Mounting evidence links the enjoyment of music to brain areas implicated in emotion and the dopaminergic reward system. In particular, dopamine release in the ventral striatum seems to play a major role in the rewarding aspect of music listening. Striatal dopamine also influences reinforcement learning, such that subjects with greater dopamine efficacy learn better to approach rewards while tho...

We introduce the Music Listening Histories Dataset (MLHD), a large-scale collection of music listening events assembled from more than 27 billion time-stamped logs extracted from Last.fm. The logs are organized in the form of listening histories per user, and have been conveniently preprocessed and cleaned. Attractive features of the MLHD are the self-declared metadata provided by users at the ...

Close listening, perhaps the most important skill in music education is seldom practiced in the 21 st century. The ability to listen, understand, communicate, and interpret what you hear is central to education in general and transferable to many life situations and modes of communication. For this reason, listening is the primary focus of most first year post-secondary music history courses. I...

OBJECTIVE This study investigated whether young people's substance use and aggressive behaviors are related to their listening to music containing messages of substance use and violence. METHOD Using self-administered questionnaires, data were collected from a sample of community-college students, ages 15-25 years (N=1056; 57% female). A structural equation model (maximum likelihood method) w...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The mechanism underlying the perception of music has been the subject of study for many years. We investigated the role of the anterior portion of the temporal lobes in the perception of music in nonmusicians by use of positron emission tomography (PET). METHODS We used the subtraction technique for PET to investigate the role of the anterior portion of the bilateral te...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of music on pain for home-dwelling persons with dementia. A quasiexperimental design was used. Fifteen subjects listened to their preferred music for 30 minutes before peak agitation time, for 2 days per week, followed by no music for 2 weeks. The process was repeated once. The finding of this study showed that mean pain levels after liste...

People with Absolute Pitch can categorize musical pitches without a reference, whereas people with tone-color synesthesia can see colors when hearing music. Both of these special populations perceive music in an above-normal manner. In this study we asked whether AP possessors and tone-color synesthetes might recruit specialized neural mechanisms during music listening. Furthermore, we tested t...

The signal processing and fitting methods used for hearing aids have mainly been designed to optimize the intelligibility of speech. Little attention has been paid to the effectiveness of hearing aids for listening to music. Perhaps as a consequence, many hearing-aid users complain that they are not satisfied with their hearing aids when listening to music. This issue inspired the Internet-base...

The claim that listening to extreme music causes anger, and expressions of anger such as aggression and delinquency have yet to be substantiated using controlled experimental methods. In this study, 39 extreme music listeners aged 18-34 years were subjected to an anger induction, followed by random assignment to 10 min of listening to extreme music from their own playlist, or 10 min silence (co...