross-cultural comparison contributes to developing music psychology into a more inclusive and culturally grounded field.

Perceived valence, tension, and movement of harmonic musical intervals (from the unison to the octave presented in a low- and high-register) and standard noises (brown, pink, white, blue, purple) were assessed in two studies that differed in the crossmodal procedure by which tension and movement were rated: proprioceptive device or visual analog scale. Valence was evaluated in both studies with the visual analog scale. In a preliminary study, the proprioceptive device was calibrated with a psychophysical procedure. Roughness of the stimuli was included as covariate. Tension was perceived higher in dissonant intervals and in intervals presented in the high register. The higher the high-pitch energy content in the standard noise, the higher the perceived tension. The visual analog scale resulted in higher tension ratings than the proprioceptive device. Perception of movement was higher in dissonant intervals, in intervals in the high register, and in standard noises than in musical intervals. High-pitch spectrum noises were associated with more sense of movement than low-pitch spectrum noises. Consonant intervals and low-register intervals were evaluated as more pleasant than dissonant and high-register intervals. High-pitch spectrum purple and blue noises were evaluated as more unpleasant than low-pitch spectrum noises.

The aim of the present study was to investigate if the perception of time is affected by actively attending to different metrical levels in musical rhythmic patterns. In an experiment with a repeated-measures design, musicians and nonmusicians were presented with musical rhythmic patterns played at three different tempi. They synchronized with multiple metrical levels (half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes) of these patterns using a finger-tapping paradigm and listened without tapping. After each trial, stimulus duration was judged using a verbal estimation paradigm. Results show that the metrical level participants synchronized with influenced perceived time: actively attending to a higher metrical level (half notes, longer intertap intervals) led to the shortest time estimations, hence time was experienced as passing more quickly. Listening without tapping led to the longest time estimations. The faster the tempo of the patterns, the longer the time estimation. While there were no differences between musicians and nonmusicians, those participants who tapped more consistently and accurately (as analyzed by circular statistics) estimated durations to be shorter. Thus, attending to different metrical levels in music, by deliberately directing attention and motor activity, affects time perception.

Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys the current state of the field and offers a number of concrete recommendations focused on issues involving ethics, empirical methods, and definitions of “music” and “culture.”

We explore the effects of trained musical movements on sensorimotor interactions in order to clarify the interpretation of previously observed expertise differences. Pianists and non-pianists listened to an auditory sequence and identified whether the final event occurred in time with the sequence. In half the trials participants listened without moving, and in half they synchronized keystrokes while listening. Pianists and non-pianists were better able to identify the timing of the final tone after synchronizing keystrokes compared to listening only. Curiously, this effect of movement did not differ between pianists and non-pianists despite substantial training differences with respect to finger movements. We also found few group differences in the ability to align keystrokes with events in the auditory sequence; however, movements were less variable (lower coefficient of variation) in pianists compared to non-pianists. Consistent with the idea that the benefits of synchronization on rhythm perception are constrained by motor effector kinematics, this work helps clarify previous findings in this paradigm. We discuss these outcomes in light of training and the kinematics involved in pianist keystrokes compared to musicians synchronizing movements in other studies. We also overview how these differences across motor effector synchronization and training must be accounted for in models of perception and action.

Voice leading is a common task in Western music composition whose conventions are consistent with fundamental principles of auditory perception. Here we introduce a computational cognitive model of voice leading, intended both for analyzing voice-leading practices within encoded musical corpora and for generating new voice leadings for unseen chord sequences. This model is feature-based, quantifying the desirability of a given voice leading on the basis of different features derived from Huron’s (2001) perceptual account of voice leading. We use the model to analyze a corpus of 370 chorale harmonizations by J. S. Bach, and demonstrate the model’s application to the voicing of harmonic progressions in different musical genres. The model is implemented in a new R package, “voicer,” which we release alongside this paper.

Tonal schemata are shaped by culture-specific music exposure. The acquisition process of tonal schemata has been delineated in Western mono-musical children, but cross-cultural variations have not been explored. We examined how Japanese children acquire tonal schemata in a bi-musical culture characterized by the simultaneous, and unbalanced, appearances of Western (dominant) music along with traditional Japanese (non-dominant) music. Progress of this acquisition was indexed by gauging children’s sensitivities to musical scale membership (differentiating scale-tones from non-scale-tones) and differences in tonal stability among scale tones (differentiating the tonic from another scale tone). Children (7-, 9-, 11-, 13-, and 14-year-olds) and adults judged how well two types of target tones (scale tone vs. non-scale tone; tonic vs. non-tonic) fit a preceding Western or traditional Japanese tonal context. Results showed that even 7-year-olds showed sensitivity to Western scale membership while sensitivity to Japanese scale membership did not appear until age nine. Also, sensitivity to the tonic emerged at age 13 for both types of melodies. These results suggest that even though they are exposed to both types of music simultaneously from birth, Japanese children begin by acquiring the tonal schema of the dominant Western music and this age of acquisition is not delayed relative to Western mono-musical peers.

When designing a new study regarding how music can portray and elicit emotion, one of the most crucial design decisions involves choosing the best stimuli. Every researcher must find musical samples that are able to capture an emotional state, are appropriate lengths, and have minimal potential for biasing participants. Researchers have often utilized musical excerpts that have previously been used by other scholars, but the appropriate musical choices depend on the specific goals of the study in question and will likely change among various research designs. The intention of this paper is to examine how musical stimuli have been selected in a sample of 306 research articles dating from 1928 through 2018. Analyses are presented regarding the designated emotions, how the stimuli were selected, the durations of the stimuli, whether the stimuli are excerpts from a longer work, and whether the passages have been used in studies about perceived or induced emotion. The results suggest that the literature relies on nine emotional terms, focuses more on perceived emotion than on induced emotion, and contains mostly short musical stimuli. I suggest that some of the inconclusive results from previous reviews may be due to the inconsistent use of emotion terms throughout the music community.

T he present study tested two assumptions concerning the auditory processing of microtiming in musical grooves (i.e., repeating, movement-inducing rhythmic patterns): 1) Microtiming challenges the listener's internal framework of timing regularities, or meter, and demands cognitive effort. 2) Microtiming promotes a “groove” experience—a pleasant sense of wanting to move along with the music. Using professional jazz musicians and nonmusicians as participants, we hypothesized that microtiming asynchronies between bass and drums (varying from −80 to 80 ms) were related to a) an increase in “mental effort” (as indexed by pupillometry), and b) a decrease in the quality of sensorimotor synchronization (as indexed by reduced finger tapping stability). We found bass/drums-microtiming asynchronies to be positively related to pupil dilation and negatively related to tapping stability. In contrast, we found that steady timekeeping (presence of eighth note hi-hat in the grooves) decreased pupil size and increased tapping performance, though there were no conclusive differences in pupil response between musicians and nonmusicians. However, jazz musicians consistently tapped with higher stability than nonmusicians, reflecting an effect of rhythmic expertise. Except for the condition most closely resembling real music, participants preferred the on-the-grid grooves to displacements in microtiming and bass-succeeding-drums-conditions were preferred over the reverse.