Music is a highly dynamic stimulus, and consists of distinct acoustic features, such as pitch, rhythm and timbre. Neuroimaging studies highlight a hierarchy of brain networks involved in music perception. Psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) temporary disintegrate the normal hierarchy of brain functioning, and produce profound subjective effects, including enhanced music-e...

The relationship between the neurobiology of speech and music has been investigated for more than a century. There remains no widespread agreement regarding how (or to what extent) music perception utilizes the neural circuitry that is engaged in speech processing, particularly at the cortical level. Prominent models such as Patel's Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH) and K...

When human listeners are confronted with musical sounds, they rapidly and automatically orient themselves in the music. Even musically untrained listeners have an exceptional ability to make rapid judgments about music from very short examples, such as determining the music’s style, performer, beat, complexity, and emotional impact. However, there are presently no theories of music perception t...

A schema-based theory of music perception that describes the dynamic interaction between the musical event and the listener's knowledge of the underlying regularities in tonal music is proposed. Three properties of musical schema are evaluated in a recognition memory experiment: (1) The schema engages a subset of the abstract knowledge system that is determined by the predominant key of the mus...

An explorative study on cannabis and music perception is presented, conducted in a qualitative and quantitative way in a habituated setting. EEG-brainmapping data (4 subjects; rest–pre/post listening; 28 EEG traces; smoked cannabis containing 20 mg delta-9-THC with tobacco) were averaged and analyzed with a T-Test and a visual topographic schedule. Compared to pre-THC-rest and pre-THC-music, th...

Music mood has been recognized as an important access point for music and many online music services support browsing by mood. However, how people judge music mood has not been well studied in the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) domain. In particular, people's cultural background is often assumed to be an important factor in music mood perception, but this assumption has not been verified by ...

Background in music theory/analysis. Musical analysis focuses primarily on aspects of compositional design, mathematical/formal relations between musical materials or on musical theoretic forms and functions that have been established as musicologically pertinent through the centuries (e.g., traditional harmonic analysis, Schenkerian analysis). Listeners’ perception is not usually the explicit ...

Cochlear implants (CI) can restore part of the hearing of people with severe hearing loss, but these devices are far from perfect. Although this technology allows many users to perceive speech in a quiet room, it is not so successful for music perception. Many public spaces are awash with music, but many CI users do not find music enjoyable or reassuring. This brings multiple challenges to thei...

Dynamics is one of the principal means of expressivity in Western classical music. Still, preceding research on room acoustics has mostly neglected the contribution of music dynamics to the acoustic perception. This study investigates how the different concert hall acoustics influence the perception of varying music dynamics. An anechoic orchestra signal, containing a step in music dynamics, wa...

This study explored the role of culture in shaping music perception and memory. We tested the hypothesis that listeners demonstrate different patterns of activation associated with music processing-particularly right frontal cortex-when encoding and retrieving culturally familiar and unfamiliar stimuli, with the latter evoking broader activation consistent with more complex memory tasks. Subjec...