The music of Richard Wagner tends to generate very diverse judgments indicative of the complex relationship between listeners and the sophisticated musical structures in Wagner's music. This paper presents findings from two listening experiments using the music from Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen that explores musical as well as individual listener parameters to better understand how listener...

Electroencephalography (EEG) was used in a cross-cultural music study investigating phrase boundary perception. Chinese and German musicians performed a cultural categorization task under Chinese and Western music listening conditions. Western music was the major subject for both groups of musicians, while Chinese music was familiar to Chinese subjects only. By manipulating the presence of paus...

Music is the art of thinking in sounds.1 With its power to evoke and communicate emotions it has long intrigued philosophers, but only recently has it claimed the attention of neuroscientists. Even today, there are some who see it as a mere epiphenomenon.2 Many others, however, are exploring the neurological foundations of music perception. In this review article we focus on mechanisms by which...

Music evokes a powerful emotional response, yet it is very difficult to describe or explain why we like certain pieces of music and dislike others. As an example of a subjective judgment it is doubly obscure: firstly because it varies so much between individuals (each of whom is very sure about their own beliefs), and secondly because it is based, at least in part, upon our perception of the pa...

Auditory training has been shown to significantly improve cochlear implant (CI) users' speech and music perception. However, it is unclear whether posttraining gains in performance were due to improved auditory perception or to generally improved attention, memory, and/or cognitive processing. In this study, speech and music perception, as well as auditory and visual memory, were assessed in 10...

The perception of accents in melodies was explored in a listening experiment with pop music melodies. 29 subjects with long-term music experience listened to short melodies presented as audio excerpts from pop tunes or as single line MIDI melodies. Their task was to rate every note of every melody for their perceived accent value on a 3-pointscale. The ratings were checked for consistency. The ...

This study investigates whether congenital amusia (an inability to perceive music from birth) also impairs the perception of musical qualities that do not rely on fine-grained pitch discrimination. We established that G.G. (64-year-old male, age-typical hearing) met the criteria of congenital amusia and demonstrated music-specific deficits (e.g., language processing, intonation, prosody, fine-g...

The perception of music depends on many culture-specific factors, but is also constrained by properties of the auditory system. This has been best characterized for those aspects of music that involve pitch. Pitch sequences are heard in terms of relative as well as absolute pitch. Pitch combinations give rise to emergent properties not present in the component notes. In this review we discuss t...

Following publication of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, evidence has accumulated for the influence of language experience on perception. There are thousands of languages in the world which make use of pitch patterns to construct words much as vowels and consonants are used, among which Mandarin (a.k.a. Putonghua) is a typical tone language. This study examines the effect of language experience (to...

on the perception of speech in many different environments, hearing healthcare providers may sometimes overlook other signals, such as music, that may be very meaningful to the patient. Because hearing instruments are designed to focus on speech, music lovers and musicians are often disappointed by the sound quality of music. Settings and electroacoustic characteristics of hearing instruments m...