Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky recently reported that exposure to brief periods of music by Mozart produced a temporary increase in performance on tasks taken from the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale-IV. The present study examined whether this effect occurred in performance on a backwards digit span task. In a within-subjects design 36 undergraduates were exposed to 10-min. periods of Mozart music, a...

Although Constraint Programming (CP) is considered a useful tool for tackling combinatorial problems, its lack of flexibility when dealing with uncertainties and preferences is still a matter of research. Several formal frameworks for soft constraints have been proposed within the CP community: all of them seem to be theoretically solid, but few practical implementations exist. In this paper we...

The most famous members of the Mozart family were musicians - not physicians. In spite of that, the family correspondence of the Mozarts contains much noteworthy information on 18th century medicine. It comes mainly from Leopold, the famous composer's father, which is why the vast majority of the medical data presented in the letters cannot be found in the popular editions of the correspondence...

Although there is growing evidence that breathing is modulated by various motor and cognitive activities, the nature of breathing in musical performance has been little explored. The present study examined the temporal breath pattern in piano performance, aiming to elucidate how breath timing is related to musical organization/events and performance. In the experiments, the respiration of 15 pr...

Debates on the origins of consonance and dissonance in music have a long history. While some scientists argue that consonance judgments are an acquired competence based on exposure to the musical-system-specific knowledge of a particular culture, others favor a biological explanation for the observed preference for consonance. Here we provide experimental confirmation that this preference plays...

OBJECTIVE The rate of weight gain in preterm infants who are exposed to music seems to improve. A potential mechanism could be increased metabolic efficiency; therefore, we conducted this study to test the hypothesis that music by Mozart reduces resting energy expenditure (REE) in growing healthy preterm infants. DESIGN. A prospective, randomized clinical trial with crossover was conducted in 2...

A variety of tools exist in hardware and software for mixing dance music. These work by estimating the “beats-perminute” count of music with heavy beats. These tools aid a DJ in finding the appropriate speed change and time shift to smoothly combine or transition between two pieces of music. In this work, we present a method for finding these alignments and combining a wider class of songs with...

We present a study on using a Mnemonic Self-Organizing Map for clustering a very homogeneous collection of music. In particular, we create a map containing the complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. We study and analyze the clustering capabilities of the SOM on this very focused collection. We furthermore present a web-based application for exploring the map and accessing the music it repre...

This thesis presents constraint propagation in Mozart which is based on computational agents called propagators. The thesis designs, implements, and evaluates propagator-based propagation engines. A propagation engine is split up in generic propagation services and domain specific domain solvers which are connected by a constraint programming interface. Propagators use filters to perform constr...

PURPOSE To evaluate the performance of automated perimetry of elderly subjects naïve to AP after listening to a Mozart sonata. INTRODUCTION Automated perimetry (AP) is a psychophysical test used to assess visual fields in patients with neurological disorders and glaucoma. In a previous study, Fiorelli et al. showed that young subjects who listened to a Mozart sonata prior to undergoing AP per...