Musical emotions, such as happiness and sadness, have been investigated using instrumental music devoid of linguistic content. However, pop and rock, the most common musical genres, utilize lyrics for conveying emotions. Using participants' self-selected musical excerpts, we studied their behavior and brain responses to elucidate how lyrics interact with musical emotion processing, as reflected...

This study examined the effects of a school-based instrumental training program on the development of verbal and visual memory skills in primary school children. Participants either took part in a music program with weekly 45 min sessions of instrumental lessons in small groups at school, or they received extended natural science training. A third group of children did not receive additional tr...

The present paper reviews some investigations of intonation in instrumental and vocal music practise. Certain listening experiments are also reported. The significance of octave stretch and vibrato to tuning in music practise is discussed as is also the importance of frequency ratios that can be expressed by small integers.

Phrasing facilitates the organization of auditory information and is central to speech and music. Not surprisingly, aspects of changing intensity, rhythm, and pitch are key determinants of musical phrases and their boundaries in instrumental note-based music. Different kinds of speech (such as tone- vs. stress-languages) share these features in different proportions and form an instructive comp...

All human societies have music with a rhythmic "beat," typically produced with percussive instruments such as drums. The set of capacities that allows humans to produce and perceive music appears to be deeply rooted in human biology, but an understanding of its evolutionary origins requires cross-taxa comparisons. We show that drumming by palm cockatoos (Probosciger aterrimus) shares the key ru...

Music jamming is an extremely difficult task for musical novices. Trying to extend this meaningful and highly enjoyable activity to a larger recipient group, we present WIJAM, a mobile application for an ad-hoc group of musical novices to perform improvisation along with a music master. In this “master-players” paradigm, the master offers a music backing, orchestrates the musical flow, and give...

For over half a century, musicologists and linguists have suggested that the prosody of a culture's native language is reflected in the rhythms and melodies of its instrumental music. Testing this idea requires quantitative methods for comparing musical and spoken rhythm and melody. This study applies such methods to the speech and music of England and France. The results reveal that music refl...

conclusions music therapy is a safe, simple, inexpensive, and non-invasive nursing intervention, which can significantly alleviate patients’ anxiety during coronary angioplasty. patients and methods this was a randomized controlled trial, conducted in the catheterization laboratory unit of baqiyatallah hospital, in tehran, iran. a sample of 64 patients, who were planned to undergo coronary angi...