The scientific study of music blossomed in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany and Austria. Researchers such as Hermann von Helmholtz and Carl Stumpf investigated the physiological and psychological bases of music but did not focus on higher-level musical topics. It was not until the early twentieth century that scientific methods were applied to the study of larg...

Research and outcomes with cochlear implants (CIs) have revealed a dichotomy in the cues necessary for speech and music recognition. CI devices typically transmit 16-22 spectral channels, each modulated slowly in time. This coarse representation provides enough information to support speech understanding in quiet and rhythmic perception in music, but not enough to support speech understanding i...

BACKGROUND Visual perception is not a passive process: in order to efficiently process visual input, the brain actively uses previous knowledge (e.g., memory) and expectations about what the world should look like. However, perception is not only influenced by previous knowledge. Especially the perception of emotional stimuli is influenced by the emotional state of the observer. In other words,...

SCIENCE SINCE ANTIQUITY HAS ASKED WHETHER mathematical relationships among acoustic frequencies govern musical relationships. Psychophysics rejected frequency ratio theories, focusing on sensory phenomena predicted by linear analysis of sound. Cognitive psychologists have since focused on long-term exposure to the music of one’s culture and short-term sensitivity to statistical regularities. To...

BACKGROUND An extensive body of literature indicates that cochlear implants (CIs) are effective in supporting speech perception of persons with severe to profound hearing losses who do not benefit to any great extent from conventional hearing aids. Adult CI recipients tend to show significant improvement in speech perception within 3 mo following implantation as a result of mere experience. Fur...

The present review examined the cross-modal association of sensations and their relationship to musical perception. Initially, the study focuses on synesthesia, its definition, incidence, forms, and genetic and developmental factors. The theories of the neural basis of synesthesia were also addressed by comparing theories emphasizing the anatomical aspect against others reinforcing the importan...

The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of how the perception of a regular beat in music can be studied in humans adults, human newborns, and nonhuman primates using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Next to a review of the recent literature on the perception of temporal regularity in music, we will discuss in how far ERPs, and especially the component called mismatch negativity (MM...