Reopening the Conversation Between Music Psychology and Music Therapy

Although the fields of music psychology and music therapy share many common interests, research collaboration between the two fields is still somewhat rare. Previous work has identified that disciplinary identities and attitudes towards those in other disciplines are challenges to effective interdisciplinary research. The current study explores such attitudes in music therapy and music psychology. A sample of 123 music therapists and music psychologists answered an online survey regarding their attitudes towards potential interdisciplinary work between the two fields. Analysis of results suggested that participants’ judgements of the attitudes of members of the other discipline were not always accurate. Music therapists indicated a high degree of interest in interdisciplinary research, although in free text answers, both music psychologists and music therapists frequently characterized music therapists as disinterested in science. Music therapists reported seeing significantly greater relevance of music psychology to their own work than did music psychologists of music therapists. Participants’ attitudes were modestly related to their reported personality traits and held values. Results overall indicated interest in, and positive expectations of, interdisciplinary attitudes in both groups, and should be explored in future research.

Reassessing Syntax-Related ERP Components Using Popular Music Chord Sequences

Electroencephalographic responses to unexpected musical events allow researchers to test listeners’ internal models of syntax. One major challenge is dissociating cognitive syntactic violations—based on the abstract identity of a particular musical structure—from unexpected acoustic features. Despite careful controls in past studies, recent work by Bigand, Delbe, Poulin-Carronnat, Leman, and Tillmann (2014) has argued that ERP findings attributed to cognitive surprisal cannot be unequivocally separated from sensory surprisal. Here we report a novel EEG paradigm that uses three auditory short-term memory models and one cognitive model to predict surprisal as indexed by several ERP components (ERAN, N5, P600, and P3a), directly comparing sensory and cognitive contributions. Our paradigm parameterizes a large set of stimuli rather than using categorically “high” and “low” surprisal conditions, addressing issues with past work in which participants may learn where to expect violations and may be biased by local context. The cognitive model (Harrison & Pearce, 2018) predicted higher P3a amplitudes, as did Leman’s (2000) model, indicating both sensory and cognitive contributions to expectation violation. However, no model predicted ERAN, N5, or P600 amplitudes, raising questions about whether traditional interpretations of these ERP components generalize to broader collections of stimuli or rather are limited to less naturalistic stimuli.

On the Roles of Complexity and Symmetry in Cued Tapping of Well-formed Complex Rhythms

Production of relatively few rhythms with non-isochronous beats has been studied. So we assess reproduction of most well-formed looped rhythms comprising K=2-11 cues (a uniform piano tone, indicating where participants should tap) and N=3-13 isochronous pulses (a uniform cymbal). Each rhythm had two different cue interonset intervals. We expected that many of the rhythms would be difficult to tap, because of ambiguous non-isochronous beats and syncopations, and that complexity and asymmetry would predict performance. 111 participants tapped 91 rhythms each heard over 129 pulses, starting as soon as they could. Whereas tap-cue concordance in prior studies was generally >> 90%, here only 52.2% of cues received a temporally congruent tap, and only 63% of taps coincided with a cue. Only −2 ms mean tap asynchrony was observed (whereas for non-musicians this value is usually c. −50 ms). Performances improved as rhythms progressed and were repeated, but precision varied substantially between participants and rhythms. Performances were autoregressive and mixed effects cross-sectional time series analyses retaining the integrity of all the individual time series revealed that performance worsened as complexity features K, N, and cue inter-onset interval entropy increased. Performance worsened with increasing R, the Long: short (L: s) cue interval ratio of each rhythm (indexing both complexity and asymmetry). Rhythm evenness and balance, and whether N was divisible by 2 or 3, were not useful predictors. Tap velocities positively predicted cue fulfilment. Our data indicate that study of a greater diversity of rhythms can broaden our impression of rhythm cognition.

Perception of Music and Speech Prosody After Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

The present study aimed to examine the perception of music and prosody in patients who had undergone a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Our second objective was to describe the association between music and prosody impairments in clinical individual presentations. Thirty-six patients who were out of the acute phase underwent a set of music and prosody tests: two subtests of the Montreal Battery for Evaluation of Amusia evaluating respectively melody (scale) and rhythm perception, two subtests of the Montreal Evaluation of Communication on prosody understanding in sentences, and two other tests evaluating prosody understanding in vowels. Forty-two percent of the patients were impaired in the melodic test, 51% were impaired in the rhythmic test, and 71% were impaired in at least one of the four prosody tests. The amusic patients performed significantly worse than non-amusics on the four prosody tests. This descriptive study shows for the first time the high prevalence of music deficits after severe TBI. It also suggests associations between prosody and music impairments, as well as between linguistic and emotional prosody impairments. Causes of these impairments remain to be explored.

Influence of Regular Rhythmic Versus Textural Sound Sequences on Semantic and Conceptual Processing

Conceptual priming studies have shown that listening to musical primes triggers semantic activation. The present study further investigated with a free semantic evocation task, 1) how rhythmic vs. textural structures affect the amount of words evoked after a musical sequence, and 2) whether both features also affect the content of the semantic activation. Rhythmic sequences were composed of various percussion sounds with a strong underlying beat and metrical structure. Textural sound sequences consisted of blended timbres and sound sources evolving over time without identifiable pulse. Participants were asked to verbalize the concepts evoked by the musical sequences. We measured the number of words and lemmas produced after having listened to musical sequences of each condition, and we analyzed whether specific concepts were associated with each sequence type. Results showed that more words and lemmas were produced for textural sound sequences than for rhythmic sequences and that some concepts were specifically associated with each musical condition. Our findings suggest that listening to musical excerpts emphasizing different features influences semantic activation in different ways and extent. This might possibly be instantiated via cognitive mechanisms triggered by the acoustic characteristics of the excerpts as well as the perceived emotions.

Perception of Musicality and Emotion in Signed Songs

This study investigated how signed performances express musical meaning and emotions. Deaf, Hard-of-Hearing (HoH), and hearing participants watched eight translated signed songs and eight signed lyrics with no influence of music. The participants rated these videos on several emotional and movement dimensions. Even though the videos did not have audible sounds, hearing participants perceived the signed songs as more musical than the signed lyrics. Deaf/HoH participants perceived both types of videos as equally musical, suggesting a different conception of what it means for movement to be musical. We also found that participants’ ratings of spatial height, vertical direction, size, tempo, and fluency related to the performer’s intended emotion and participants’ ratings of valence/arousal. For Deaf/HoH participants, accuracy at identifying emotional intentions was predicted by focusing more on facial expressions than arm movements. Together, these findings add to our understanding of how audience members attend to and derive meaning from different characteristics of movement in performative contexts.

Effects of Chord Inversion and Bass Patterns on Harmonic Expectancy in Musicians

This study tests the respective roles of pitch-class content and bass patterns within harmonic expectation using a mix of behavioral and computational experiments. In our first two experiments, participants heard a paradigmatic chord progression derived from music theory textbooks and were asked to rate how well different target endings completed that progression. The completion included the progression’s paradigmatic target, different inversions of that chord (i.e., different members of the harmony were heard in the lowest voice), and a “mismatched” target, a triad that shared its lowest pitch with the paradigmatic ending but altered other pitch-class content. Participants generally rated the paradigmatic target most highly, followed by other inversions of that chord, with lowest ratings generally elicited by the mismatched target. This suggests that listeners’ harmonic expectations are sensitive to both bass patterns and pitch-class content. However, these results did not hold in all cases. A final computational experiment was run to determine whether variations in behavioral responses could be explained by corpus statistics. To this end, n-gram chord-transition models and frequency measurements were compiled for each progression. Our findings suggest that listeners rate highly and have stronger expectations about chord progressions that occur frequently and behave consistently within tonal corpora.

Experience of Groove Questionnaire

In recent empirical research, the experience of groove (i.e., the pleasant sense of wanting to move along with the music) has come into focus. By developing the new Experience of Groove Questionnaire (EGQ), Senn et al. (2020) have provided a standardized and validated research instrument for future studies, consisting of the two correlated factors Urge to Move and Pleasure. The present study reports the translation of the English version into German and a validation with a German sample (N = 455). The original version’s factor structure was confirmed by the German data. Test-retest reliability was found to be high (rtt > .85) for both factors. To determine convergent validity, two other scales were included: The Drum Pattern Quality Scale (Frühauf, Kopiez, & Platz, 2013) and the Aesthetic Emotions Scale (Schindler et al., 2017) showed high correlations (.78 < r < .87) with the two factors of the EGQ and therefore indicated convergent validity. We conclude that the German version shows good psychometric properties and recommend its use for future research on the experience of groove.

The Perceptual Attraction of Pre-Dominant Chords

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/senior music majors, freshman music majors, and people from the general population recruited on Prolific.co. In each trial, four Shepard-tone sounds in the key of C were presented: 1) the tonic note, 2) one of 31 different chords, 3) the dominant triad, and 4) the tonic note. Participants rated the strength of attraction between the second and third chords. Across all individuals, diatonic and chromatic pre-dominant chords were rated significantly higher than non-pre-dominant chords and bridge chords. Further, music theory training moderated this relationship, with individuals with more theory training rating pre-dominant chords as being more attracted to the dominant. A final data analysis modeled the role of empirical features of the chords preceding the V chord, finding that chords with roots moving to V down by fifth, chords with less acoustical roughness, and chords with more semitones adjacent to V were all significant predictors of attraction ratings.

The Metaphor of Sweetness in Medieval and Modern Music Listening

Historical listening has long been a topic of interest for musicologists. Yet, little attention has been given to the systematic study of historical listening practices before the common practice era (c. 1700–present). In the first study of its kind, this research compared a model of medieval perceptions of “sweetness” based on writings of medieval music theorists with modern day listeners’ aesthetic responses. Responses were collected through two experiments. In an implicit associations experiment, participants were primed with a more or less consonant musical excerpt, then presented with a sweet or bitter target word, or a non-word, on which to make lexical decisions. In the explicit associations experiment, participants were asked to rate on a three-point Likert scale perceived sweetness of short musical excerpts that varied in consonance and sound quality (male, female, organ). The results from these experiments were compared to predictions from a medieval perception model to investigate whether early and modern listeners have similar aesthetic responses. Results from the implicit association test were not consistent with the predictions of the model, however, results from the explicit associations experiment were. These findings indicate the metaphor of sweetness may be useful for comparing the aesthetic responses of medieval and modern listeners.