Music listening and music making activities are powerful tools to engage multisensory and motor networks, induce changes within these networks, and foster links between distant, but functionally related brain regions with continued and life-long musical practice. These multimodal effects of music together with music's ability to tap into the emotion and reward system in the brain can be used to...

The present study reexamined the mood-mediation hypothesis for explaining background-music-dependent effects in free recall. Experiments 1 and 2 respectively examined tempo- and tonality-dependent effects in free recall, which had been used as evidence for the mood-mediation hypothesis. In Experiments 1 and 2, undergraduates (n = 75 per experiment) incidentally learned a list of 20 unrelated wo...

Emerging research over the last decade has shown that long-term music training and skill learning can be a strong stimulator for neuroplastic changes in the developing as well as adult brain. Making music places unique demands on the nervous system, leading to strong coupling of perception and action mediated by sensory, motor, and multimodal integrative regions distributed throughout the brain...

Some people experience pleasant emotion when listening to sad music. Therefore, they can enjoy listening to it. In the current study, we aimed to investigate such apparently paradoxical emotional mechanisms and focused on the influence of individuals' trait empathy, which has been reported to associate with emotional responses to sad music and a preference for it. Eighty-four elementary school ...

Automatic music classification is essential for implementing efficient music information retrieval systems; meanwhile, it may shed light on the process of human’s music perception. This paper describes our work on the classification of folk music from different countries based on their monophonic melodies using hidden Markov models. Music corpora of Irish, German and Austrian folk music in vari...

In this paper, a framework for interactive sonification is introduced. It is argued that electroacoustic composition techniques can provide a methodology for structuring and presenting multivariable data through sound. Furthermore, an embodied music cognition driven interface is applied to provide an interactive exploration of the generated music-based output. The motivation and theoretical fou...

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 demonstration illustrates how the methods developed in the MIR community can be used to provide real-time feedback to music users. By creating a genre classifier plugin for a popular media player we present users with relevant information as they play their songs. The plug-in can furthermore be used as a data collection platform. After informed consent from a selected set of users the plug...

In this paper we present an analysis of the suitability of four different feature sets which are currently employed to represent music signals in the context of the automatic music genre classification. To such an aim, feature selection is carried out through genetic algorithms, and it is applied to multiple feature vectors generated from different segments of the music signal. The feature sets...