Annabel Cohen

University of Prince Edward Island | UPEI · Department of Psychology

The concluding chapter of Volume 2 synthesizes the findings, methods and cultural perspectives found in the preceding chapters, as well as the applications of findings and the proposed guidelines for practice. The Chapter summarizes the contributions to theory, connecting to the Volume Introduction, and takes a closer look at Dynamic Systems Theory...

The Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing, Volume II: Education examines the many methods and motivations for vocal pedagogy, promoting singing not just as an art form arising from the musical instrument found within every individual but also as a means of communication with social, psychological, and didactic functions. Prese...

Creativity research examines both the processes and products of creativity. An important avenue for analyzing creativity is by means of spontaneous improvisation, although there are major challenges to characterizing the products of improvisation because of their variable nature. A useful concept missing from the analysis of improvisation is the id...

This Editorial contextualizes the Special Issue of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain on Music as a Multimodal Experience, guest coedited by Renee Timmers and Roni Granot. Reference is made to the rebirth of interest in psychomusicological research in the 1980s that focused primarily on the auditory aspects of music, bridging it with psychoac...

The present issue of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, & Brain (PMMB), Volume 24, Issue 3, presents a broad range of research from psychoacoustics and psychometrics to applications of artificial intelligence and music therapy. The following editorial briefly introduces the contents of the issue, which also include a tribute to the late David Wessel, a...

This editorial introduces the current special issue of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, & Brain (PMMB) on “Interactions between Emotion and Cognition in Music.” PMMB is fortunate to be able to advance the discipline of psychomusicology through this focus on the integration of cognitive and emotional processes in music, all resulting from the generous...

The present special issue of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain entitled “Jazz Improvisation: Cognitive Perspectives” stems from a conference on “The Improvising Brain” held in 2013 at Georgia State University. The featured articles represent one of the first, if not the first, collections to focus on the music–cognitive–motor behaviors and p...

In 2008, at the ASA/EAA symposium honouring pioneering scientist of singing, Johan Sundberg, the Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing (AIRS) project was introduced as a major collaborative research initiative on singing [Cohen, Acoustics 08, Paris (2008), 3177-3182]. Over 70 collaborators around the world were to investigate singing from...

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

The author acknowledges the extraordinary efforts of Lauren Stewart, who has guest-edited this special issue on Music and Neuroscience for Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, & Brain. It is also announced that forthcoming volumes of the Journal will be quarterly, beginning in 2013. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)

Introduces the present issue of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, & Brain (PMMB). This issue is special in several ways. It is the first produced by its new publisher, the American Psychological Association. This longstanding prestigious publisher assures wide dissemination through PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES, and it also assures both timeliness and hig...

AIRS-TEST, an online system supporting a major collaborative research initiative, Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing (AIRS), was developed. AIRS-TEST administers a sequence of interactive tests and organizes the results for analysis. The tests can present text and audiovisual information to prompt the participant's response (e.g., key...

The work of the authors in the present volume, as introduced below, reflects the three main research themes of AIRS: Theme 1 - Singing and Development, Theme 2 - Singing and Education, and Theme 3 - Singing and Well-being. The authors represent Canadian, American, British, Swiss, German, Estonian, and Japanese perspectives. From multidisciplinary p...

Johan Sundberg: Eminent pioneer in voice sciences, longstanding scientist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology with a personal Chair in Musical Acoustics; author of the seminal book The Science of the Singing Voice and over 200 articles on singing; mentor and role model to dozens of students; sought after speaker; honored for scholarship, leade...

The special volume of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind & Brain (PMMB) takes its inspiration from the AIRS (Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing) Major Collaborative Research Initiative, which is generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Although the work of only some of the AIRS collabora...

As part of a major collaborative research initiative, Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing (AIRS), we developed a protocol for obtaining audiovisual information reflecting aspects of the ability to sing. We also developed a digital library prototype, the Children's International Media Exchange for Singing (CHIMES), to index and store the...

This special issue of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind & Brain presents the scholarly autobiographies of 12 pioneers in the psychology of music. Each has witnessed over four decades of academic life and has contributed to the foundation of the field of music psychology that now flourishes. Authors were asked to recount the influences on their careers...

The journal, Psychomusicology: Music, Mind & Brain greatly values the human effort demanded by scientific and scholarly work. Without motivated, intelligent researchers, mentors, students, and reviewers there is no research or reporting of research. The journal recognizes its responsibility to past, present, and future generations of contributors t...

The domain of research in singing encompasses numerous disciplines, countless styles, and many lifespan stages of skill development. A comprehensive understanding of this domain would benefit from a vast digital repository for storing, accessing, and annotating recordings of singing in all its manifestations. A cross-cultural strategy for acquiring...

A key issue in development of speech perception and production concerns the possible existence of an early sensitive period that facilitates language acquisition. Spoken language acquisition entails representation of grammatical sequences of phonemes. In a two-phase experiment, 120 participants in three age groups (pre-adolescents, adolescents, you...

In two experiments, the empirical parsing of melodies was compared with predictions derived from four grouping preference rules of A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (F. Lerdahl & R. Jackendoff, 1983). In Experiment 1 (n = 123), listeners representing a wide range of musical training heard two familiar nursery-rhyme melodies and one unfamiliar tona...

Early 20th century psychologists drew attention to similarities between mental processes elicited by film and by music. Contemporary film theorists have also noted analogous film and music structures, and contemporary psychologists have used musical metaphors in discussions of film perception and cognition. These psychological parallels have not be...

Cohen, Lamothe, Fleming, MacIsaac, and Lamoureux [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 109, 2460 (2001)] reported that proximity governed circular direction judgments (clockwise/counterclockwise) of two successive tones emanating from all pairs of 12 speakers located at 30-degree intervals around a listeners' head (cranium). Many listeners appeared to experience sy...

The escalation of research in both the psychology of music and the psychology of aging has led to a natural convergence on a new shared domain, that of psychogeromusicology. The present Volume of Psychomusicology represents different views of this domain: melodic memory, rhythmic processes, neurophysiology, quality of life, strong musical experienc...

To determine the significance of music in the lives of senior individuals, a short questionnaire was added to the protocol of the 2nd phase of the Canadian Study of Health and Aging (CSHA2). Over 300 participants (mean age 78.3 years) from Prince Edward Island (N=211) and Nova Scotia (N=109) completed the questionnaire. Their ratings of the importa...

An experiment was conducted in which listeners made CW/CCW (clockwise or counterclockwise) auditory motion direction in three conditions that differed in location of the listeners who were either centered within the circular array of speakers or were positioned one foot ahead of center or one foot behind. Analysis of the data revealed that a relati...

In an experiment analogous to that of Shepard which showed circularity in judgments of relative pitch of pairs of octave‐complex tones [Shepard, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 36, 2346–2353 (1964)], 40 listeners, centered in a sound‐attenuated room, judged the apparent direction (clockwise, or counterclockwise) of 396 pairs of successive complex tones emanati...

A study was done to focus on the role of experience in tonality induction by comparing younger and older adults on contemporary popular and classical music excerpts using dual-keyboard technique. The dual-keyboard technique was found successful in revealing the ability of young and older listeners to systematically induce tonality regardless of the...

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...

The vast amount of information in multimedia presentations ought to place inordinate demands on perceptual and cognitive systems. Yet there seems to be a superfluity of resources for processing music in the midst of processing information from visual and verbal sources. Research of the author and others reveals the remarkable ability of listeners t...

Thirty-six different binaural noises were formed by crossing six right-ear intensities of a broadband noise with the same six intensities in the left ear in a 6 X 6 factorial design. Children (6-7 years of age) and adults were presented with 2 of these 36 binaural noises on a trial and asked to indicate which noise was louder. In Experiment 1, the...

The perception of microtonal scales was investigated in a melodic identification task. In each trial, eight pure tones, equally-spaced in log frequency in the vicinity of 700 Hz, were presented in one of nine different serial orders. There were two experiments, each with 108 trials (six scales [tone sets] x nine serial orders x two repetitions). In...

It is proposed that the interpretation of action in film depends on the combination of semantic (i.e., meaning) and formal (e.g., temporal) information across auditory and visual channels. A series of experiments was conducted to examine the listener-viewer’s use of semantic and formal audiovisual information. In all experiments, subjects were pres...

Most people would agree that music plays an integral role in film perception, but exactly what the role of film music is and what cognitive processes underlie it have been little explored and explained. Film music raises intriguing questions for experimental psychology. The present volume of Psychomusicology provides a forum for addressing some of...

It is often assumed that musical soundtracks influence the interpretation of film. Film music theorists further assume that such musical influences depend on the combination of meanings derived from musical and film material. The present article suggests that these assumptions about film music fall within an associationist tradition and translate i...

Reviews the book, Cognitive Bases of Musical Communication edited by Mari Riess Jones and Susan Holleran (see record 1991-98971-000). The Cognitive Bases of Musical Communication is a collection of 16 articles from an invited conference held at the Ohio State University in 1990. It provides a wealth of contemporary thought, data, and theory on musi...

This half‐hour battery, which included 16 subtests, examined lower‐ and higher‐level perceptual/cognitive and affective responses to musical stimuli. A comparison of the results from two independent groups of university students revealed highly significant correlations between response patterns both over individual items and over subtests. The agre...

The NeXT computer system is a relatively new, inexpensive, 68040-based computer with high computational power, storage, graphics, audio, and other capabilities. The present article examines the effectiveness of the NeXT for studies of auditory sequential memory. In these studies, subjects track the time of occurrence of a sequence of tones, using a...

Increasing numbers and varieties of electronic monitors are used in hospital operating rooms. Many of these are equipped with auditory alarms which are loud, insistent, or irritating, and thus are frequently disabled by the anaesthetist. This study was planned to evaluate two components of auditory alarm design which may influence the usefulness of...

The psychological relevance of the musicians' concept of tonality was tested in the context of the music of J. S. Bach. Musically trained listeners were instructed to sing the musical scale that first came to mind immediately after hearing short excerpts from Preludes of J. S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier. For each Prelude, the tonic (first not...

Forty listeners, differing in level of musical experience, indicated the serial order of eight tones in 32 sequences representing all combinations of four tone sets or scales (major, minor, chromatic, and three?semitone spacing) and eight serial orders. Responses were produced with a mouse, which controlled the vertical height (representing pitch h...

Musical soundtracks concern two art forms, music and cinema, and two sensory modalities, auditory and visual. As such, they touch many aspects of psychology and provide a fertile and challenging domain for investigation. The present article advocates that a framework for exploring the psychological effects of musical soundtracks should focus on mea...

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Past research is reviewed which suggests that absolute pitch can be acquired during preschool years. In order to account for this phenomenon, an analogy is drawn between the early acquisition of categories for speech sounds and pitch; the acoustical similarity between vowels, music tones, and chords is also noted. Attention is then directed to a Ja...

Sixty-one subjects with a wide range of formal music training were presented with ascending and descending C major scales, each followed by a single probe tone drawn from the 13-note chromatic scale. They were asked to decide whether the fit of the probe to the preceding context was good or poor. For each probe, the proportion of good-fit replies w...

The potential of the Commodore Amiga as a digital synthesizer for research and demonstration in psychoacoustics and memory is discussed. Economy, ease of use, flexibility, portability, and accuracy outweigh disadvantages of narrow bandwidth, narrow dynamic range, and storage limitations for many applications encountered in pilot research and educat...

In three experiments, musically trained and untrained adults listened to three repetitions of a 5-note melodic sequence followed by a final melody with either the same tune as those preceding it or differing in one position by one semitone. In Experiment 1, ability to recognize the final sequence was examined as a function of redundancy at the leve...

The study is part of a research program examining the effects of small integer frequency ratio relations on memory for unfamiliar (microtonal) sets of tones. Previous work indicated the benefit of both successive and simultaneous small integer context in an absolute judgment task. In order to determine whether such benefits were cognitive as oppose...

In three experiments, musically trained and untrained adults listened to three repetitions of a 5-note melodic sequence followed by a final melody with either the same tune as those preceding it or differing in one position by one semitone. In Experiment 1, ability to recognize the final sequence was examined as a function of redundancy at the leve...

In designing experiments on melodic perception, the experimenter can select a large or small number of test melodies. This paper discusses advantages of a small stimulus set particularly in developmental research. With this approach it has been shown that preschool children can remember a sequence based on the major triad more easily than a sequenc...

Reviews the book, The Developmental Psychology of Music by David J. Hargreaves (see record 1987-97613-000). David Hargreaves believes that a developmental psychology of music is necessary to provide the foundation for the right answers, and his new book is an important addition to the growing collection of books on the psychology of music. Differin...

We investigated the effects of musical soundtracks on attitudes to figures in a short animated film. In a preliminary study and in the main experiment, subjects saw the film accompanied by one of two soundtracks or with no soundtrack, or they heard one of the two soundtracks alone. In the main experiment, Semantic Differential judgments on Activity...

Infants 7 to 11 months of age were tested for their detection of a frequency relational change of one semitone in a five-note melody. Melodies were presented in various transpositions that altered absolute frequencies of the component tones but preserved the frequency ratios. In Experiment 1, two background melodies were based on major and minor tr...

In the present research we examined the development of sensitivity to two musical relations significant in Western tonal music, the semitone and diatonic structure. Infants and preschool children were tested for their detection of a semitone change in any position of a five-note melody. Two standard melodies were used, one composed of diatonic tone...

College students and preschool children rated dichotomous tone sequences varying in intensity and range on the bipolar adjective scale of sadness/happiness. Both groups assigned the modal response of happy to the high/fast stimulus and the modal response of sad to the low/slow stimulus. In another study, differences in the meaning of two contrastin...

Performance on a direct distance estimation task in a large, complex environment was studied as a function of variation in some members of the set of test locations. Features of the multidimensional scaling solutions-along with effects on the imagery that subjects reported experiencing while engaged in the spatial task-support the notion that a wor...

The conjunction of a progamming language and a text formatter is described as an aid to the construction of questionnaires in which the order of presentation of items is randomized and the output has a neat and professional appearance. The technique has marked advantages over the use of a programming language on its own. Modifications can be easily...

Studied the acquisition of spatial information about a large multifunctional complex building by obtaining distance estimations, confidence judgments, and imagery reports. Ss were undergraduates and prospective undergraduates of a university who varied in their experience with the campus. Fourth-year Ss, who had made intensive use of the campus for...

Billingsley and Rotenberg (1982) explored the ability of children to process information between non-adjacent tones in tests for recognition of correctly transposed three-note and related two-note sequences. The paradigm had been developed by Cuddy and Cohen (1976) and was modified for use with children. The following remarks suggest that an analys...

We have been investigating the acquisition and use of the mental representation of a large, complex, environment in a variety of studies. The environment is Scarborough College, a self-contained arts and science campus serving 4 to 5,000 users. Often referred to as an example of a megastructure (Drexler, 1979), it encompasses distances spanning up...

Three experiments studied the perception of tone sequences having various degrees of musical structure. Ratings of perceived structure and ease of recognition in transposition were both influenced by harmonic progression (as defined by music theory), the contour (directional changes in pitch), and the excursion or repetition pattern within the sequ...

The understanding of music perception and cognition is advancing on many frontiers. Technological, methodological, theoretical, and artistic developments have stimulated new areas for investigation and have placed longstanding issues in a new context. This session explores recent progress from a variety of perspectives: music theory, perceptual‐cog...

Three experiments tested the recognition of transposed 3-tone melodies in a standard 2-alternative forced-choice psychophysical paradigm. Melodies were tested alone or embedded in 1 of 3 types of contexts that varied in degree of conformity to the rules of diatonicism and cadential ending. Results, replicated for both piano and sine-tone stimuli, i...

Twenty 7‐note standard sequences cross‐classifield on 5 levels of harmony and 2 levels of contour were presented in a, two‐alternative forced choice paradigm to two groups of musicians differing in level of musical training. Comparison sequences were transposed: on one‐half the trials to the dominant (+7 of −5 semits), on the remaining trials to th...

Accuracy of recognition for short (three-note) transposed melodic sequences was measured and compared with accuracy predicted by three models of recognition each of which described a different degree of abstraction and synthesis of the musical intervals contained in the sequence. For subjects with musical training, recognition was best described by...