Nicola Di Stefano

Nicola Di Stefano
Italian National Research Council | CNR · Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies ISTC

Ph. D.
Reseacher, Italian National Research Council (CNR)

About

63
Publications
14,243
Reads
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385
Citations
Citations since 2017
37 Research Items
380 Citations
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Introduction
Nicola Di Stefano is researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council (CNR) of Italy. His research focuses on Music perception and cognition, Philosophy and psychology of perception, Philosophy of cognitive sciences, Philosophy and technology.
Additional affiliations
October 2019 - August 2021
Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
Position
  • Research grant holder
January 2016 - September 2019
Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma
Position
  • Post doc

Publications

Publications (63)
Article
Full-text available
Perceptual similarity is one of the most fiercely debated topics in the philosophy and psychology of perception. The documented history of the issue spans all the way from Plato – who regarded similarity as a key factor for human perceptual experience and cognition – through to contemporary psychologists – who have tried to determine whether, and i...
Article
Full-text available
“Crossmodal correspondences” are the consistent mappings between perceptual dimensions or stimuli from different sensory domains, which have been widely observed in the general population and investigated by experimental psychologists in recent years. At the same time, the emerging field of human movement augmentation (i.e., the enhancement of an i...
Article
Full-text available
Supernumerary robotic limbs are innovative devices in the field of wearable robotics which can provide humans with unprecedented sensorimotor abilities. However, scholars have raised awareness of the ethical issues that would arise from the large adoption of technologies for human augmentation in society. Most negative attitudes towards such techno...
Article
Revealed more than two millennia ago by Pythagoras, consonance and dissonance (C/D) are foundational concepts in music theory, perception, and aesthetics. The search for the biological, acoustical, and cultural factors that affect C/D perception has resulted in descriptive accounts inspired by arithmetic, musicological, psychoacoustical or neurobio...
Article
Full-text available
Roughness is a perceptual attribute typically associated with certain stimuli that are presented in one of the spatial senses. In auditory research, the term is typically used to describe the harsh effects that are induced by particular sound qualities (i.e., dissonance) and human/animal vocalizations (e.g., screams, distress cries). In the tactile...
Article
Full-text available
The proliferation of and interest in concepts of musical space make the question of why composers, philosophers, and musicologists have used spatial concepts for music - which is typically considered a temporal and ephemeral art form - a relevant issue in the multidisciplinary research on music. In this paper, I suggest distinguishing between a lit...
Article
Full-text available
One of the most challenging goals in social robotics is implementing emotional skills. Making robots capable of expressing and deciphering emotions is considered crucial for allowing humans to socially interact with them. In addition to presenting technical challenges, the implementation of artificial emotions in artificial systems raises intriguin...
Article
Full-text available
There has long been interest in the nature of the relationship(s) between hue and pitch or, in other words, between colour and musical/pure tones, stretching back at least as far as Newton, Goethe, Helmholtz, and beyond. In this narrative historical review, we take a closer look at the motivations that have lain behind the various assertions that h...
Article
Full-text available
The notion of harmony was first developed in the context of metaphysics before being applied to the domain of music. However, in recent centuries, the term has often been used to describe especially pleasing combinations of colors by those working in the visual arts too. Similarly, the harmonization of flavors is nowadays often invoked as one of th...
Chapter
Odour-sound correspondences provide some of the most fascinating and intriguing examples of crossmodal associations, in part, because it is unclear from where exactly they originate. Although frequently used as similes, or figures of speech, in both literature and poetry, such smell-sound correspondences have recently started to attract the attenti...
Book
This book offers a broad and timely perspective on research on olfaction and its current technological challenges. It specifically emphasizes the interdisciplinary context in which olfaction is investigated in contemporary research. From aesthetics to sociology, from bioengineering to anthropology, the different chapters discuss a wide variety of i...
Article
Full-text available
Bowing is the fundamental motor action responsible for sound production in violin playing. A lot of effort is required to control such a complex technique, especially at the beginning of violin training, also due to a lack of quantitative assessments of bowing movements. Here, we present magneto-inertial measurement units (MIMUs) and an optical sen...
Article
Full-text available
Article
Over the last few years, scholars have been debating whether aesthetic experience is characterized by a peculiar detachment from ordinary experience, i.e., «doubling», or by an intrinsic pragmatic and interactional nature. Within this debate, the embodied cognition paradigm contributes the position that the contemplative quality of aesthetic experi...
Article
Full-text available
Finger-tapping tasks have been widely adopted to investigate auditory-motor synchronization, i.e., the coupling of movement with an external auditory rhythm. However, the discrete nature of these movements usually limits their application to the study of beat perception in the context of isochronous rhythms. The purpose of the present pilot study w...
Article
Over the last few decades, research on auditory perception has increased a great deal, treating a wide range of topics from different perspectives. Empirical research has provided a detailed account of sound perception in neurobiological terms. From a different perspective, the phenomenology of music has focused on the experience of auditory percep...
Article
Full-text available
Moving from the physiological characterization of emotion as a specific bodily response to a stimulus, I highlight some phenomenological properties of emotions, differentiating them from moods and atmospheres. Then, I consider the three notions in relation to music. In conclusion, I trace the difference between emotions, moods, and atmospheres back...
Conference Paper
We present an easy to wear and use wearable system to monitor wrist and elbow movements in musicians. The system is based on two piezoresistive sensors embedded into a garment. Pilot tests on an adult double-bass player were carried out to assess the feasibility of the device for monitoring bowing technique. Results show promising performances in i...
Article
Full-text available
It. Incarnazione, Embodiment; Fr. Incarnation, Embodiment; Germ. Verkörperung, Embodiment; Span. Encarnación, Embodiment. The English term literally means the act or process of embodying something, i.e. something becoming part of a body. In the last decades, embodiment has become one of the most ubiquitous, debated, and popular concepts in academic...
Article
Full-text available
The role of gesture in music has been widely investigated in different disciplines, from experimental psychology to aesthetics, from musicology to anthropology. What seems to drive the different researches is the question about the relationship arising between gestures and sound, and how this relationship affects the experience of music. In this ar...
Article
Full-text available
Background Rhinoplasty is one of the most complex procedures in plastic surgery. In patients over 65, the procedure is even more demanding because of the coexistence of multiple complicating psychological and anatomical factors. The aims of our study were to analyze the necessity of rhinoplasty in elderly patients, to analyze the perception of pati...
Article
Full-text available
Background A patient's perspective is usually measured by patient-reported outcome instruments, which are becoming increasingly relevant to current research on clinical outcomes. The aims of our review were to identify studies that evaluated patient satisfaction after gynecomastia correction, analyze existing questionnaires, and summarize the devel...
Article
Full-text available
In sixth century BC, Pythagoras discovered the mathematical foundation of musical consonance and dissonance. When auditory frequencies in small-integer ratios are combined, the result is a harmonious perception. In contrast, most frequency combinations result in audible, off-centered by-products labeled “beating” or “roughness;” these are reported...
Chapter
Within the field of systems theory, the term robustness has typically been applied to different contexts such as automatic control, genetic networks, metabolic pathways, morphogenesis, and ecosystems. All these systems involve either man-made machines, or living organisms. In this chapter, we will consider music as a peculiar complex system, involv...
Book
Full-text available
Drawing on shared research experiences and collaborative projects, this book offers a broad and timely perspective on research on the hand and its current challenges. It especially emphasizes the interdisciplinary context in which researchers need to be trained in contemporary science. From language to psychology, from neurology to the social scien...
Article
Full-text available
Two biases affect the idea of beauty often embodied in aesthetic surgery. The first one is that the living body is the sum of different parts; the second one claims that beauty results from the sum of beautiful elements. Taken together, these 2 biases explain most of the aesthetic surgery procedures, in which a localized improvement is supposed to...
Chapter
In diverse interaction processes that characterize music experience, the human hand can be seen as a mediator and facilitator for the brain’s processing of musical expressive patterns. After a brief overview on the human expressive system for music, we consider gestures and hand articulations in music production and performance, focusing on hand de...
Article
Full-text available
The literature still lacks a review regarding PROs applied for rhinoplasty. Thus, we performed a systematic review of the literature to identify PROMs that assess patient satisfaction and quality of life after rhinoplasty. The aim of our study was to identify existing questionnaires and to summarize their development, psychometric properties, and c...
Article
Background The aims of our study were to identify studies that evaluated patient satisfaction after transsexual surgery, analyze existing questionnaires, and summarize their development, psychometric properties, and content. MethodsA systematic review of the English-language literature was performed. Patient-reported outcome measures designed to as...
Article
To date, behavioural procedures adopted to assess sound preferences in young children have evaluated the responses of participants while listening to the stimuli administered by the experimenter. Due to the difficulties which may arise in the interpretation of the results, recent studies have suggested some limitations to these procedures, stimulat...
Article
In the present paper we describe an instrumented toy to study auditory preferences in young children. After brief considerations on the theoretical framework, the design of the mechanical, electronic and software components of the system is presented. The system allows for: (a) producing audio stimuli according to how children play with the toy; (b...
Article
To date, behavioural procedures adopted to assess sound preferences in young children have evaluated the responses of participants while listening to the stimuli administered by the experimenter. Due to the difficulties which may arise in the interpretation of the results, recent studies have suggested some limitations to these procedures, stimulat...
Chapter
Full-text available
Starting from two different case studies—cancer explanatory theories and musical consonance and dissonance perception theories—we aim to show how different analytical aspects of complex phenomena can be grasped by apparently divergent accounts. Reaching a more adequate understanding of these phenomena thus needs an integrated systemic view in which...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this work we describe a new sensing technique to study auditory preferences in young children based on the interaction between perception and action. Manipulation is assessed thanks to a novel device instrumented with a magneto-inertial sensing core. This system allows estimating the manipulation in terms of angular displacements with errors low...
Article
Full-text available
The paper discusses an ethical analysis of three common cases involving the most popular requests in rhinoplasty. As the nose plays a fundamental role in the aesthetics and physiognomy of the human face, the request for rhinoplasty may be an expression of both subjective discomfort and objective dysfunction. The paper aims, therefore, to fill the g...
Book
Perché alcuni suoni stanno bene insieme e altri no? Da più di due millenni, questa semplice domanda è al centro della riflessione di filosofi, scienziati e teorici della musica. Da Pitagora a Keplero, da Galilei a Helmholtz, fino alle ricerche sperimentali contemporanee, il fenomeno della consonanza e della dissonanza è tra i più dibattuti della te...
Chapter
Since the beginning of human history, music appears to be one of the most transcultural and permanent characters of mankind, as the discovery of ancient musical instruments suggests. Though different animal species use complex sounds for communication, the development of a structured musical language is unique to humans. In this chapter we focus on...
Article
Full-text available
Il fenomeno della consonanza è oggetto di indagine nella tradizione teorico-musicale occidentale sin dalle sue origini. Ad oggi, non esiste una teoria della consonanza la cui validità sia universalmente riconosciuta. Nella prima sezione dell’articolo, presentiamo quattro modelli di spiegazione della consonanza – quello aritmetico, psico-fisico, fis...
Article
Full-text available
The search for beauty and its value has been a discussion topic since the ancient Greeks composed their myths. The advent of safer and more advanced modern plastic surgery techniques and the spread of aesthetic medicine have renewed the search for beauty. Today, beauty seems possible, accessible, and more democratic than ever before. To be beautifu...
Article
Full-text available
The article calls into question the very possibility of a post-human aesthetics, starting from the following premise: rather than post-human, it is more correct to speak of post-natural, indicating by this expression a reality produced through a new type of evolution, which does not simply change human nature, but de-natures it, radically transform...
Article
L’articolo esamina i contenuti filosofici de Il settimo sigillo di Bergman, a partire da un confronto diretto con la sceneggiatura del film. Oltre che su aspetti generali dell’estetica di Bergman, ci soffermiamo sul ruolo che alcuni nuclei tematici assumono all’interno della pellicola : in particolare, sul rapporto tra fede e conoscenza, sul ruolo...
Article
Full-text available
Different accounts have been given in order to face the problem of the emergence of musical consonance and dissonance. Getting a more adequate comprehension of such phenomenology may require a systemic view to integrate such multidimensionality into a unitary picture in which every partial solution enlightens a particular aspect of the very same pr...
Article
Moving from the Aristotelian definition of human as the only animal endowed with the gift of speech, we focus on the reasons why rhetoric has to be considered an essential dimension of human being. As humanity is strictly related to speech, rhetoric became a fundamental medium for knowledge of truth. Plato, in Gorgia’s dialogue, underlines the risk...
Article
In this paper, we aim to show that behind the utilization of a progressive rhetoric always lies a progressive existential behavior. Therefore, starting from the linguistic level of rhetoric, we move to the anthropological one. Here we present three fundamental elements for promoting a progressive strategy for bioethics: 1. to strongly desire that t...
Article
Abstract: A new paradigm about machine-design in robotics, currently defined as ‘Embodied Intelligence’, has recently been developed. Here we consider the debate on the relationship between the hand and the intellect, from the perspective of the history of philosophy, aiming at providing a more suitable understanding of this paradigm. The new botto...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper we reflect on the philosophical and epistemological connections between a new technology recently developed within robotics, and the previous mechanical approach. We will perform this task introducing the cyber-hand case: a very particular kind of bio-mechatronical prosthesis designed by bio-engineers in University Campus Bio-Medico i...
Article
Aim of this paper is to analyse Nuages gris, a short piano piece composed by Franz Liszt in the last period of his life. These two pages, totally 48 bars, are quite easy to play and very far from transcendental and virtuoso style which still characterizes Liszt’s late production. Despite of its apparent simplicity, Nuages is to be seen as a very mo...

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