Apart from its natural relevance to cognition, music provides a window into the intimate relationships between production, perception, experience, and emotion. Here, emotional responses and neural activity were observed as they evolved together with stimulus parameters over several minutes. Participants listened to a skilled music performance that included the natural fluctuations in timing and...

This article investigates the contexts, or "listening niches", in which people hear popular music. The study spanned a century of popular music, divided into 10 decades, with participants born between 1940 and 1999. It asks about whether they know and like the music in each decade, and their emotional reactions. It also asks whether the music is associated with personal memories and, if so, wit...

Due to the creative and purposeful applications of music in a therapeutic context, music therapists may be uniquely able to foster flow-based experiences for the people who access their services – herein “users”. As flow has been linked with a number of positive factors, it may be ideal for encouraging and enhancing learning and therapeutic encounters during music therapy. The purpose of this p...

Chronic tinnitus is a symptom with high prevalence. There is evidence that the tinnitus perception is related to unfavorable cortical plastic changes. In our recent study we have developed and evaluated a customized music training strategy that appears capable of both reducing cortical tinnitus related neuronal activity and alleviating subjective tinnitus perception. We hypothesize that the reg...

This paper explores the potential for music perception in children who are deaf or hard of hearing and the benefits of using a music program to facilitate the development of reading skills in preschool children.

Introduction: An increasing body of literature indicates that adult recipients of the hybrid cochlear implant have more accurate perception of speech in background noise and salient structures of music (e.g., pitch, timbre) than recipients of conventional long electrodes (LE). Improved perception of pitch and melody is a function of preserved low-frequency hearing. Children and adolescents who ...

Music has a unique power to elicit moments of intense emotional and psychophysiological response. These moments - termed "chills," "thrills", "frissons," etc. - are subjects of introspection and philosophical debate, as well as scientific study in music perception and cognition. The present article integrates the existing multidisciplinary literature in an attempt to define a comprehensive, tes...

This study explored whether we could accurately classify perceived and imagined musical stimuli from EEG data. Successful EEG-based classification of what an individual is imagining could pave the way for novel communication techniques, such as brain-computer interfaces. We recorded EEG with a 64-channel BioSemi system while participants heard or imagined different musical stimuli. Using princi...

Interaction with human musicians is a challenging task for robots as it involves online perception and precise synchronization. In this paper, we present a consistent and theoretically sound framework for combining perception and control for accurate musical timing. For the perception, we develop a hierarchical hidden Markov model that combines event detection and tempo tracking. The robot perf...

Music perception deficits following acute neurological damage are thought to be rare. By a newly devised test battery of music-perception skills, however, we were able to identify among a group of 12 patients with acute hemispheric stroke six patients with music perception deficits (amusia) while six others had no such deficits. In addition we recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in a...