An entrancing tale of cross-disciplinary bridge building and burning in ethnopsychophysiomusicology

Having a paper accepted for publication is challenging, even under the best of circumstances, as when reporting an incremental finding in a field that is one’s home discipline. The process becomes considerably more difficult when venturing into foreign disciplines in which methodological conventions and assumptions may differ from those one is familiar with. Provocative topics may further exacerbate the reticence of reviewers and editors to welcome cross-disciplinary research to a journal’s pages. Here, a pair of papers, one of which describes a study of possible physiological correlates of music- induced trance states, and the other which describes the challenging journey to get the research performed and published, provide a case study for examining whether epistemological divides can be bridged in the face of editorial obstinacy

Commentary on "The Processing of Pitch and Scale: An ERP Study of Musicians Trained Outside of the Western Musical System" by Bischoff Renninger, Wilson, and Donchin

Electrophysiological measures of expectancy violation processing by the brain, such as the P300 component of the event-related potential, have provided insight into the way in which humans with varying amounts of musical experience maintain representations of musical information, in particular tonal representations. Bischoff Renninger and colleagues (2006) seek to extend this work by examining the P300 in the context of the very interesting topic of cross-cultural music perception, using Western listeners who either have or have not undergone training in Javanese music. Their study highlights the myriad issues and complexities of experimental design and analysis that must be addressed if one is to conduct an ethologically compelling and interpretable study of musical context representations using brain responses as dependent measures

Online Detection of Tonal Pop-Out in Modulating Contexts

We investigated the spontaneous detection of wrong notes in a melody that modulated continuously through all 24 major and minor keys. Three variations of the melody were composed, each of which had distributed within it 96 test tones of the same pitch, for example, A2. Thus, the test tones would blend into some keys and pop out in others. Participants were not asked to detect or judge specific test tones; rather, they were asked to make a response whenever they heard a note that they thought sounded wrong or out of place. This task enabled us to obtain subjective measures of key membership in a listening situation that approximated a natural musical context. The frequency of observed wrong-note responses across keys matched previous tonal hierarchy results obtained using judgments about discrete probes following short contexts. When the test tones were nondiatonic notes in the present context they elicited a response, whereas when the test tones occupied a prominent position in the tonal hierarchy they were not detected. Our findings could also be explained by the relative salience of the test pitch chroma in short-term memory, such that when the test tone belonged to a locally improbable pitch chroma it was more likely to elicit a response. Regardless of whether the local musical context is shaped primarily by bottom-up or topdown influences, our findings establish a method for estimating the relative salience of individual test events in a continuous melody

Decrypt the groove: Audio features of groove and their importance for auditory-motor interactions

When we listen to music we often experience a state that can be described as ”˜in the groove’. This state is characterized by the wish or even the urge to move our body to the musical pulse (Janata et al., 2012; Madison, 2006). A previous study showed that high-groove music modulates the excitability of the motor system, whereas no effect of low-groove music was found (Stupacher et al., 2013). But which musical qualities contribute to the feeling of groove? To answer this question, we extracted audio features of 80 song clips with similar instrumentation and correlated them with subjective groove ratings. Song clips and groove ratings of 19 participants were taken from Janata et al. (2012). The following features were extracted with Matlab’s MIR toolbox (Lartillot & Toiviainen, 2007): RMS energy, spectral flux, sub-band flux, pulse clarity (”˜MaxAutocor’ and ”˜Attack’), and event density. Additionally we used the Genesis Loudness toolbox to compute measures of loudness using the loudness model of Glasberg and Moore (2002).Results showed that groove ratings correlated positively (all ps < .01) with following audio features: RMS energy (r = .37), RMS variability (r = .57), pulse clarity ”˜attack’ (r = .38), spectral flux (r = .34), sub-band flux of band 1 (0-50 Hz, r = .29), and band 2 (50-100 Hz, r = .29). Additionally, groove ratings correlated positively (all ps < .05) with band 3 (100-200 Hz, r = .23), band 5 (400-800 Hz, r = .23), and band 6 (800-1600 Hz, r = .24). The mean loudness of song clips did not affect groove ratings.Since energy in low frequency bands (Burger et al., 2012; Van Dyck et al., 2013), percussiveness (similar to pulse clarity ”˜attack’), and spectral flux (Burger et al., 2012) have previously been shown to affect motor movements, our results indicate that the experience of groove is a phenomenon predominantly based on auditory-motor interactions (cf. Janata et al., 2012; Stupacher et al., 2013).ReferencesBurger, B., Thompson, M. R., Luck, G., Saarikallio, S., & Toiviainen, P. (2012). Music moves us: Beat related musical features influence regularity of music-induced movement. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference in Music Perception and Cognition and the 8th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences for Music, Thessaloniki, Greece.Glasberg, B. R., & Moore, B. C. J. (2002). A model of loudness applicable to time-varying sounds. Journal Audio Engineering Society, 50, 331–342.Janata, P., Tomic, S. T., & Haberman, J. M. (2012). Sensorimotor coupling in music and the psychology of the groove. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 141, 54–75.Lartillot, O., & Toiviainen, P. (2007). A matlab toolbox for musical feature extraction from audio. In Proc. of the 10th Int. Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-07), Bordeaux, France.Madison, G. (2006). Experiencing groove induced by music: Consistency and phenomenology. Music Perception, 24, 201–208.Stupacher, J., Hove, M. J., Novembre, G., Schütz-Bosbach, S., &Keller, P. E. (2013). Musical groove modulates motor cortex excitability: a TMS investigation. Brain and Cognition, 82, 127–136.Van Dyck, E., Moelants, D., Demey, M., Deweppe, A., Coussement, P., & Leman, M. (2013). The impact of the bass drum on human dance movement. Music Perception, 30, 349–359

The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories

The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is regarded as a region of the brain that supports self-referential processes, including the integration of sensory information with self-knowledge and the retrieval of autobiographical information. I used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a novel procedure for eliciting autobiographical memories with excerpts of popular music dating to one's extended childhood to test the hypothesis that music and autobiographical memories are integrated in the MPFC. Dorsal regions of the MPFC (Brodmann area 8/9) were shown to respond parametrically to the degree of autobiographical salience experienced over the course of individual 30 s excerpts. Moreover, the dorsal MPFC also responded on a second, faster timescale corresponding to the signature movements of the musical excerpts through tonal space. These results suggest that the dorsal MPFC associates music and memories when we experience emotionally salient episodic memories that are triggered by familiar songs from our personal past. MPFC acted in concert with lateral prefrontal and posterior cortices both in terms of tonality tracking and overall responsiveness to familiar and autobiographically salient songs. These findings extend the results of previous autobiographical memory research by demonstrating the spontaneous activation of an autobiographical memory network in a naturalistic task with low retrieval demands

A linear oscillator model predicts dynamic temporal attention and pupillary entrainment to rhythmic patterns

Rhythm is a ubiquitous feature of music that induces specific neural modes of processing. In this paper, we assess the potential of a stimulus-driven linear oscillator model (Tomic & Janata, 2008) to predict dynamic attention to complex musical rhythms on an instant-by-instant basis. We use perceptual thresholds and pupillometry as attentional indices against which to test our model pre- dictions. During a deviance detection task, participants listened to continuously looping, multi- instrument, rhythmic patterns, while being eye-tracked. Their task was to respond anytime they heard an increase in intensity (dB SPL). An adaptive thresholding algorithm adjusted deviant in- tensity at multiple probed temporal locations throughout each rhythmic stimulus. The oscillator model predicted participants’ perceptual thresholds for detecting deviants at probed locations, with a low temporal salience prediction corresponding to a high perceptual threshold and vice versa. A pupil dilation response was observed for all deviants. Notably, the pupil dilated even when partic- ipants did not report hearing a deviant. Maximum pupil size and resonator model output were sig- nificant predictors of whether a deviant was detected or missed on any given trial. Besides the evoked pupillary response to deviants, we also assessed the continuous pupillary signal to the rhythmic patterns. The pupil exhibited entrainment at prominent periodicities present in the stimuli and followed each of the different rhythmic patterns in a unique way. Overall, these results repli- cate previous studies using the linear oscillator model to predict dynamic attention to complex auditory scenes and extend the utility of the model to the prediction of neurophysiological signals, in this case the pupillary time course; however, we note that the amplitude envelope of the acoustic patterns may serve as a similarly useful predictor. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to show entrainment of pupil dynamics by demonstrating a phase relationship between musical stimuli and the pupillary signal

Music recognition in frontotemporal lobar degeneration and Alzheimer disease

Objective—To compare music recognition in patients with frontotemporal dementia, semantic dementia, Alzheimer disease, and controls and to evaluate the relationship between music recognition and brain volume. Background—Recognition of familiar music depends on several levels of processing. There are few studies about how patients with dementia recognize familiar music. Methods—Subjects were administered tasks that assess pitch and melody discrimination, detection of pitch errors in familiar melodies, and naming of familiar melodies. Results—There were no group differences on pitch and melody discrimination tasks. However, patients with semantic dementia had considerable difficulty naming familiar melodies and also scored the lowest when asked to identify pitch errors in the same melodies. Naming familiar melodies, but not other music tasks, was strongly related to measures of semantic memory. Voxelbased morphometry analysis of brain MRI showed that difficulty in naming songs was associated with the bilateral temporal lobes and inferior frontal gyrus, whereas difficulty in identifying pitch errors in familiar melodies correlated with primarily the right temporal lobe. Conclusions—The results support a view that the anterior temporal lobes play a role in familiar melody recognition, and that musical functions are affected differentially across forms of dementia

Urges to Move and Other Motivation States for Physical Activity in Clinical and Healthy Populations: A Scoping Review Protocol

[EN] Motivation for bodily movement, physical activity and exercise varies from moment to moment. These motivation states may be “affectively-charged,” ranging from instances of lower tension (e.g., desires, wants) to higher tension (e.g., cravings and urges). Currently, it is not known how often these states have been investigated in clinical populations (e.g., eating disorders, exercise dependence/addiction, Restless Legs Syndrome, diabetes, obesity) vs. healthy populations (e.g., in studies of motor control; groove in music psychology). The objective of this scoping review protocol is to quantify the literature on motivation states, to determine what topical areas are represented in investigations of clinical and healthy populations, and to discover pertinent details, such as instrumentation, terminology, theories, and conceptual models, correlates and mechanisms of action. Iterative searches of scholarly databases will take place to determine which combination of search terms (e.g., “motivation states” and “physical activity”; “desire to be physically active,” etc.) captures the greatest number of relevant results. Studies will be included if motivation states for movement (e.g., desires, urges) are specifically measured or addressed. Studies will be excluded if referring to motivation as a trait. A charting data form was developed to scan all relevant documents for later data extraction. The primary outcome is simply the extent of the literature on the topic. Results will be stratified by population/condition. This scoping review will unify a diverse literature, which may result in the creation of unique models or paradigms that can be utilized to better understand motivation for bodily movement and exercise.GA was supported by a fellowship from the Office of Academic Affiliations at the United States Veterans Health Administration, a Robert E. Leet and Clara Guthrie Patterson Trust Mentored Research Award, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee, and American Heart Association Grant #852679 (GA, 2021–2024).We would like to thank Melissa Eden, Ph.D. (Hanover College, IN) for her valuable assistance in refining aspects of the search strategy. Khristdman Cavalcanti helped with technical aspects of the study. Sunao Akashi Slayton, PharmD BCOP (Smilow Cancer Hospital, Yale – New Haven Hospital, CT) evaluated clinical information and provided nomenclatur

Android application for playing of web radios

The goal of this work is to gain tool, for playing internet radios on the Android platform. Firstly I made a research, where I was looking for current solutions. After that I analysed theirs lacks. After the analysis and consultation with PLAY.CZ a. s. company (which owns server play.cz) I designed new solution. The soliton is native application for the Android platform written in Java programing language. At practical part of this work I described the implementation of the application