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Publications (61)
The relationship between musical complexity and enjoyment is often characterized as an inverted U-shaped curve, with maximum hedonic value achieved at intermediate levels of musical complexity. However, the precise psychological processes underpinning this curve remain unclear. In this study, the previously proposed link between rhythmic entrainmen...
Introduction
In stressful times, people often listen to “coping songs” that help them reach emotional well-being goals. This paper is a first attempt to map the connection between an individual’s well-being goals and their chosen coping song.
Methods
We assembled a large-scale dataset of 2,804 coping songs chosen by individuals from 11 countries d...
Music is a complex phenomenon that elicits a range of emotional responses, influenced by numerous variables, such as rhythm, melody and harmony. One interesting aspect of music is listeners’ ability to predict its continuation as it unfolds – an inherent attribute hypothesized to contribute to our emotional response to music. In this study, we inve...
In the psychological literature on musical humor, the emphasis on laughter-inducing music has naturally led researchers to focus on quite uncommon devices, such as stylistic deviations or formal incongruities that strongly violate listeners’ expectations, as the privileged basis for musical humor. But musical humor extends well beyond laughter-indu...
The musical surrounding typical of most non-European/North American population includes some mix of Western, local art or folk music, and hybrid forms combining the two. How do these various musical systems play out in the internalized musical mental schemes of their listeners? Have Western musical schemes been totally internalized in such populati...
Passive listening to music, without sound production or evident movement, is long known to activate motor control regions. Nevertheless, the exact neuroanatomical correlates of the auditory-motor association and its underlying neural mechanisms have not been fully determined. Here, based on a NeuroSynth meta-analysis and three original fMRI paradig...
Music can reduce stress and anxiety, enhance positive mood, and facilitate social bonding. However, little is known about the role of music and related personal or cultural (individualistic vs. collectivistic) variables in maintaining wellbeing during times of stress and social isolation as imposed by the COVID-19 crisis. In an online questionnaire...
The strict lockdown experienced in Spain during March–June 2020 as a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis has led to strong negative emotions. Music can contribute to enhancing wellbeing, but the extent of this effect may be modulated by both personal and context-related variables. This study aimed to analyze the impact of the two types of variables...
Music can reduce stress and anxiety, enhance positive mood, and facilitate social bonding. However, little is known about the role of music and related personal or cultural (individualistic versus collectivistic) variables in maintaining wellbeing during times of stress and social isolation as imposed by the COVID-19 crisis. In an online questionna...
The question of the origin of music and its powers has always fascinated philosophers and scientists. Here we present a close reading of the view offered by the Persian Muslim philosopher and scientist Ibn Sīnā, also known as Avicenna (980–1037). We draw a parallel between Ibn Sīnā’s account of the senses and mental capacities and his hierarchical,...
Predictive coding is an increasingly influential and ambitious concept in neuroscience viewing the brain as a 'hypothesis testing machine' that constantly strives to minimize prediction error, the gap between its predictions and the actual sensory input. Despite the invaluable contribution of this framework to the formulation of brain function, its...
How can music-merely a stream of sounds-be enjoyable for so many people? Recent accounts of this phenomenon are inspired by predictive coding models, hypothesizing that both confirmation and violations of musical expectations associate with the hedonic response to music via recruitment of the mesolimbic system and its connections with the auditory...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.0010042.].
Auditory frequency change (FC) might be crucial to respond to. We hypothesized that FC affects human motor behavior within short latency, and that upwards vs downwards changes exert distinct effects. Behavioral correlates of asymmetries in FC processing are scarcely researched. Previous work of ours showed direction-biased FC effect in a tapping ta...
Major methodological advancements have been recently made in the field of neural decoding, which is concerned with the reconstruction of mental content from neuroimaging measures. However, in the absence of a large-scale examination of the validity of the decoding models across subjects and content, the extent to which these models can be generaliz...
Melody recognition is an online process of evaluating incoming information and comparing this information to an existing internal corpus, thereby reducing prediction error. The predictive-coding model postulates top-down control on sensory processing accompanying reduction in prediction error. To investigate the relevancy of this model to melody pr...
Music is a powerful means for communicating emotions among individuals. Here we reveal that this continuous stream of affective information is commonly represented in the brains of different listeners and that particular musical attributes mediate this link. We examined participants' brain responses to two naturalistic musical pieces using function...
This editorial introduces a collection of papers brought together under the heading of “Music as a Multimodal Experience.” This issue aims to bring to the foreground recent developments in our understanding of music as a multimodal experience.
The Faenza Codex contains highly diverse instrumental figurations in the Ars Nova style and is unique in its sharp jump from
simple melodic skeleton lines to extremely elaborate figurations (a diminution can accommodate up to 20 notes per one melodic
note). This makes the manuscript an interesting candidate on which to build a figuration dictionary...
Musicians' perceptual advantage in the acoustic domain is well established. Recent studies show that musicians' verbal working memory is also superior. Additionally, some studies report that musicians' visuospatial skills are enhanced although others failed to find this enhancement. We now examined whether musicians' spatial vision is superior, and...
Previous genetic studies showed an association between variations in the gene coding for the 1a receptor of the neuro-hormone arginine vasopressin (AVP) and musical working memory (WM). The current study set out to test the influence of intranasal administration (INA) of AVP on musical as compared to verbal WM using a double blind crossover (AVP-pl...
Singing is, undoubtedly, the most fundamental expression of our musical capacity, yet an estimated 10-15% of Western population sings "out-of-tune (OOT)." Previous research in children and adults suggests, albeit inconsistently, that imitating a human voice can improve pitch matching. In the present study, we focus on the potentially beneficial eff...
We examine how individuals who are congenitally or early blind (CEB), as compared with sighted individuals, associate musical parameters with nonauditory domains. Exp1 (modeled after Eitan & Granot, 2006) investigated how participants associate pitch direction, loudness change and tempo change with motion features. In Exp2 (modeled after Eitan & Ti...
Previous studies have suggested that listeners are insensitive to the overall tonal structure of musical pieces. In Part I of this report (Granot & Jacoby, 2011) we reexamined this question by means of a puzzle task using 10 segments of Mozart’s B flat major piano sonata K. 570/I. As expected, subjects had difficulty in recreating the original piec...
Previous studies have suggested that listeners are not sensitive to the overall tonal structure of musical pieces. This assumption is reexamined in the current study in an active musical puzzle task, with no time constraints, focusing on the presumably most directional musical form – the sonata form. In our first study (reported here, and referred...
Though the Perception of Musical Tension has recently received considerable attention, the effect of interactions among auditory parameters on perceived tension has hardly been examined systematically. In this study, 132 participants (60 with music training) listened to short melodic sequences that combined manipulations of pitch direction, pitch r...
One of the most studied effects of verbal working memory (WM) is the influence of the length of the words that compose the list to be remembered. This work aims to investigate the nature of musical WM by replicating the word length effect in the musical domain. Length and rate of presentation were manipulated in a recognition task of tone sequences...
In this study, we examine through electrophysiological measures three alternative mechanisms underlying musical chord priming: psychoacoustic distance, common parent-key, and distance along the circle of fifths. In contrast with previous behavioral studies, we present complex tones which do not blur the melodic component, we present various chord a...
Music theorists often maintain that motivic categorization in music is determined by “primary” musical parameters — music-specific aspects of pitch and temporal structure, like pitch intervals or metric hierarchies, serving as bases for musical syntax. In contrast, “secondary” parameters, including important aspects of extra-musical auditory percep...
Converging evidence from both human and animal studies has highlighted the pervasive role of two neuropeptides, oxytocin (OXT) and arginine vasopressin (AVP), in mammalian social behaviours. Recent molecular genetic studies of the human arginine vasopressin 1a (AVPR1a) and oxytocin (OXTR) receptors have strengthened the evidence regarding the role...
This paper presents an empirical investigation of the ways listeners associate changes in musical parameters with physical space and bodily motion. In the experiments reported, participants were asked to associate melodic stimuli with imagined motions of a human character, and to specify the type, direction, and pace-change of these motions, as wel...
Music theorists often presume that the various sections in a musical masterwork match "organically" in a way en- hancing aesthetic unity and value. This supposed intra- opus (piece-specific) coherence, or "inner form," should be distinguished from coherence associated with inter- opus, "external" constraints, such as conventional musi- cal forms an...
Based on nine calls of Calodactylodes illingworthorum recorded in the wild in Sri Lanka, the ‘spontaneous’ call of the species is a very rapid series of 4–7 roughly similar chirps. Call parameters are compared to those of Ptyodactylus guttatus of Israel because the species are similar in morphology (size, proportions, digit shape, scutellation, col...
In a preliminary pilot study, 82 university students were administered an extensive battery of musical and phonological memory tasks; their scores were examined for an association with promoter repeats in the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor and serotonin transporter genes. We previously showed that these genes were associated with another music-re...
Music theorists and psychologists have described diverse musical processes in terms of changes (increase or decrease) in “intensity”. This paper examines the hypothesis that analogous intensity changes in different musical parameters can be perceived as similar, and discusses implications of such perception for music analysis. In the experiment rep...
Dancing, which is integrally related to music, likely has its origins close to the birth of Homo sapiens, and throughout our history, dancing has been universally practiced in all societies. We hypothesized that there are differences among individuals in aptitude, propensity, and need for dancing that may partially be based on differences in common...
Even within equitonal isochronous sequences, listeners report perceiving differences among the tones, reflecting some grouping and accenting of the sound events. In a previous study, we explored this phenomenon of �subjective rhythmization� physiologically through brain event-related potentials (ERPs). We found differences in the ERP responses to s...
Even within equitone isochronous sequences, listeners report perceiving some grouping and accenting of sound events. In a previous study we explored this phenomenon of "subjective rhythmisation" physiologically through brain event-related potentials (ERP). We found differences in the ERP responses to small loudness deviations introduced in differen...
Background in music theory. Music theorists and aestheticians have long suggested that musical gestures are isomorphic with expressive motion (e.g., Kurth, 1991; Scruton, 1997). The ramifications of this hypothesis can be observed in attempts to map changes in diverse musical parameters onto curves representing spatial motion (see Shove & Repp, 199...
Our primary goal has been to elucidate a model of pitch memory by examining the brain activity of musicians with and without absolute pitch during listening tasks. Subjects, screened for both absolute and relative pitch abilities, were presented with two auditory tasks and one visual task that served as a control. In the first auditory task (pitch...
In an earlier study, we found that human voices evoked a positive event-related potential (ERP) peaking at approximately 320 ms after stimulus onset, distinctive from those elicited by instrumental tones. Here we show that though similar in latency to the Novelty P3, this Voice-Sensitive Response (VSR) differs in antecedent conditions and scalp dis...
In this study, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) are used to measure subjects' responses to violations of musical expectancies elicited in seven-tone sequences. We manipulated the structure of the sequence (strongly vs. weakly constraining), the congruity of the terminal tone (congruent vs. incongruent), the form of sequence presentation (both...
Recent neuroimaging studies have provided evidence for localized perceptual specificity in the processing of human voice stimuli, paralleling the specificity for human faces. This study attempted to delineate the perceptual features of human voices yielding selective processing, and to characterize its time-course. Electrophysiological recordings r...
In this study, we suggest a network of links among musical activities and external and internal factors that influence these activities. Specifically, we examine the influences of cognitive constraints, of the stylistic ideal, and of the listener's consciousness on the rules governing the selection of the raw material, on the compositional rules, a...
People who have the ability to label or to produce notes without any reference are considered to possess Absolute Pitch (AP). Others, who need a reference in order to identify the notes, possess Relative Pitch (RP). The AP ability is assumed to reflect a unique, language-like representation of non-lexical musical notes in memory. The purpose of thi...
The study included six experiments on responses to harmonic and melodic intervals, using two complementary methods: event-related potentials (ERP) and verbal responses. Three experiments were performed with each method, using the same musical material: (1) isolated harmonic intervals (m 2nd, m 3rd, p 5th); (2) nine pairs of melodic intervals compri...
In previous reports we described a centro-frontal scalp-recorded event-related potential (ERP), particularly sensitive to human voices. This potential peaked at about 320 ms from stimulus onset and was significantly larger, in nonmusicians, in response to tones sung by human singers as compared to same-pitched tones produced by a variety of musical...
