Musicology students are engaged with music on an academic level and usually have an extensive musical background. They have a considerable knowledge of music history and theory and listening to music may be regarded as one of their primary occupations. Taken together, these factors qualify them as ≫expert listeners≪, who may be expected to exhibit a specific profile of musical taste: interest i...

sociomusicology (sociology of music) as a branch of art sociology aims at identifying the relationships between music and social structures. the main question faced by the sociologists of music is how the conditions of a given social system affect the dominant music style of a culture or the subculture of a group and how the public tendencies for a specific music style affect a social system an...

While there is broad consensus about the structural similarities between language and music, comparably less attention has been devoted to semantic correspondences between these two ubiquitous manifestations of human culture. We have investigated the relations between music and a narrow and bounded domain of semantics: the words and concepts referring to taste sensations. In a recent work, we f...

Here we investigate associations between complex auditory and complex taste stimuli. A novel piece of music was composed and recorded in four different styles of musical articulation to reflect the four basic tastes groups (sweet, sour, salty, bitter). In Experiment 1, participants performed above chance at pairing the music clips with corresponding taste words. Experiment 2 uses multidimension...

In this thesis we present history-based collaborative filtering, a novel approach to recommend unfamiliar music to users which them is nevertheless going to suit, in order to broaden theirs horizon of musical familiarity. We refer to people with similar music taste which experienced musical transitions when generating a new recommendation, and show that the results are accurate in terms of musi...

People intuitively match basic tastes to sounds of different pitches, and the matches that they make tend to be consistent across individuals. It is, though, not altogether clear what governs such crossmodal mappings between taste and auditory pitch. Here, we assess whether variations in taste intensity influence the matching of taste to pitch as well as the role of emotion in mediating such cr...