AIMS The study aims to determine the importance of music to adolescents in England, and investigates why they listen to and perform music. SAMPLE A total of 2465 adolescents (1149 males; 1266 females; 50 participants did not state their sex) between 13 and 14 years of age who were attending Year 9 at one of 22 secondary schools in the North Staffordshire region of England. METHOD A question...

People increasingly live their lives in an online setting. This observation is fundamental to a growing body of work that aims at describing, understanding and exploiting the abundance of online personal information. The strong potential of social media platforms for understanding people’s behavior has already played an important role in scientific literature and as we increasingly integrate so...

Mind wandering has been investigated in a variety of sustained attention tasks. In the present research, we investigated the role of mind wandering while listening to familiar or unfamiliar musical excerpts, and its effects on linguistic processing. Participants performed a lexical congruity task involving judging the semantic relatedness of a list of word pairs while listening to familiar clas...

Homophily, ranging from demographics to sentiments, breeds connections in social networks, either offline or online. However, with the prosperous growth of music streaming service, whether homophily exists in online music listening remains unclear. In this study, two online social networks of a same group of active users are established respectively in Netease Music and Weibo. Through presented...

After intensive, long-term musical training, the auditory system of a musician is specifically tuned to perceive musical sounds. We wished to find out whether a musician's auditory system also develops increased sensitivity to any sound of everyday life, experiencing them as noise. For this purpose, an online survey, including questionnaires on noise sensitivity, musical background, and listeni...

The aim of this study was to investigate how background auditory processing can affect other perceptual and cognitive processes as a function of stimulus content, style and emotional nature. Previous studies have offered contrasting evidence, and it has been recently shown that listening to music negatively affected concurrent mental processing in the elderly but not in young adults. To further...

One of my research goals is to enrich music listening experiences by deepening each person’s understanding of music. Music listening experiences depend on music-understanding abilities. Although the music-composing/performing abilities of musicians are often discussed, the music-understanding abilities of casual listeners have not been well discussed or studied. It is difficult, for example, to...

A controversy exists over the “Mozart effect,” which is the influence of Mozart’s classical music on spatial-reasoning abilities. There are contradicting studies of whether listening to Mozart’s music improves performance on spatial-reasoning tasks. This study tested the effect of classical music on performance and investigated the role of arousal and relaxation. Participants were randomly assi...

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...