Annabel Cohen

University of Prince Edward Island | UPEI · Department of Psychology

Singing provides older persons with opportunities to engage in music performance, whether or not they have done so in the past. It offers the esthetic pleasure of making music, and much more. Singing in a group has been associated with enhanced social bonding, general feeling of well-being, sense of personal growth, reductions in stress, pain, and...

In this editorial Cohen discusses her tenure as the editor of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, & Brain ( PMMB ) for almost a decade. During this period, 26 issues in eight volumes (vol. 20 to vol. 27) were published under her supervision. Any successes that the journal or she has had during her editorship are due, in large part, to the dedication and...

The AIRS Test Battery of Singing Skills (ATBSS) is a protocol for acquiring data about a wide range of singing abilities, one of which is the ability to learn an unfamiliar song. This test component presents a song with English lyrics. We examined the role of native language of the singer in this task by comparing the sung productions of the song b...

Singing abilities begin in early childhood and continue throughout life. Audiovideo recordings of singing behaviours collected from a wide variety of individuals can provide a foundation for exploring the complexities of singing acquisition. The AIRS Test Battery of Singing Skills (ATBSS) was developed to provide this foundation using a standard pr...

Performance spaces for music have an impact on every live music listening experience, yet music psychologists have directed relatively little attention to them. In contrast, architectural acousticians have quantified the characteristics of performance spaces and have sought to develop guidelines for their optimization. From a background in physics,...

The context for the professional autobiography of Leo Beranek is introduced by the second author, describing the early years prior to his graduate studies. Then, Dr. Beranek continues with a description of his professional career: first in teaching, research, and industry, and then concert hall and opera acoustics. The second author then continues...

This special issue of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, & Brain is dedicated to Dr. Leo Beranek not only in acclaim of his 100th birthday in 2014 but also in recognition of his lifelong contributions to the field of architectural acoustics. The editors have arranged the papers along a line of argument following a "communication chain," beginning with...

The article draws attention to the value of objective measurement of both human responses and soundtracks for validating conjectures about the role of film music. Based on empirical research on film music as well as ideas from film theory and cognitive science, the author's Congruence-Association Model with Working Narrative (CAM-WN) is introduced...

Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, & Brain ( PMMB ) is pleased to publish this Special Issue on Musical Imagery, under the most able guest editorship of Freya Bailes. Musical imagery—hearing music apart from the presence of external sound—is a topic at the forefront of music psychology today. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)

In a same-different rhythm recognition study, similar to Grahn and Brett (2009), 30 young and 30 older adults (M= 21.8 and 75.6 years respectively) in each trial compared a final rhythm to 2 previously presented. Half of each group was musically trained. Accuracy decreased with age, F(1, 58)=12.77, p<.001, and rhythm complexity (beat-based versus n...

This chapter focuses on the role of music in narrative film. Unlike most other sensory information in a film (i.e., the visual scenes, sound effects, dialog, and text), music is typically directed to the audience and not to the characters in the film. Several examples will familiarize the reader with some of the subtleties of film music phenomena....

This chapter analyzes the similarities and differences of meaning in language and music, with a special focus on the neural underpinning of meaning. In particular, factors (e.g., emotion) that are internal to an agent are differentiated from factors that arise from the interaction with the external environment and other agents (e.g., sociality and...

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the definition of creativity in singing. It then highlights the uniqueness of this human ability by contrasting it with the absence of creativity in birdsong. However, consistent with the notions of critical periods for the acquisition of birdsong, the potential for creativity in singing at different s...

The relative ease with which children versus adults carried out a recognition task for words in their own versus an unfamiliar language was investigated. According to the critical period hypothesis it was predicted that the difference in the foreign and native recognition scores for music and language would be less than the respective difference wi...

Tonality induction is the natural outcome of acoustic redundancies in music and the predisposition of the brain to represent these redundancies. In the simplest case, tonality induction relies on frequency resolution and a memory accumulator. A review of the literature suggests that these and other more sophisticated building blocks (analysis of co...

We examined two models that quantified the effects of tonality on accuracy and reaction time in an intervening-tone pitch-comparison task. In each of 16 task conditions (standard tone-interpolated sequence-test tone, abbreviated as S-seq-T), the S and T tones, C₄ and/or C#₄, were separated by a three-tone sequence that was a random arrangement of o...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Queens University, 1975. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-188). Microfiche.