Listening to music often drives people to move along to the beat of that music. Past research has suggested that motor resources are recruited not just to produce a beat, but also to perceive a beat. The present study extends this correlational work and examines whether the motor system plays a functional role in beat perception using a dual-task behavioral paradigm. Wßhile performance on a bea...

Beat perception in music has been proposed to be a human universal that may have its origins in adaptive processes involving temporal entrainment such as social communication and interaction. We examined beat perception skills in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic, neurodevelopmental disorder. Musical interest and hypersociability are two prominent aspects of the WS phenotype al...

I propose that we study music and the brain for our student topic. Since music and the brain is a very broad topic, I suggest that we focus on multisensory integration between the auditory and motor modalities in the production and perception of music. In the following proposal I will give a background to the broad topic of music and the brain by briefly discussing the role that music plays in ...

The major mode conveys positive emotion, whereas the minor mode conveys negative emotion. However, previous studies have primarily focused on the emotions induced by Western music in Western participants. The influence of the musical mode (major or minor) on Chinese individuals' perception of Western music is unclear. In the present experiments, we investigated the effects of musical mode and h...

Timing cues are an essential feature of music. To understand how the brain gives rise to our experience of music we must appreciate how acoustical temporal patterns are integrated over the range of several seconds in order to extract global timing. In music perception, global timing comprises three distinct but often interacting percepts: temporal grouping, beat, and tempo. What directions may ...

Music perception and cognition is the area of cognitive psychology devoted to determining the mental mechanisms underlying our appreciation of music, and in this chapter we review the major findings. We begin with the perception and cognition of pitch, which is the most thoroughly researched area in the field. We then consider perceptual organization in music in the dimension of time, followed ...

Most music processing attempts to focus on one particular feature or structural element such as pitch, beat location, tempo, or genre. This hierarchical approach, in which music is separated into elements that are analyzed independently, is convenient for the scientific researcher, but is at odds with intuition about music perception. Music is interconnected at many levels, and the interplay of...

Representing one thing metaphorically-as something else is something that can occur in thought, imagination or perception. When a piece of music is heard as expressing some property F, some feature of the music is heard metaphorically-as F. The metaphor is exploited in the perception, rather than being represented. This account is developed and deployed to address some classical issues about mu...

Generative models of music are in need of performance and gesture additions, i.e. inclusions of subtle temporal and dynamic alterations, and gestures so as to render the music musical. While much of the research regarding music generation is based on music theory, the work presented here is based on the temporal perception, which is divided into three parts, the immediate (subchunk), the short-...