While listening to music, a significant high degree of phase synchrony in the gamma frequency range globally distributed over the brain was found in subjects with musical training (musicians) compared with subjects with no such training (non-musicians). No significant differences were found in other EEG frequency bands. Listening to neutral text did not produce any significant differences in th...

Pianists often report that pure listening to a well-trained piece of music can involuntarily trigger the respective finger movements. We designed a magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiment to compare the motor activation in pianists and nonpianists while listening to piano pieces. For pianists, we found a statistically significant increase of activity above the region of the contralateral motor ...

This paper aims to motivate and demonstrate how widely available environmental data can be exploited to allow organization, structuring and exploration of music collections by personal listening contexts. We describe a logging plug-in for music players that automatically records data about the listening context and discuss possible extensions for more sophisticated context logging. Based on dat...

Why do people sing to babies? Human infants are relatively altricial and need their parents' attention to survive. Infant-directed song may constitute a signal of that attention. In Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS), a rare disorder of genomic imprinting, genes from chromosome 15q11-q13 that are typically paternally expressed are unexpressed, which results in exaggeration of traits that reduce offspr...

BACKGROUND The problem of the potential impact of personal music players on the auditory system remains an open question. The purpose of the present study was to investigate, by means of otoacoustic emissions (OAEs), whether listening to music on a personal player affected auditory function. MATERIAL/METHODS A group of 20 normally hearing adults was exposed to music played on a personal playe...

Psychological and aesthetic theories predict that music is appreciated at optimal, peak levels of familiarity and complexity, and that appreciation of music exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship with familiarity as well as complexity. Because increased familiarity conceivably leads to improved processing and less perceived complexity, we test whether there is an interaction between familia...

Why do people listen to music? Over the past several decades, scholars have proposed numerous functions that listening to music might fulfill. However, different theoretical approaches, different methods, and different samples have left a heterogeneous picture regarding the number and nature of musical functions. Moreover, there remains no agreement about the underlying dimensions of these func...