BACKGROUND Listening to music is amongst the most rewarding experiences for humans. Music has no functional resemblance to other rewarding stimuli, and has no demonstrated biological value, yet individuals continue listening to music for pleasure. It has been suggested that the pleasurable aspects of music listening are related to a change in emotional arousal, although this link has not been d...

Visual memory for scenes is surprisingly robust. We wished to examine whether an analogous ability exists in the auditory domain. Participants listened to a variety of sound clips and were tested on their ability to distinguish old from new clips. Stimuli ranged from complex auditory scenes (e.g., talking in a pool hall) to isolated auditory objects (e.g., a dog barking) to music. In some condi...

As the amount, availability and use of online music increase, music recommendation becomes an important field of research. Collaborative, content-based and case-based recommendation systems and their hybrids have been used for music recommendation. There are already a number of online music recommendation systems. Although specific user information, such as, demographic data, education and orig...

Most people are able to identify basic emotions expressed in music and experience affective reactions to music. But does music generally induce emotion? Does it elicit subjective feelings, physiological arousal, and motor reactions reliably in different individuals? In this interdisciplinary study, measurement of skin conductance, facial muscle activity, and self-monitoring were synchronized wi...

To investigate whether key processing precedes the appraisal of valence in music, participants listened to pairs of clips of same or different valence, played either in the same key or one semitone apart. They judged whether the second clip expressed the same emotion as the first one. Our predictions were confirmed: the response times obtained were shorter when both clips were played in the sam...

It is often said that music affects the impression of our environment and also our behavior. The author’s group previously investigated the effect of music on the performance and impression in the virtual environmental context of video games; racing games and Pachi-slot games (slot-machine type games). The results commonly showed that the “no music” condition provided the best performances, and...

Figure 1. Schematics of the three musical memory tasks and corresponding performance of PM and control subjects. Subjects listened to matched pairs of instrumental classical music and had to decide which excerpt sounded more familiar. Pieces were closely matched for musical character and instrumental line-up. White dots, Berlin Philharmonic string players; grey dots, active amateur musicians; e...

Note onsets in music are acoustic landmarks providing auditory cues that underlie the perception of more complex phenomena such as beat, rhythm, and meter. For naturalistic ongoing sounds a detailed view on the neural representation of onset structure is hard to obtain, since, typically, stimulus-related EEG signatures are derived by averaging a high number of identical stimulus presentations. ...