Daniel Müllensiefen

Goldsmiths, University of London · Department of Psychology

Convenience sampling is often used in music psychology research, leading to an overrepresentation of young participants with high socio-economic status and potentially compromising the generalizability of empirical findings to the broader population. Fortunately, analysis techniques enable matching biased samples to known population characteristics...

The perception of harmony has been the subject of many studies in the research literature, though little is known regarding how individuals vary in their ability to discriminate between different chord sequences. The aim of the current study was to construct an individual-differences test for the processing of harmonic information. A stimulus datab...

Convenience sampling is often used in music psychology research, leading to an overrepresentation of young participants with high socio-economic status, and potentially compromising the generalizability of empirical findings to the broader population. Fortunately, analysis techniques enable matching biased samples to known population characteristic...

Deliberate Practice in Music Inventory - German Translation

The document describes the translation procedure adopted to create the Deliberate Practice in Music Inventory - German Translation.

Using melodic recall paradigm data, we describe an algorithmic approach to assessing melodic learning across multiple attempts. In a first simulation experiment, we reason for using similarity measures to assess melodic recall performance over previously utilized accuracy-based measures. In Experiment 2, with up to six attempts per melody, 31 parti...

Auditory scene analysis (ASA) is the process through which the auditory system makes sense of complex acoustic environments by organising sound mixtures into meaningful events and streams. Although music psychology has acknowledged the fundamental role of ASA in shaping music perception, no efficient test to quantify listeners’ ASA abilities in rea...

Musical creativity, as a cognitive process, is inherently associated with musical imagery. Several composers have claimed to have composed music based on creative ideas that emerged involuntarily in their minds in the form of musical imagery. Research on musical imagery has been growing steadily, yet studies exploring its link to creativity have be...

Music copyright infringement lawsuits implicate millions of dollars in damages and costs of litigation. There are, however, few objective measures by which to evaluate these claims. Recent music information retrieval research has proposed objective algorithms to automatically detect musical similarity, which might reduce subjectivity in music copyr...

Musical plagiarism has been widely discussed in academic contexts as well as in the popular press, especially due to recent prominent cases such as Metall auf Metall (German band Kraftwerk vs. producer Moses Pelham) or Dark Horse in the US (Katy Perry vs. Flame). However, there are no objective standards for the clear assessment of such cases. Inst...

This article investigates the relationship between handedness and abilities in secondary school students, specifically analyzing the effect of handedness on subjective and objective musicality and academic performance. Previous research on the association between handedness and musicality has yielded mixed conclusions. Some studies have documented...

Individual taste plays an important role in assessing music performances. Aggregating ratings from multiple evaluators is commonly applied to overcome individual biases and to obtain near-objective judgements. However, high degrees of subjectivity in the evaluation of music performances inevitability lowers the agreement between music evaluators an...

Interdisciplinary essays on music psychology that integrate scientific, humanistic, and artistic ways of knowing in transformative ways. Researchers using scientific methods and approaches to advance our understanding of music and musicality have not yet grappled with some of the perils that humanistic fields concentrating on music have long articu...

People who engage in musical activities may, on average, share certain personality features. For example, performing music in front of audiences may require greater extraversion. In contrast, long and solitary practice sessions may require greater introversion and conscientiousness. Research has established some links between dimensions of personal...

The Musical Emotion Discrimination Task (MEDT) is a short, non-adaptive test of the ability to discriminate emotions in music. Test-takers hear two performances of the same melody, both played by the same performer but each trying to communicate a different basic emotion, and are asked to determine which one is “happier”, for example. The goal of t...

Beat perception can serve as a window into internal time-keeping mechanisms, auditory–motor interactions, and aspects of cognition. One aspect of beat perception is the covert continuation of an internal pulse. Of the several popular tests of beat perception, none provide a satisfying test of this faculty of covert continuation. The current study p...

Longitudinal studies on musical development can provide very valuable insights and potentially evidence for causal mechanisms driving the development of musical skills and cognitive resources, such as working memory and intelligence. Nonetheless, quantitative longitudinal studies on musical and cognitive development are very rare in the published l...

This article investigates the relationship between handedness and abilities in secondary school students, specifically analyzing the effect of handedness on subjective and objective musical abilities and academic performance. Previous research on the association between handedness and musical abilities has yielded mixed conclusions. On the one hand...

Music training, in all its forms, is known to have an impact on behavior both in childhood and even in aging. In the delicate life period of transition from childhood to adulthood, music training might have a special role for behavioral and cognitive maturation. Among the several kinds of music training programs implemented in the educational commu...

Music copyright lawsuits are worth millions of dollars, but there are few objective guidelines for applying copyright law in infringement claims involving musical works. Recent music information retrieval research has proposed objective algorithms that reduce subjectivity in music copyright decisions to automatically detect musical similarity, but...

Zusammenfassung Nur wenige Langzeitstudien beschreiben bislang musikalische Entwicklungsverläufe mit einem Fokus auf Begabungsforschung (Müllensiefen 2017). Diese Lücke will der vorliegende Beitrag schließen und anhand der Daten aus einer internationalen Langzeitstudie die Frage beantworten, wie hilfreich unterschiedliche Begabungsansätze für die M...

This study presents a Japanese translation of the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI). The index consists of 38 self-report questions and provides a general sophistication score as well as subscale scores for Active Engagement, Perceptual Abilities, Musical Training, Singing Abilities, and Emotions. The validation of the translation...

When searching for and buying new products, consumers’ knowledge is often limited, and some (but not all) options in the choice set are unrecognized. In such situations, research on the recognition heuristic shows that people tend to choose more often the recognized option over the unrecognized one, as they infer it has the higher value regarding t...

Prior research studying the relationship between music training (MT) and more general cognitive faculties, such as visuospatial working memory (VSWM), often fails to include tests of musical memory. This may result in causal pathways between MT and other such variables being misrepresented, potentially explaining certain ambiguous findings in the l...

Die Struktur musikalischer Fähigkeiten ist bislang nicht eindeutig identifiziert. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht, ob es analog zu Gardners Konzept der multiplen Intelligenzen mehrere unabhängige Musikalitäten gibt oder analog zu Spearmans Generalfaktor der Intelligenz hingegen nur einen allgemeinen Musikalitätsfaktor. Hierbei wird Musikalität im...

Recent meta-analyses have confirmed the significance of three personality traits of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) in predicting academic achievement, namely, conscientiousness, emotional stability (neuroticism), and openness. However, there is little agreement on which FFM traits are relevant in predicting academic achievement in music. The underlyin...

In this chapter, the authors explain that there are two common goals in musical corpus analysis. The first is the description and comparison of musical corpora, the second is to establish relationships between musical structures and extra-musical data, which can refer to metadata of a particular musical piece (genre, style, and period labels, compo...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Practice is the process through which musicians improve their performance abilities and increase their level of expertise. Deliberate Practice (DP) is a theory of expertise based on the concept that interindividual differences in the level of proficiency in a specific domain can be mostly explained by interindividual differences in the amount of de...

Visuospatial working memory (VSWM) is essential to human cognitive abilities and is associated with important life outcomes such as academic performance. Recently, a number of reliable measures of VSWM have been developed to help understand psychological processes and for practical use in education. We sought to extend this work using Item Response...

We present a model for talent development in music that resulted from applying a general framework for Talent development in Achievement Domains (i.e., the TAD framework; Preckel et al., 2020) to the domain of music. The talent development model in the musical domain (TAD music model) draws on the existing literature on musical talent development b...

Although making music is a popular leisure activity for children and adolescents, few stay musically engaged. Previous research has focused on finding reasons for quitting musical activities, pedagogical strategies to keep students engaged with music, and motivational factors of musical training. Nonetheless, we know very little about how the propo...

Musicians and music professionals are often considered to be expert listeners for listening tests on room acoustics. However, these tests often target acoustic parameters other than those typically relevant in music such as pitch, rhythm, amplitude, or timbre. To assess the expertise in perceiving and understanding room acoustical phenomena, a list...

Global collaborative networks have been established in multiple fields to move beyond research that over-relies on "WEIRD" participants and to consider central questions from cross-cultural and epistemological perspectives. As researchers in music and the social sciences with experience building and sustaining such networks, we participated in a vi...

The ability to silently hear music in the mind has been argued to be fundamental to musicality. Objective measurements of this subjective imagery experience are needed if this link between imagery ability and musicality is to be investigated. However, previous tests of musical imagery either rely on self-report, rely on melodic memory, or do not ca...

Zusammenfassung Ausgehend von jüngsten Urheberrechtsurteilen, die die Musikwelt verunsichert haben, skizzieren wir in diesem Artikel, wie musikinformatische Methoden auf Basis musikpsychologischer Erkenntnisse eingesetzt werden könnten, um für mehr Rechtssicherheit der Musikschaffenden zu sorgen. Based on recent copyright rulings that have unsett...

Dance has become an important topic for research in empirical aesthetics, social and motor cognition, and as an intervention for neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Despite the growing scientific interest in dance, no standardized psychometric instrument exists to assess people’s dance experience. Here, we introduce the Goldsmiths D...

Die Beiträge dieses Sammelbandes informieren eine interdisziplinär ausgerichtete Urheberrechtsforschung und diskutieren anhand der Denkfigur der „Tipping Points“ neue Fragen, die eine vernetzte Gesellschaft an das Urheberrecht stellt. Die Autorinnen und Autoren untersuchen den Wandel rechtlicher Rahmenbedingungen kreativen Schaffens, auch mit Bezug...

It is widely believed that someone’s personality can be assessed through their musical taste. There are many theoretical approaches that explain why this could be true, and a long tradition of research has investigated the associations between personality and musical preferences, but empirical evidence regarding these correlations shows inconsisten...

Im Schulkontext fallen Annahmen von Lehrkräften über Hochbegabte oft entsprechend des sogenannten Disharmoniestereotyps aus, d. h. Hochbegabte werden im Leistungsbereich positiver als nicht Hochbegabte bewertet, jedoch gleichzeitig und fälschlicherweise negativer hinsichtlich ihres Verhaltens und ihrer Persönlichkeit. Eine Forschungslücke zeigt sic...

Für die jährlichen Erhebungen im LongGold-Projekt, das Jahrgänge weiterführender Schulen über mehrere Jahre begleitet, wurde das R-Paket psyquest auf Grundlage von psychTestR entwickelt, welches selbst ein R-Paket zur Verwendung und Entwicklung psychologischer Tests ist (Harrison, 2020). Es enthält die 17 im Projekt verwendeten und im Folgenden bes...

The present study introduces the German version of the original version of the Music@Home questionnaire developed in the UK, which systematically evaluates musical engagement in the home environment of young children. Two versions are available, an Infant version for children aged three to 23 months and a Preschool version for children aged two to...

Music training is widely assumed to enhance several nonmusical abilities, including speech perception, executive functions, reading, and emotion recognition. This assumption is based primarily on cross-sectional comparisons between musicians and nonmusicians. It remains unclear, however, whether training itself is necessary to explain the musician...

When choosing music for advertisements, professionals are influenced by a large number of factors that could impair their judgement. This research examined source effects in the evaluation of advertising music by professionals and non-professionals. Results showed that advertising professionals gave significantly more favorable evaluations - higher...

In an online study, N = 517 participants rated 48 very short musical stimuli comprised of well-known pop songs with regard to arrangement parameters and cross-modal variables. Identification rates for songs and artists ranged between 0-7%. We observed associations between increasing stimulus durations as well as structural sections (chorus or verse...

To date, tests that measure individual differences in the ability to perceive musical timbre are scarce in the published literature. The lack of such tool limits research on how timbre, a primary attribute of sound, is perceived and processed among individuals. The current paper describes the development of the Timbre Perception Test (TPT), in whic...

Achievement in different domains, such as academics, music, or visual arts, plays a central role in all modern societies. Different psychological models aim to describe and explain achievement and its development in different domains. However, there remains a need for a framework that guides empirical research within and across different domains. W...

There has been increasing interest in the role of artistic creative activities in supporting emotion regulation. However, there is little research about how demographic factors (such as age, gender, ethnicity, personality, and socioeconomic status) or factors relating to creative engagement (including engagement behaviors and subjective experience...

This study presents the Chinese adaptation of the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI), an instrument for measuring individual differences in musical ability and skilled musical behaviour. Its psychometric properties were examined with a Taiwanese sample. The Gold-MSI inventory was translated into Chinese following recommendations fro...

Previous research has shown that levels of musical training and emotional engagement with music are associated with an individual’s ability to decode the intended emotional expression from a music performance. The present study aimed to assess traits and abilities that might influence emotion recognition, and to create a new test of emotion discrim...

The Pitch Imagery Arrow Task (PIAT) was designed to induce and evaluate pitch imagery in participants with a range of musical backgrounds (Gelding, Thompson, & Johnson, 2015). However, the original version of the task is long and inefficient. Therefore, the present three-part study aimed at enhancing its validity and reliability using modern psycho...

Memory is a cognitive faculty that is of fundamental importance for human communication in speech and music. How humans retain and reproduce sequences of words and pitches has been studied extensively in the cognitive literature. However, the ability to retain timbre information in memory remains less well understood. Recent years have nonetheless...

Music offers a unique spectrum of situations to study human choice behavior. Why do we choose to listen to (and pay for) the music that we do? How do music preferences change over time? How can we explain large-scale music success? Today, it remains unclear to what extent music may prove exceptional or congruent with general theories of human judge...

An important aspect of the perceived quality of vocal music is the degree to which the vocalist sings in tune. Although most listeners seem sensitive to vocal mistuning, little is known about the development of this perceptual ability or how it differs between listeners. Motivated by a lack of suitable preexisting measures, we introduce in this art...

There is a rich literature exploring emotional responses to engaging in artistic creative activities such as making music, writing, dancing and crafts. However, it remains unclear how such activities affect our emotions; specifically which mental processes (‘strategies’) are used to regulate our emotional responses. This paper therefore describes t...

Questions included in Study 1 and 2. (DOCX)

Normative values for factor responses (means and standard deviations). (DOCX)

Data norms for all factors. (DOCX)

Sleep loss is a widespread problem with serious physical and economic consequences. Music can impact upon physical, psychological and emotional states, which may explain anecdotal reports of its success as an everyday sleep aid. However, there is a lack of systematic data on how widely it is used, why people opt for music as a sleep aid, or what mu...

The study of false memory has had a profound impact on our understanding of how and what we remember, as shown by the misinformation paradigm [Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory, 12(4), 361-366. doi:10.1101/lm.94705]. Though misinformation effects...

With over 560 citations reported on Google Scholar by April 2018, a publication by Juslin and Gabrielsson (1996) presented evidence supporting performers’ abilities to communicate, with high accuracy, their intended emotional expressions in music to listeners. Though there have been related studies published on this topic, there has yet to be a dir...

The Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI) was recently proposed as a self-report measure of musical skills and behaviors in the general population. Although it is becoming a widely used tool, relatively little is known about its correlates, and adaptations into different languages will be crucial for cross-cultural comparisons and to a...

Musik in der Werbung ist ein großes Geschäft, wobei Marken Millionen von Dollar ausgeben, um Musik für Marketingkampagnen, Fernseh- und Radiowerbung, soziale Medien und Live-Events zu beschaffen. Im Jahr 2017 belief sich die Synchronisierung Umsatz (d. h. der Einsatz von Musik in Werbespots, Filmen, Spielen und Fernsehen) auf insgesamt 346 Millione...

Beat perception is increasingly being recognised as a fundamental musical ability. A number of psychometric instruments have been developed to assess this ability, but these tests do not take advantage of modern psychometric techniques, and rarely receive systematic validation. The present research addresses this gap in the literature by developing...

Background. Music in advertising is big business, with brands spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to procure music for use in marketing campaigns, television and radio commercials, social media, and experiential events. Agency professionals are entrusted by their clients to make decisions about music that not only impact the advertising...

Background. The study of false memory has had a profound impact on our understanding of how and what we remember. The work of Elizabeth F. Loftus has been particularly groundbreaking, including what she dubbed “the misinformation effect”. That is, how the information to which a witness is exposed after an event (whether consistent or misleading) is...

The majority of children under the age of 5 appear to show spontaneous enjoyment of singing, being exposed to music and interacting with musical instruments, but whether variations in engaging in such activities in the home could contribute to developmental outcomes is still largely unknown. Critically, researchers lack a comprehensive instrument w...

Study 1: Music@Home-Infant: Demographic information for the respondents’ children. (DOCX)

Study 1: Structure of factors and item loadings for the Music@Home—Infant. (DOCX)

Study 1: Factor structure of the Music@Home-Preschool as formalized by confirmatory factor analysis. (PDF)

Study 1: Music@Home-Preschool: Demographic information for the respondents’ children. (DOCX)