We provide the outline of a semantics for music. We take music cognition to be continuous with normal auditory cognition, and thus to deliver inferences about “virtual sources” of the music. As a result, sound parameters that trigger inferences about sound sources in normal auditory cognition produce related ones in music. But music also triggers inferences on the basis of the movement of virtual sources in tonal pitch space, which has points of stability, points of instability, and relations of attraction among them. We sketch a framework that aggregates inferences from normal auditory cognition and tonal inferences, by way of a theory of musical truth: a source undergoing a musical movement m is true of an object undergoing a series of events e just in case there is a certain structure-preserving map between m and e . This framework can help revisit aspects of musical syntax: Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s (1983) grouping structure can be seen to reflect the mereology (“partology”) of events that are abstractly represented in the music. Finally, we argue that this “refentialist” approach to music semantics still has the potential to provide an account of diverse emotional effects in music.

Guitar distortion used in rock music modifies a chord so that new frequencies appear in its harmonic structure. A distorted dyad (power chord) has a special role in heavy metal music due to its harmonics that create a major third interval, making it similar to a major chord. We investigated how distortion affects cortical auditory processing of chords in musicians and nonmusicians. Electric guitar chords with or without distortion and with or without the interval of the major third (i.e., triads or dyads) were presented in an oddball design where one of them served as a repeating standard stimulus and others served as occasional deviants. This enabled the recording of event-related potentials (ERPs) of the electroencephalogram (EEG) related to deviance processing (the mismatch negativity MMN and the attention-related P3a component) in an ignore condition. MMN and P3a responses were elicited in most paradigms. Distorted chords in a nondistorted context only elicited early P3a responses. However, the power chord did not demonstrate a special role in the level of the ERPs. Earlier and larger MMN and P3a responses were elicited when distortion was modified compared to when only harmony (triad vs. dyad) was modified between standards and deviants. The MMN responses were largest when distortion and harmony deviated simultaneously. Musicians demonstrated larger P3a responses than nonmusicians. The results suggest mostly independent cortical auditory processing of distortion and harmony in Western individuals, and facilitated chord change processing in musicians compared to nonmusicians. While distortion has been used in heavy rock music for decades, this study is among the first ones to shed light on its cortical basis.

This study investigates the effects of music training on brain activity to violations of melodic expectancies. We recorded behavioral and event-related brain potential (ERP) responses of musicians and nonmusicians to discrepancies of pitch between pairs of unfamiliar melodies based on Western classical rules. Musicians detected pitch deviations significantly better than nonmusicians. In musicians compared to nonmusicians, auditory cortical potentials to notes but not unrelated warning tones exhibited enhanced P200 amplitude generally, and in response to pitch deviations enhanced amplitude for N150 and P300 (P3a) but not N100 was observed. P3a latency was shorter in musicians compared to nonmusicians. Both the behavioral and cortical activity differences observed between musicians and nonmusicians in response to deviant notes were significant with stimulation of the right but not the left ear, suggesting that left-sided brain activity differentiated musicians from nonmusicians. The enhanced amplitude of N150 among musicians with right ear stimulation was positively correlated with earlier age onset of music training. Our data support the notion that long-term music training in musicians leads to functional reorganization of auditory brain systems, and that these effects are potentiated by early age onset of training.

A large body of evidence has shown that musicians’ brains differ in many ways from nonmusicians’ brains due to the particularly intense and prolonged sensorimotor training involved. Not much is known about the effects of the specific musical instrument played on brain processing of audiovisual information. In this study the effect of musical expertise was investigated in professional clarinetists and violinists. One hundred and eighty videos showing fragments of musical performances played on a violin or a clarinet were presented to musicians of G. Verdi Milan Conservatory and age-matched controls. Half of the musicians were violinists, the other half were clarinetists; event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 128 scalp sites and analyzed. Participants judged how many notes were played in each clip. The task was extremely easy for all participants. Over prefrontal areas an anterior negativity response was found to be much larger in controls than in musicians, and in musicians for the unfamiliar over the familiar musical instrument. Furthermore, a later central negativity response showed a lack of note numerosity effect in the brains of musicians for their own instrument, but not for unfamiliar instrument. The data indicate that music training is instrument-specific and that it profoundly affects prefrontal encoding of music-related information and auditory processing.

Our primary goal has been to elucidate a model of pitch memory by examining the brain activity of musicians with and without absolute pitch during listening tasks. Subjects, screened for both absolute and relative pitch abilities, were presented with two auditory tasks and one visual task that served as a control. In the first auditory task (pitch memory task), subjects were asked to differentiate between diatonic and nondiatonic tones within a tonal framework. In the second auditory task (contour task), subjects were presented with the same pitch sequences but instead asked to differentiate between tones moving upward or downward. For the visual control task, subjects were presented again with the same pitch sequences and asked to determine whether each pitch was diatonic or nondiatonic, only this time the note names appeared visually on the computer screen. Our findings strongly suggest that there are various levels of absolute pitch ability. Some absolute pitch subjects have, in addition to this skill, strong relative pitch abilities, and these differences are reflected quite consistently by the behavior of the P300 component of the event-related potential. Our research also strengthens the idea that the memory system for pitch and interval distances is distinct from the memory system for contour (W. J. Dowling, 1978). Our results are discussed within the context of the current absolute pitch literature.

In two experiments with event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated the formation of auditory Gestalts. For this purpose, we used tone sequences of different structure. In the first experiment, we contrasted a rhythmic section to a section with random time values, each embedded in rhythmically irregular context. In the second experiment, melodies were contrasted to randomized sequences. Nonmusicians either had to detect the rhythmic pattern or to memorize short tone excerpts. Random versions in both experiments evoked a significant increase in the amplitude of P1 and P2. Randomized rhythm sections also evoked a late sustained negative potential. The enlarged P1 and P2 for random sequences might reflect stronger integration effort, as the predictability of tone progression was low. Thus, already at the early stage of encoding, sequence processing might be top-down-driven. The late negativity for rhythmically random sections is possibly task-related, reflecting expectancy violation in terms of regularity, since a metrical grid of beats could not be established. The memorizing of tone excerpts did not evoke a late neural correlate. (169)

Behavioral evidence indicates that musical context facilitates pitch discrimination. In the present study, we sought to determine whether pitch context and its familiarity might affect brain responses to pitch change even at the preattentive level. Ten musicians and 10 nonmusicians, while concentrating on reading a book, were presented with sound stimuli that had an infrequent (p = 15%) pitch shift of 144 Hz. In the familiar condition, the infrequent third-position deviant changed the mode (major vs. minor) of the five-tone pattern. In the unfamiliar condition, patterns were formed from five arithmetically determined tone frequencies, the deviant not causing any change of mode. The no-context condition included only third-position tones. All deviants elicited the change-specific mismatch negativity component of the event-related potentials in both groups of subjects. In both musicians and nonmusicians, pitch change in the familiar condition evoked larger mismatch negativity amplitude than the change in the unfamiliar condition and, correspondingly, larger mismatch negativity in the unfamiliar condition than in the no-context condition. This suggests that preattentive pitch-change processing is generally enhanced in a familiar context. Moreover, the latency of the mismatch negativity was shorter for musicians than for nonmusicians in both the familiar and unfamiliar conditions, whereas no difference between groups was observed in the no-context condition. This finding indicates that, in response to sequential structured sound events, the auditory system reacts faster in musicians than in nonmusicians.

An event-related brain potential (ERP) component called mismatch negativity (MMN) is elicited by physically deviant auditory stimuli presented among repetitive, "standard," stimuli. MMN reflects a mismatch process between sensory input from the deviant stimulus and a shortduration neuronal representation developed by the standard stimulus. The MMN amplitude is known to correlate with pitch-discrimination performance. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether the MMN is different in absolute pitch (AP) possessors and nonpossessors. ERPs were recorded from AP and non-AP groups, which were matched with regard to musical training. It was found that deviant stimuli differing from standard tones by a quartertone or a semitone elicited an MMN irrespective of whether the stimulus was located on (white key/black key) or off the Western musical scale. These results were obtained with both sinusoidal and piano tones. The MMN was larger and earlier when the stimuli were piano tones than when they were sinusoidal tones and when the standard-deviant difference amounted to a semitone rather than a quartertone. However, differences between the groups were not found in auditory information processing reflected by the MMN component of the ERP. In the light of the earlier MMN results showing a close correlation between the MMN and pitch- discrimination accuracy, it might be concluded that pitch discrimination and identification are based on different brain mechanisms. In addition, the differences in the MMN amplitude and latency between sinusoidal and piano tones might be interpreted as suggesting that sensory memory traces, as reflected by the MMN, are capable of storing information of very complex sound structures also.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This study investigates the possibility of measuring cognitive responses to musical stimuli. The experiments were based on measurements of the event- related potential (ERP) of three electroencephalographic electrodes. The musical stimuli consisted of five-tone pitch patterns ( constant intensity, duration, and timbre), based on the Western tonal system. Subjects compared reference patterns with comparison patterns, which were either identical to the reference pattern or nonidentical because of predetermined changes in the comparison patterns. The patterns were presented in auditory or visual mode in a slow or a fast version. The results show a striking cognitive response to nonidentical tones in the comparison patterns and to a lesser extent to exceptional tones even in the reference patterns. Different levels of response were detected according to the type of pattern. We also found some evidence of factors contributing to "subjective equivalence" between different patterns. The correlation between results from this study and those from earlier studies based on the same measuring technique with different kinds of input data or using different methods and techniques is discussed.

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.

T raditional neurobiological theories of musical emotions explain well why extreme music such as punk, hardcore, or metal—whose vocal and instrumental characteristics share much similarity with acoustic threat signals—should evoke unpleasant feelings for a large proportion of listeners. Why it doesn't for metal music fans, however, is controversial: metal fans may differ from non-fans in how they process threat signals at the sub-cortical level, showing deactivated responses that differ from controls. Alternatively, appreciation for metal may depend on the inhibition by cortical circuits of a normal low-order response to auditory threat. In a series of three experiments, we show here that, at a sensory level, metal fans actually react equally negatively, equally fast, and even more accurately to cues of auditory threat in vocal and instrumental contexts than non-fans; conversely, we tested the hypothesis that cognitive load reduced fans' appreciation of metal to the level experienced by non-fans, but found only limited support that it was the case. Nevertheless, taken together, these results are not compatible with the idea that extreme music lovers do so because of a different sensory response to threat, and highlight a potential contribution of controlled cognitive processes in their aesthetic experience.

W hat makes a piece of music appear complex to a listener? This research extends previous work by Eerola (2016) , examining information content generated by a computational model of auditory expectation (IDyOM) based on statistical learning and probabilistic prediction as an empirical definition of perceived musical complexity. We systematically manipulated the melody, rhythm, and harmony of short polyphonic musical excerpts using the model to ensure that these manipulations systematically varied information content in the intended direction. Complexity ratings collected from 28 participants were found to positively correlate most strongly with melodic and harmonic information content, which corresponded to descriptive musical features such as the proportion of out-of-key notes and tonal ambiguity. When individual differences were considered, these explained more variance than the manipulated predictors. Musical background was not a significant predictor of complexity ratings. The results support information content, as implemented by IDyOM, as an information-theoretic measure of complexity as well as extending IDyOM's range of applications to perceived complexity.

T imbre is an important factor that affects the perception of emotion in music. To date, little is known about the effects of timbre on neural responses to musical emotion. To address this issue, we used ERPs to investigate whether there are different neural responses to musical emotion when the same melodies are presented in different timbres. With a cross-modal affective priming paradigm, target faces were primed by affectively congruent or incongruent melodies without lyrics presented in the violin, flute, and voice. Results showed a larger P3 and a larger left anterior distributed LPC in response to affectively incongruent versus congruent trials in the voice version. For the flute version, however, only the LPC effect was found, which was distributed over centro-parietal electrodes. Unlike the voice and flute versions, an N400 effect was observed in the violin version. These findings revealed different patterns of neural responses to musical emotion when the same melodies were presented in different timbres, and provide evidence for the hypothesis that there are specialized neural responses to the human voice.

T he neural activation patterns provoked in response to music listening can reveal whether a subject did or did not receive music training. In the current exploratory study, we have approached this two-group (musicians and nonmusicians) classification problem through a computational framework composed of the following steps: Acoustic features extraction; Acoustic features selection; Trigger selection; EEG signal processing; and Multivariate statistical analysis. We are particularly interested in analyzing the brain data on a global level, considering its activity registered in electroencephalogram (EEG) signals on a given time instant. Our experiment's results—with 26 volunteers (13 musicians and 13 nonmusicians) who listened the classical music Hungarian Dance No. 5 from Johannes Brahms—have shown that is possible to linearly differentiate musicians and nonmusicians with classification accuracies that range from 69.2% (test set) to 93.8% (training set), despite the limited sample sizes available. Additionally, given the whole brain vector navigation method described and implemented here, our results suggest that it is possible to highlight the most expressive and discriminant changes in the participants brain activity patterns depending on the acoustic feature extracted from the audio.

I n a study of tempo perception , L ondon , Burger, Thompson, and Toiviainen (2016) presented participants with digitally ‘‘tempo-shifted’’ R&B songs (i.e., sped up or slowed down without otherwise altering their pitch or timbre). They found that while participants’ relative tempo judgments of original versus altered versions were correct, they no longer corresponded to the beat rate of each stimulus. Here we report on three experiments that further probe the relation(s) between beat rate, tempo-shifting, beat salience, melodic structure, and perceived tempo. Experiment 1 is a replication of London et al. (2016) using the original stimuli. Experiment 2 replaces the Motown stimuli with disco music, which has higher beat salience. Experiment 3 uses looped drum patterns, eliminating pitch and other cues from the stimuli and maximizing beat salience. The effect of London et al. (2016) was replicated in Experiment 1 , present to a lesser degree in Experiment 2 , and absent in Experiment 3 . Experiments 2 and 3 also found that participants were able to make tempo judgments in accordance with BPM rates for stimuli that were not tempo-shifted. The roles of beat salience, melodic structure, and memory for tempo are discussed, and the TAE as an example of perceptual sharpening is considered.

C omposers convey emotion through music by co-varying structural cues. Although the complex interplay provides a rich listening experience, this creates challenges for understanding the contributions of individual cues. Here we investigate how three specific cues (attack rate, mode, and pitch height) work together to convey emotion in Bach's Well Tempered-Clavier (WTC) . In three experiments, we explore responses to (1) eight-measure excerpts and (2) musically “resolved” excerpts, and (3) investigate the role of different standard dimensional scales of emotion. In each experiment, thirty nonmusician participants rated perceived emotion along scales of valence and intensity (Experiments 1 & 2) or valence and arousal ( Experiment 3 ) for 48 pieces in the WTC . Responses indicate listeners used attack rate, Mode, and pitch height to make judgements of valence, but only attack rate for intensity/arousal. Commonality analyses revealed mode predicted the most variance for valence ratings, followed by attack rate, with pitch height contributing minimally. In Experiment 2 mode increased in predictive power compared to Experiment 1 . For Experiment 3 , using “arousal” instead of “intensity” showed similar results to Experiment 1 . We discuss how these results complement and extend previous findings of studies with tightly controlled stimuli, providing additional perspective on complex issues of interpersonal communication.