The Neuroaesthetics of Music: A Research Agenda Coming of Age

2018 ◽  
pp. 363-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elvira Brattico
Keyword(s):  
Research Agenda ◽  
Music Perception ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Superior Temporal Gyrus ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Cognition And Emotion ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
Future Challenges ◽  
Art Research

This chapter offers an overview on the state-of-the-art research under the agenda of the neuroaesthetics of music. This research agenda, inspired by the neuroaesthetics of visual art, represents a paradigm shift from neuroimaging studies focused exclusively on music perception, cognition, and emotion to studies that consider aesthetic responses such as liking, preference, and aesthetic judgments. The existing models depicting information processing stages of the musical aesthetic experiences and their loci in the brain are summarized. The latest findings point at a synergy between neural systems, and particularly between superior temporal gyrus and limbic reward areas for issuing aesthetic responses to music. Future challenges for the field are the discovery of the neural mechanisms of inter-subject communication during musical performance leading to an efficacious aesthetic experience.

scholarly journals ClC-1 chloride channels: state-of-the-art research and future challenges

2015 ◽  
Vol 09 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paola Imbrici ◽  
Concetta Altamura ◽  
Mauro Pessia ◽  
Renato Mantegazza ◽  
Jean-François Desaphy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Chloride Channels ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Future Challenges ◽  
Art Research

Global Climate Change and Aesthetics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Brady
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Ethical Values ◽  
Global Crisis ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Relationship

What kinds of issues does the global crisis of climate change present to aesthetics, and how will they challenge the field to respond? This paper argues that a new research agenda is needed for aesthetics with respect to global climate change (GCC) and outlines a set of foundational issues which are especially pressing: (1) attention to environments that have been neglected by philosophers, for example, the cryosphere and aerosphere; (2) negative aesthetics of environment, in order to grasp aesthetic experiences, meanings, and dis/values in light of the catastrophic effects of GCC; (3) bringing intergenerational thinking into aesthetics through concepts of temporality and ‘future aesthetics’ (4) understanding the relationship between aesthetic and ethical values as they arise in regard to GCC.

Questions about Aesthetic Experience

Projections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-75
Author(s):  
Paisley Livingston
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Third Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
The Third

These brief comments raise some questions about Murray Smith’s remarks, in his new volume Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film, on the nature of aesthetic experience. My questions concern how we might best draw a viable distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic experiences and focus in particular on possible links between self-awareness and aesthetic experiences. In sum, I agree with Smith in holding that we should not give up on the notion of aesthetic experience, even though aestheticians continue to disagree regarding even the most basic questions pertaining to its nature.

scholarly journals Plastic (in) Paradise: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-40
Author(s):  
Michaela Keck
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Rain Forest ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Material Wealth ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site

This contribution examines the magic-realist metaphor of the Matacão in Karen Tei Yamashita’s (1990) debut novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest as a trope that invites us to imagine, reflect on, and explore plastic’s cross-cultural meanings, aesthetic experiences, and materialist implications. I contend that through the Matacão, Yamashita engenders a narrative about, as well as an aesthetic experience of, plastic that is inherently ambivalent and paradoxical. While it provides societies with material wealth and sensual pleasures, it poses at the same time a profound threat to life – human and nonhuman. The main part of the article is divided into two major sections: in the first part, I read Yamashita’s story about the Matacão as historiographic metafiction that parodies the socio-cultural history of plastic and its utopian promises and failures. In the second part, I draw on Catherine Malabou’s philosophical concept of plasticity to explore the Matacão’s material agency, as well as the social mobility and economic connectivity of Yamashita’s human protagonists in their plastic environments. The theoretical perspective of Malabou’s concept of plasticity shifts the focus to the agentic forces of the waste material and allows us to read Yamashita’s Matacão as both a site and material that, notwithstanding its devastating impacts, also holds potentialities for resilience and repair, and even the possibility for an, at least temporary, utopia.

scholarly journals Discerning the functional networks behind processing of music and speech through human vocalizations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arafat Angulo-Perkins ◽  
Luis Concha
Keyword(s):  
Speech Processing ◽  
Music Perception ◽  
Right Hemisphere ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Inferior Frontal Gyrus ◽  
Functional Divergence ◽  
Premotor Cortex ◽  
Superior Temporal Gyrus ◽  
Magnetic Resonance Images ◽  
Biological Traits

ABSTRACT Musicality refers to specific biological traits that allow us to perceive, generate and enjoy music. These abilities can be studied at different organizational levels (e.g., behavioural, physiological, evolutionary), and all of them reflect that music and speech processing are two different cognitive domains. Previous research has shown evidence of this functional divergence in auditory cortical regions in the superior temporal gyrus (such as the planum polare), showing increased activity upon listening to music, as compared to other complex acoustic signals. Here, we examine brain activity underlying vocal music and speech perception, while we compare musicians and non-musicians. We designed a stimulation paradigm using the same voice to produce spoken sentences, hummed melodies, and sung sentences; the same sentences were used in speech and song categories, and the same melodies were used in the musical categories (song and hum). Participants listened to this paradigm while we acquired functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI). Different analyses demonstrated greater involvement of specific auditory and motor regions during music perception, as compared to speech vocalizations. This music sensitive network includes bilateral activation of the planum polare and temporale, as well as a group of regions lateralized to the right hemisphere that included the supplementary motor area, premotor cortex and the inferior frontal gyrus. Our results show that the simple act of listening to music generates stronger activation of motor regions, possibly preparing us to move following the beat. Vocal musical listening, with and without lyrics, is also accompanied by a higher modulation of specific secondary auditory cortices such as the planum polare, confirming its crucial role in music processing independently of previous musical training. This study provides more evidence showing that music perception enhances audio-sensorimotor activity, crucial for clinical approaches exploring music based therapies to improve communicative and motor skills.

scholarly journals Ways of studying O. Pushkin’s creativity in the classroom with foreign students-philologists

2020 ◽  
pp. 186-194
Author(s):  
O. M. Kirichenko ◽  
◽  
S. I. Kryzhanovskyi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Students ◽  
Music Perception ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Film Interpretation ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Oral Speech ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
New Research

The article examines the ways of effective assimilation of the development of oral speech by foreign students when studying the creative heritage of Oleksandr Pushkin. Unresolved issues and problems of teaching Russian language and literature as a foreign language remain and are a stimulus for new research. This determines the relevance of the article, the purpose of which is to strive to choose a methodological direction and an effective approach when acquainting with the literary heritage of Oleksandr Pushkin in the classroom on the Russian language and literature with foreign students of philology. To understand a work of art not only as a means of teaching and upbringing, but as a source of personal inspiration and inspiration for foreign students, an incentive to attract them to creative research work; to perceive a literary and artistic work as an individual and unique system of artistic speech, the interpretation of which will contribute to the understanding of the individuality of the author’s personality, expressed through the concept, emotional-evaluative attitude and a set of considerations of the work; to analyze the connections between artistic phenomena of the literary process – these are the main directions of research in this article. The authors are convinced that in the classroom with foreign students of philology, it will be effective to study the poet’s work with the involvement of the interaction of various types of art: Pushkin author’s illustrations, portraits of the poet, paintings by outstanding artists. The appeal to musical compositions based on the works of Oleksandr Pushkin is justified. Musical works will allow foreign students-philologists not only to learn about the interpretation of Oleksandr Pushkin’s poems by composers, but also to enrich their own aesthetic experience of music perception. Methodically conditioned by the use of film interpretation in the classroom with foreign students, it allows you to motivate not only to read the works of O. Pushkin, but also to create your own films and animation works based on the poet's work.

scholarly journals The Biological Basis of Mathematical Beauty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Semir Zeki ◽  
Oliver Y. Chén ◽  
John Paul Romaya
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Mathematical Culture ◽  
Extensive Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Biological Basis ◽  
Mathematical Beauty ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Biological Category

AbstractThrough our past studies of the neurobiology of beauty, we have come to divide aesthetic experiences into two broad categories: biological and artifactual. The aesthetic experience of biological beauty is dictated by inherited brain concepts, which are resistant to change even in spite of extensive experience. The experience of artifactual beauty on the other hand is determined by post-natally acquired concepts, which are modifiable throughout life by exposure to different experiences (Zeki, 2009). Hence, in terms of aesthetic rating, biological beauty (in which we include the experience of beautiful faces or human bodies) is characterized by less variability between individuals belonging to different ethnic origins and cultural backgrounds or the same individual at different times. Artifactual beauty (in which we include the aesthetic experience of human artifacts such as buildings and cars) is characterized by greater variability between individuals belonging to different ethnic and cultural groupings and by the same individual at different times. In this paper, we present results to show that the experience of mathematical beauty (Zeki et al 2014), even though it constitutes an extreme example of beauty that is dependent upon (mathematical) culture and learning, belongs to the biological category and obeys one of its characteristics, namely a lesser variability in terms of the aesthetic ratings given to mathematical formulae experienced as beautiful.

Empirical Aesthetics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helmut Leder ◽  
Matthew Pelowski
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Contextual Factors ◽  
Framing Effects ◽  
Specific Situation ◽  
General Introduction ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Extra Information ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Psychological Studies

In most people’s lives, aesthetic experiences are probably frequent and occur in multiple, often very different and idiosyncratic situations. Usually, aesthetic experience involves an episode with the experiencing person in a specific situation, stretched out over time, in which certain objects, their environment, and various constituting elements are brought together. In this chapter, the authors provide a general introduction on the importance of such contextual factors in aesthetic experiences. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the nature of aesthetic experiences as a topic beyond typical aesthetic objects, with regard to how aesthetic experiences emerge as interactions between person, objects, and environment, and thus how they are embedded in informational contexts. In particular, the importance of information context is discussed: how we frame, anticipate, explain, and understand the factors of our experience as we live them. Also examined is how, in psychological studies, extra information or titles presented with pictures and artworks, or instructions regarding the context—so-called framing effects—have been shown to affect aesthetic experiences. The chapter ends with an outlook on major challenges, goals, and future directions.

6. Aesthetics and life

2019 ◽  
pp. 72-85
Author(s):  
Bence Nanay
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences

‘Aesthetics and life’ considers several questions to show how aesthetics and life are intertwined on all kinds of levels. Should we treat our life as a work of art? Should we become the spectators of our own life? It discusses how not to be jaded by aesthetic experiences, how expectations can influence our experiences, how some aesthetic experiences have a lot to do with seeing something afresh, and how some aesthetic experiences can have a lingering effect. It concludes that aesthetic experience does not have to be detached, it does not need to be contemplative, and it does not need to involve open-ended attention.

The Aesthetic Triad

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
Oshin Vartanian ◽  
Anjan Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Rapid Growth ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Emergent Property ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Large Scale Systems ◽  
Sensory Motor ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Meaning System ◽  
The Brain

Following the rapid growth of neuroaesthetics, there was a need to systematize and organize the findings into a coherent and testable framework. With the “aesthetic triad,” the authors presented a model according to which aesthetic experience was viewed as the emergent property of the interaction of three large-scale systems in the brain: sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and knowledge-meaning. Features that distinguished this model from others was that it was meant to apply to all aesthetic episodes (e.g., art, faces, architecture, etc.) and it acknowledged explicitly that a large variety of aesthetic experiences can emerge as a function of the specific ways in which these systems interact in the course of their emergence. To probe the model, the contribution of the knowledge-meaning system is likely of greatest interest, at least in part because that system encapsulates a large breadth of factors ranging from the personal to the cultural.

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