David Baker

• PhD
• Researcher at Louisiana State University

In August of 2022, the Anti-Racism and Equity Committee of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition held a special session at the biennial meeting of the society, taking place in Portland, Oregon, USA. The goal of this session was to present issues of social justice to the society’s membership for discussion, and in so doing, to normalize dis...

What factors affect listeners’ perception of the emotions conveyed by music? Ali and Peynircioğlu conducted a series of experiments in which listeners rated emotional judgments of the melodies and lyrics of songs. Here, we present a pre-registered replication and extension of their study with newly adapted stimuli, including several covariates usin...

Among the three primary tonal functions described in modern theory textbooks, the pre-dominant has the highest number of representative chords. We posit that one unifying feature of the pre-dominant function is its attraction to V, and the experiment reported here investigates factors that may contribute to this perception. Participants were junior...

Background Most research on correlates of music preference considers micro-level influences, such as personality and social positional levels (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003; North & Hargreaves, 1996). However, it is important to consider macro-level influences, such as cultural norms and the effects of time and weather, as well. An interesting macro-lev...

What factors affect listeners’ emotional perception of music? Ali and Peynircioğlu (2006) conducted a series of experiments on the listener's emotional response to melodies and lyrics in songs. Here we present a pre-registered replication and extension of this line of research with new adapted stimuli and several musical covariates using the Goldsm...

Among the three primary tonal functions described in modern theory textbooks, the pre-dominant has the highest number of representative chords. We posit that one unifying feature of the pre-dominant function is its attraction to V, and the experiment reported here investigates factors that may contribute to this perception. Participants were junior...

Recent studies have shown that musicians have higher accuracy in their ability to communicate emotions in music, but what about their perception of emotion? Work by Ali and Peynircioğlu (2006) reported that the presence of lyrics only enhanced listener’s emotional ratings in sad and angry music. However, the melodies and the lyrics were chosen from...

Melodic memory continues to present a paradox. Listeners excel at recognizing melodies once encoded in long term memory, but often struggle during encoding. In order to investigate this paradox, we employ a recall design to investigate melodic encoding. Here we report results from a forward, serial recall within-subjects melodic memory experiment (...

This data report introduces the MeloSol corpus, a collection of 783 Western, tonal monophonic melodies. I first begin by describing the overall structure of the corpus, then proceed to detail its contents as they would be helpful for researchers working in the field of computational musicology or music psychology. In order to contextualize the Melo...

Previous research has examined the relationships among cognitive variables and musical training, but relatively less attention has addressed downstream effects of musical training on other psychological domains, such as aesthetic preference, and the potential impact of domain-general constructs, such as working memory. Accordingly, the present stud...

Previous research has examined the relationships among cognitive variables and musical training, but relatively less attention has addressed downstream effects of musical training on other psychological domains, such as aesthetic preference, and the potential impact of domain-general constructs, such as working memory. Accordingly, the present stud...

The difficulties associated with measuring the complex construct of musicianship have received considerable attention in the music psychology literature. Multiple measures exist for various constructs, yet the need for the careful replication and documentation of the use of these measures remains an area of critical importance. Here, we describe th...

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 first experiment from my dissertation work looking at aural skill!

Despite its abundance in curricula in music conservatory settings, research on topics pertaining to aural skills is currently limited at best. While anthologies of materials for sight singing and dictation exist, the ways in which people learn melodies are not well understood. This problem is difficult to tackle given the amount of factors that may...

Recent work in music psychology has examined the relationship between individual differences and factors that predict various aspects of musical sophistication. Some of the recent research has begun to model how musical sophistication or aptitude relates to various cognitive measures, ranging from executive functions, to measures of general fluid i...

The music of Richard Wagner tends to generate very diverse judgments indicative of the complex relationship between listeners and the sophisticated musical structures in Wagner's music. This paper presents findings from two listening experiments using the music from Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen that explores musical as well as individual listen...

For applications in HCI and sonic interaction design, the accuracy with which humans can continuously control analog sensors is investigated. The field of information theory suggests that a human together with a user interface can be modeled as a communication channel. Specifically, the Shannon-Hartley theorem implies that the channel capacity/thro...

In this study we aim to understand listeners’ real-time processing of musical leitmotives. We probe participants’ memory for different leitmotives contained in a 10-min passage from the opera Siegfried by Richard Wagner, and use item response theory to estimate parameters for item difficulty and for participants’ individual recognition ability, as...

Advertising and branding practitioners in music industry are often faced with the task of finding and selecting music that matches a given brand profile to enhance the overall brand perception or impact of a commercial. Currently there are only few suggestions in the literature on how to best match music to brands (Brodsky, 2011; MacInnins & Park,...

This article reviews a public lecture given by Dr. Daniel Levitin at the 2015 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Proms entitled “Unlocking the Mysteries of Music in Your Brain.” The talk was given July 18, 2015, in London, England.