Klaus Frieler

Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics | MPGAESTHETIC

Voice preferences are an integral part of interpersonal interactions and shape how people connect with each other. While a large number of studies have investigated the mechanisms behind (speaking) voice attractiveness, very little research was dedicated to other types of vocalizations. In this Registered Report, we proposed to investigate voice pr...

Grouping research participants by culture or language proficiency may no longer suffice to investigate cognitive universals and differences cross-culturally, due to the interconnectedness of our multicultural world. Based on immigration psychology research, we provide a ‘proof of principle’ for three culture screening tools. Across five online expe...

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...

Poetic diction routinely involves two complementary classes of features: (i) parallelisms, i.e. repetitive patterns (rhyme, metre, alliteration, etc.) that enhance the predictability of upcoming words, and (ii) poetic deviations that challenge standard expectations/predictions regarding regular word form and order. The present study investigated ho...

I comment on Clark and Arthur's response to a YouTuber’s claim of the death of melody for which they used corpus analysis and statistical methods of computational musicology. While I basically appreciate the effort, I also will discuss three pertinent problems I see ingrained here: whether such claims can be substantiated in any form in the first p...

The experience of involuntary musical imagery (earworm experience) is an everyday phenomenon that differs in frequency and subjective quality and may be strongly influenced by musical sophistication and expertise. An online survey was used to examine differences between music students and non-music students testing for relationships between earworm...

The current study explored the structure of rationales for musical dislikes. In an online survey, participants (N = 627) evaluated self-selected styles and artists in a slight and strong degree of dislike condition with respect to 41 reasons for musical dislikes distilled from a previous interview study. After constructing nine subscales of reasons...

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...

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...

Jazz is a musical tradition that is just over 100 years old; unlike in other Western musical traditions, improvisation plays a central role in jazz. Modelling the domain of jazz poses some ontological challenges due to specificities in musical content and performance practice, such as band lineup fluidity and importance of short melodic patterns fo...

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...

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 paper pursues two goals. First, we present a generative model for (monophonic) jazz improvisation whose main purpose is testing hypotheses on creative processes during jazz improvisation. It uses a hierarchical Markov model based on mid-level units and the Weimar Bebop Alphabet, with statistics taken from the Weimar Jazz Database. A further in...

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...

Musical training enhances auditory-motor cortex coupling, which in turn facilitates music and speech perception. How tightly the temporal processing of music and speech are intertwined is a topic of current research. We investigated the relationship between musical sophistication (Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication index, Gold-MSI) and spontaneous s...

Language production involves action sequencing to produce fluent speech in real-time, placing a computational burden on working memory that leads to sequencing biases in production. Here we examine whether these biases extend beyond language to constrain one of the most complex human behaviors: music improvisation. Using a large corpus of improvis...

Fiction reading is a popular leisure activity associated with a variety of pleasurable experiences, including suspense, narrative transportation, and—as indicated by recent empirical studies—also flow. In the context of fiction reading, flow—generally defined as a pleasurable state of mind experienced during an optimally stimulating activity—is spe...

The spontaneous motor tempo (SMT) describes the pace of regular and repeated movements such as hand clapping or walking. It is typically measured by letting people tap with their index finger at a pace that feels most natural and comfortable to them. A number of factors have been suggested to influence the SMT, such as age, time of the day, arousal...

The most recognisable features of the jazz phrasing style known as ‘swing’ is the articulation of tactus beat subdivisions into long-short patterns (known as ‘swing eighths’). The subdivisions are traditionally assumed to form a 2:1 beat-upbeat ratio (BUR), however, several smaller case studies have suggested that the 2:1 BUR is a gross oversimplif...

The spontaneous motor tempo (SMT) describes the pace of regular and repeated movements such as hand clapping. It is typically measured by letting people tap at a pace that feels most natural and comfortable to them. A number of factors have been suggested to influence the SMT, such as age and musical experience (McAuley et al., 2006; Drake et al.,...

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...

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...

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...

Much has been written about John Coltrane and Miles Davis, from autobiographical works to detailed musicological analyses and cultural/sociological accounts of their lives, work, and legacy. Fewer publications are concerned with a direct comparison of both artists' approach to improvisation. I introduce a new analytical perspective, developed in th...

Language production involves complex action sequencing to produce fluent speech in real-time, placing considerable constraints on working memory that lead to sequencing biases in production. Researchers have speculated that these biases may extend beyond language to other human behaviors involving action sequencing, but this claim has not been empi...

Language production involves complex action sequencing to produce fluent speech in real-time, placing considerable constraints on working memory that lead to sequencing biases in production. Researchers have speculated that these biases may extend beyond language to other human behaviors involving action sequencing, but this claim has not been emp...

In this paper, we address how to evaluate and improve the performance of automatic dominant melody extraction systems from a pattern mining perspective with a focus on jazz improvisations. Traditionally, dominant melody extraction systems estimate the melody on the frame-level, but for real-world musicological applications note-level representation...

A listener's aesthetic engagement with a musical piece often reaches peaks in response to passages experienced as especially beautiful. The present study examined the extent to which responses to such self-identified beautiful passages (BPs), in self-selected music, may be distinguishable in terms of their affective qualities. In an online survey,...

In this paper, we propose a novel classification system for improvised jazz lines, which we have called the Weimar Bebop Alphabet. It is based on a phrase-wise parsing of interval sequences using nine different classes of melodic atoms (diatonic, chromatic, approaches, arpeggios, jump arpeggios, repetitions, trills, links and a residual category ca...

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...

This study tries to explore the possibilities statistical and computational methods can offer for historical jazz research. As a corpus study it is not focusing on persons and events but on measurable quantities extracted from historical documents, here: jazz improvisations transcribed from recordings as contained in the Weimar Jazz Database (see...

This paper presents two novel user interfaces for investigating the pattern content in monophonic jazz solos and exemplifies how these interfaces could be used for research on jazz improvisation. In jazz improvisation, patterns are of particular interest for the analysis of improvisation styles, the oral transmission of musical language, the practi...

This paper presents two novel user interfaces for investigating the pattern content in monophonic jazz solos and exemplifies how these interfaces could be used for research on jazz improvisation. In jazz improvisation, patterns are of particular interest for the analysis of improvisation styles, the oral transmission of musical language, the practi...

Web services allow permanent access to music from all over the world. Especially in the case of web services with user-supplied content, e.g., YouTube™, the available metadata is often incomplete or erroneous. On the other hand, a vast amount of high-quality and musically relevant metadata has been annotated in research areas such as Music Informat...

The solo is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQp75UJhlZ0

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a fast-growing research area. One of its aims is to extract musical characteristics from audio. We assumed the roles of researchers without further technical MIR experience and set out to test in an exploratory way its opportunities and challenges in the specific context of musical emotion perception. Twenty sou...

http://schott-campus.com/jazzomat/

In this paper, we focus on transcribing walking bass lines, which provide clues for revealing the actual played chords in jazz recordings. Our transcription method is based on a deep neural network (DNN) that learns a mapping from a mixture spectrogram to a salience representation that emphasizes the bass line. Furthermore, using beat positions, we...

Both the collection and analysis of large music repertoires constitute major challenges within musicological disciplines such as jazz research. Automatic methods of music analysis based on audio signal processing have the potential to assist researchers and to accelerate the transcription and analysis of music recordings significantly. In this pape...

Ausgehend von Hargreaves (1982) Thesen zu einem sogenannten „open-eared“ Verhalten (Offenohrigkeit) entstanden innerhalb der letzten 10 Jahre diverse Studien zur Offenohrigkeit im deutschsprachigen Raum. Zusammengefasst können diese in zwei übergeordnete Paradig-men kategorisiert werden: a) Die Erfassung von Offenohrigkeit über Valenzurteile (Schel...

The metaphor of storytelling is widespread among jazz performers and jazz researchers. However, little is known about the precise meaning of this metaphor on an analytical level. The present paper attempts to shed light on the connected semantic field of the metaphor and relate it to its musical basis by investigating time courses of selected music...

We present a novel approach to the analysis of jazz solos based on the categorisation and annotation of musical units on a middle level between single notes and larger form parts. A guideline during development was the hypothesis that these midlevel units (MLU) correspond to the improvising musicians’ playing ideas and action plans. A system of cat...

In this commentary, I would like to add a few of our own, still unpublished, empirical observations concerning the possible role of absolute pitch memory (APM) in the oral transmission of folksongs. This empirical data poses some questions about the likelihood of the observed inter-recording tonic pitch consistency of Olthof, Janssen & Honing (2015...

Multitrack recordings of a mixed adult choir with 23 singers were collected in order to investigate the influence of varied virtual room acoustical conditions on a choir’s performance with regard to intonation, tempo, and timing precision. Headset microphones were used to record each chorister separately while the collected sound of all singers was...

The paper presents new approaches for analyzing the characteristics of intonation and pitch modulation of woodwind and brass solos in jazz recordings. To this end, we use score-informed analysis techniques for source separation and fundamental frequency tracking. After splitting the audio into a solo and a backing track, a reference tuning frequenc...

In this paper, we aim at analyzing the use of dynamics in jazz improvisation by applying score-informed source separation and automatic estimation of note intensities. A set of 120 jazz solos taken from the Weimar Jazz Database covering many different jazz styles was manually transcribed and annotated by musicology and jazz students within the Jazz...

In this paper, we focus on the automatic classification of jazz records. We propose a novel approach where we break down the ambiguous task, which is commonly referred to as genre classification, into three more specific semantic levels. First, the rhythm feel (swing, latin, funk, two-beat) characterizes the basic groove organization and most often...

The present theoretical and experimental study treats open-earedness as a situation-independent behavioral disposition. In the first part, critical moments of the corresponding research are discussed to guarantee an unambiguously defined access of the measurement of open-earedness. In the second part, a coefficient for the measurement of open-eared...

This paper presents a study on intonation and intonation drift in unaccompanied singing, and proposes a simple model of reference pitch memory that accounts for many of the effects observed. Singing experiments were conducted with 24 singers of varying ability under three conditions (Normal, Masked, Imagined). Over the duration of a recording, ∼50...

In this article, we address the current state and general role of replication in empirical sciences in general and music psychology in particular. We argue that replication should be an integral part of the quality management of science because it helps to improve and maintain the general benefit of empirical sciences by enhancing the confidence in...

In a widely cited study, Levitin (1994) suggested the existence of absolute pitch memory for music in the general population beyond the rare trait of genuine absolute pitch (AP). In his sample, a significant proportion of non-AP possessors were able to reproduce absolute pitch levels when asked to sing very familiar pop songs from memory. Forty-fou...