Individual differences in the strength of music preference are among the most intricate psychological phenomena. While one person gets by very well without music, another person needs to listen to music every day and spends a lot of temporal and financial resources on listening to music, attending concerts, or buying concert tickets. Where do these differences come from? The hypothesis presente...

OBJECTIVE Music, being a multifaceted stimulus evolving at multiple timescales, modulates brain function in a manifold way that encompasses not only the distinct stages of auditory perception, but also higher cognitive processes like memory and appraisal. Network theory is apparently a promising approach to describe the functional reorganization of brain oscillatory dynamics during music listen...

The effect of concurrent music on gait was investigated amongst Parkinson " s disease (PD) patients and age-matched control subjects. Ten people (mean age 66.6 ± 6.5 years) with idiopathic Parkinson " s disease and ten healthy age-matched (mean age 65.4 ± 6.3 years) control subjects completed steady state gait, dual task and obstacle negotiation trials in two differing test conditions; no music...

We recapitulate a series of studies of the perceptual role of low levels of background noise in quiet spaces for music listening. These include structured listening exercises in two quiet music rooms – Jordan Hall in Boston and the EMPAC Concert Hall in Troy, NY – wherein background noise levels were electronically manipulated while subjects listened critically to live and recorded music in the...

We examine whether the familiarity of thematic music affects the degree to which concepts associated with the music are activated after listening to the music and subsequently affect generation task performance. In two experiments, participants listened to one of two excerpts of war-themed music varying in familiarity either before or after completing Amabile’s (1985) American Haiku task. Haiku...

Personality traits are increasingly being incorporated in systems to provide a personalized experience to the user. Current work focusing on identifying the relationship between personality and behavior, preferences, and needs o‰en do not take into account di‚erences between age groups. With music playing an important role in our lives, di‚erences between age groups may be especially prevalent....

The aim of the research was to establish the infl uence of techno music on the reaction times of participants in the research. Our hypothesis was that stimulating music, such as techno, would shorten the participants’ reaction time to visual stimuli while, without music, the reaction time would be longer. To defi ne the reaction time to expected light stimuli we used a special apparatus for mea...

Although the neural underpinnings of music cognition have been widely studied in the last 5 years, relatively little is known about the neuroscience underlying emotional reactions that music induces in listeners. Many people spend a significant amount of time listening to music, and its emotional power is assumed but not well understood. Here, we use functional and effective connectivity analys...

We performed an experimental single-blind crossover design study in a postanaesthesia care unit (PACU): (i) to test the hypothesis that patients will experience a higher degree of wellbeing if they listen to music compared to ordinary PACU sounds during their early postoperative care, (ii) to determine if there is a difference over time, and (iii) to evaluate the importance of the acoustic envi...