Even adults with no formal music lessons have implicit musical knowledge acquired through exposure to the music of their culture. Two of these abilities are knowledge of key membership (which notes belong in a key) and harmony (chord progressions). Studies to date suggest that perception of harmony emerges around 5-6 years of age. Using simple tasks, we found that formal music training influenc...

Doctoral dissertation in musicology at the Department of Culture, Aesthetics and Media, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 2008, 311 pages. Language: English. Title: A Perspective Theory of Music Perception and Emotion. Author: Björn Vickhoff Series: Skrifter från musikvetenskap, Göteborgs universitet nr 90 In order to answer the question of why music moves us emotionally we need to understand t...

Perception of complex sound is a process carried out in everyday life situations and contributes in the way one perceives reality. Attempting to explain sound perception and how it affects human beings is complicated. Physics of simple sound can be described as a function of frequency, amplitude and phase. Psychology of sound, also termed psychoacoustics, has its own distinct elements of pitch,...

We introduce the CrestMuse Performance Expression Database (CrestMusePEDB), a music database that describes music performance expression and is available for academic research. While music databases are being provided as MIR technologies continue to progress, few databases deal with performance expression. We constructed a music expression database, CrestMusePEDB. It may be utilized in the rese...

Basic Emotion theory has had a tremendous influence on the affective sciences, including music psychology, where most researchers have assumed that music expressivity is constrained to a limited set of basic emotions. Several scholars suggested that these constrains to musical expressivity are explained by the existence of a shared acoustic code to the expression of emotions in music and speech...

Previous studies of auditory expectation have focused on the expectedness perceived by listeners retrospectively in response to events. In contrast, this research examines predictive uncertainty-a property of listeners' prospective state of expectation prior to the onset of an event. We examine the information-theoretic concept of Shannon entropy as a model of predictive uncertainty in music co...

Listening to music usually elicits emotions that can vary considerably in their intensity over the course of listening. Yet, after listening to a piece of music, people are easily able to evaluate the music's overall emotional intensity. There are two different hypotheses about how affective experiences are temporally processed and integrated: (1) all moments' intensities are integrated, result...

Despite music's universality, people perceive and interpret music according to their cultural background. The existing music perception batteries, however, do not take into account possible cultural differences. We adapted the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusias (MBEA) into the requirements of Eastern (Greek) music, where rhythm and melody scales are different from the ones used in Wester...