Musical enculturation is a complex, multifaceted process that includes the development of perceptual processing specialized for the pitch and rhythmic structures of the musical system in the culture, understanding of esthetic and expressive norms, and learning the pragmatic uses of music in different social situations. Here, we summarize the results of a study in which 6-month-old Western infan...

Today, among the best-performing audio-based music similarity measures are algorithms based on Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCCs). In these algorithms, each music track is modelled as a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) of MFCCs. The similarity between two tracks is computed by comparing their GMMs. One drawback of this approach is that the distance space obtained this way has some undesira...

Research on rap music has turned from a lack of attention to an alarmist examination of the genre. In the 1980s, rap music was seldom studied by scholars in the academic community (Dixon & Linz, 1997). Today rap has increasingly been considered a troubling form of musical expression related to a number of negative psychological outcomes (Barongan & Hall, 1995; Johnson, Adams, Ashburn & Reed, 19...

Music plays an important role in the socialization of children and adolescents. Popular music is present almost everywhere, and it is easily available through the radio, various recordings, the Internet, and new technologies, allowing adolescents to hear it in diverse settings and situations, alone or shared with friends. Parents often are unaware of the lyrics to which their children are liste...

During the past three decades, our knowledge about brain functions and its structures underlying music perception, performance, and emotions has accumulated relatively quickly. Cortical and subcortical brain areas involved in these musical functions have been identified using various techniques and paradigms. In the present talk, I will introduce recent findings revealing enhanced brain mechani...

The present study used a temporal bisection task to investigate whether music affects time estimation differently from a matched auditory neutral stimulus, and whether the emotional valence of the musical stimuli (i.e., sad vs. happy music) modulates this effect. The results showed that, compared to sine wave control music, music presented in a major (happy) or a minor (sad) key shifted the bis...

This study investigated the impact of pleasant and unpleasant classical music on experimental pain, compared to silence and to an auditory attention task. Pain measurements were assessed with the nociceptive flexion reflex (NFR), pain ratings, and the cold pressor test on 20 healthy nonmusician participants in a within-participant design. Results indicated that, in comparison to silence and to ...

Musical enculturation is a complex, multifaceted process that includes the development of perceptual processing specialized for the pitch and rhythmic structures of the musical system in the culture, understanding of esthetic and expressive norms, and learning the pragmatic uses of music in different social situations. Here, we summarize the results of a study in which 6-month-old Western infan...

Today, among the best-performing audio-based music similarity measures are algorithms based on Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCCs). In these algorithms, each music track is modelled as a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) of MFCCs. The similarity between two tracks is computed by comparing their GMMs. One drawback of this approach is that the distance space obtained this way has some undesira...

Collecting human judgments for music similarity evaluation has always been a difficult and time consuming task. This paper explores the viability of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) for collecting human judgments for audio music similarity evaluation tasks. We compared the similarity judgments collected from Evalutron6000 (E6K) and MTurk using the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange 2...