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...

Mounting evidence links the enjoyment of music to brain areas implicated in emotion and the dopaminergic reward system. In particular, dopamine release in the ventral striatum seems to play a major role in the rewarding aspect of music listening. Striatal dopamine also influences reinforcement learning, such that subjects with greater dopamine efficacy learn better to approach rewards while tho...

Close listening, perhaps the most important skill in music education is seldom practiced in the 21 st century. The ability to listen, understand, communicate, and interpret what you hear is central to education in general and transferable to many life situations and modes of communication. For this reason, listening is the primary focus of most first year post-secondary music history courses. I...

We introduce the Music Listening Histories Dataset (MLHD), a large-scale collection of music listening events assembled from more than 27 billion time-stamped logs extracted from Last.fm. The logs are organized in the form of listening histories per user, and have been conveniently preprocessed and cleaned. Attractive features of the MLHD are the self-declared metadata provided by users at the ...

OBJECTIVE This study investigated whether young people's substance use and aggressive behaviors are related to their listening to music containing messages of substance use and violence. METHOD Using self-administered questionnaires, data were collected from a sample of community-college students, ages 15-25 years (N=1056; 57% female). A structural equation model (maximum likelihood method) w...