Rhythmic skills are natural and widespread in the general population. The majority can track the beat of music and move along with it. These abilities are meaningful from a cognitive standpoint given their tight links with prominent motor and cognitive functions such as language and memory. When rhythmic skills are challenged by brain damage or neurodevelopmental disorders, remediation strategi...

The forty-nine Studies for player piano by Conlon Nancarrow are pervaded by the use of mathematical ratios, particularly ratios based on intervals found in the justly-tuned scale. Nancarrow found a remarkable variety of ways in which to deploy ratios in his Studies. The most obvious and pervasive use is in the establishment of different simultaneous tempos related by ratios as simple as 3:4 to ...

In Indian classical music, ragas constitute specific combinations of tonic intervals potentially capable of evoking distinct emotions. A raga composition is typically presented in two modes, namely, alaap and gat. Alaap is the note by note delineation of a raga bound by a slow tempo, but not bound by a rhythmic cycle. Gat on the other hand is rendered at a faster tempo and follows a rhythmic cy...

Dancing and singing to music involve auditory-motor coordination and have been essential to our human culture since ancient times. Although scholars have been trying to understand the evolutionary and developmental origin of music, early human developmental manifestations of auditory-motor interactions in music have not been fully investigated. Here we report limb movements and vocalizations in...

Psychophysiological studies with music have not examined what exactly in the music might be responsible for the observed physiological phenomena. The authors explored the relationships between 11 structural features of 16 musical excerpts and both self-reports of felt pleasantness and arousal and different physiological measures (respiration, skin conductance, heart rate). Overall, the relation...

The processing of rhythmic events in music is influenced by the induced metrical structure. Two mechanisms underlying this may be temporal attending and temporal prediction. Temporal fluctuations in attentional resources may influence the processing of rhythmic events by heightening sensitivity at metrically strong positions. Temporal predictions may attenuate responses to events that are highl...

Abstract Shaping events at the microlevel of rhythm is an important aspect many groove-based musics. In present study, we explore interconnectedness musical parameters such as timing, attack shape, timbre and relative intensity in creating groove through investigating musicians producers’ discourse five genres (jazz, samba, electronic dance music, hip-hop traditional Scandinavian fiddle music)....

The functioning brain behaves like one highly-structured, coherent, informational field. It can be popularly described as a "coherent ball of energy", making the idea of a local highly-structured quantum field that carries the consciousness very appealing. If that is so, the structure of the experience of music might be a quite unique window into a hidden quantum reality of the brain, and even ...

Music consists of sounds organized in time. These sounds can be understood from a rhythmic, timbral, or harmonic point of view, and they can be understood on different time scales, going from the very short (note onsets) to the medium (grouping), to the large scale with musical form. Note onsets, grouping and form are common musical terms, which can be compared to different aspects of audition,...

Music can trigger emotional responses in a more direct way than any other stimulus. In particular, music-evoked pleasure involves brain networks that are part of the reward system. Furthermore, rhythmic music stimulates the basal ganglia and may trigger involuntary movements to the beat. In the present study, we created a continuously playing rhythmic, dance floor-like composition where the amb...