Music historians have observed informally that Western music became increasingly chromatic between roughly 1600 and 1900. This view is tested formally, and the results are shown to be consistent with the standard view. Music historians have similarly assumed that the music of major composers such as Mozart and Beethoven became increasingly chromatic over their respective lifetimes. Measurements...

In this paper we study the network structure in music and attempt to compose music artificially. Networks are constructed with nodes and edges corresponding to musical notes and their co-occurrences. We analyze sample compositions from Bach, Mozart, Chopin, as well as other types of music including Chinese pop music. We observe remarkably similar properties in all networks constructed from the ...

Music affects us all. We sing with it and dance to it. We accompany our most important rituals with music. We sing hymns to our Gods and pen anthems for our nations. There is no culture in the history of mankind that has not had music. Science has always tried to explain music, to tell us why and how it affects us so. Because music's influence is so subjective and the brain is so poorly underst...

This study examined classical music’s effect on test anxiety and exam performance in a college setting by randomizing students to (1) listen to Mozart while studying and taking an exam, (2) study and take the exam under usual conditions, or (3) choose between these two alternatives. We controlled for: prior exam performance, year in college, age, the amount of time ordinarily listening to class...

In this paper we study the network structure in music and attempt to compose music artificially. Networks are constructed with nodes and edges corresponding to musical notes and their co-occurrences. We analyze sample compositions from Bach, Mozart, Chopin, as well as other types of music including our local (Hong Kong) pop. We observe remarkably similar properties in all networks constructed f...

Music and medicine have always been closely related. This remains true even in huntergatherer cultures that are thought to reflect primitive human forms, as clarified by cultural anthropological and ethno-musicological studies (Lee & Daly, 2005; Merriam & Merriam, 1964). Interestingly, music has also been used for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders in hunter-gatherer cultures (Lee & Da...

This study attempted to determine the effect of background music while silent reading on Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension. The participants were 57 Iranian EFL learners between the ages of 14 and 16 in two 3rd grade high schoolclasses at pre-intermediate proficiency level. Before treatment,both experimental and control groups took a reading comprehension pretest. In the experimental ...

Debates on the origins of consonance and dissonance in music have a long history. While some scientists argue that consonance judgments are an acquired competence based on exposure to the musical-system-specific knowledge of a particular culture, others favor a biological explanation for the observed preference for consonance. Here we provide experimental confirmation that this preference plays...

Current software for Optical Music Recognition (OMR) produces outputs with too many errors that render it an unrealistic option for the production of a large corpus of symbolic music files. In this paper, we propose a system which applies image pre-processing techniques to scans of scores and combines the outputs of different commercial OMR programs when applied to images of different scores of...

"For the respect his works have commanded of musicians, and the popularity they have enjoyed among wider audiences, he is probably the most admired composer in the history of Western music." With this appraisal the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published in 1980, begins its magisterial article on Beethoven. More than a decade later one might not apply this statement to the Teuton...