Age-Related Patterns in Emotions Evoked by Music

We presented older and younger nonmusician adult listeners with (mostly) unfamiliar excerpts of film music. All listeners rated their emotional reaction using the Geneva Emotional Music Scale 9 (GEMS-9; Zentner, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2008), and also rated familiarity and liking. The GEMS-9 was factor-analyzed into 3 factors of Animacy, Valence, and Arousal. Although the 2 age groups liked the music equally well, and showed roughly the same pattern of responses to the different emotion categories, the younger group showed a wider range of emotional reactivity on all the factors. We found support for a type of positivity effect, in that older people found Happy music somewhat less happy than did younger people, but found Sad music much less sad than did younger people. Older people also rated Fearful music more positively than did younger people. We propose that the GEMS-9 scale is an efficient and effective device to collect evoked emotion data for a wide age range of listeners

Unsupervised statistical learning underpins computational, behavioural, and neural manifestations of musical expectation

The ability to anticipate forthcoming events has clear evolutionary advantages, and predictive successes or failures often entail significant psychological and physiological consequences. In music perception, the confirmation and violation of expectations are critical to the communication of emotion and aesthetic effects of a composition. Neuroscientific research on musical expectations has focused on harmony. Although harmony is important in Western tonal styles, other musical traditions, emphasizing pitch and melody, have been rather neglected. In this study, we investigated melodic pitch expectations elicited by ecologically valid musical stimuli by drawing together computational, behavioural, and electrophysiological evidence. Unlike rule-based models, our computational model acquires knowledge through unsupervised statistical learning of sequential structure in music and uses this knowledge to estimate the conditional probability (and information content) of musical notes. Unlike previous behavioural paradigms that interrupt a stimulus, we devised a new paradigm for studying auditory expectation without compromising ecological validity. A strong negative correlation was found between the probability of notes predicted by our model and the subjectively perceived degree of expectedness. Our electrophysiological results showed that low-probability notes, as compared to high-probability notes, elicited a larger (i) negative ERP component at a late time period (400–450 ms), (ii) beta band (14–30 Hz) oscillation over the parietal lobe, and (iii) long-range phase synchronization between multiple brain regions. Altogether, the study demonstrated that statistical learning produces information-theoretic descriptions of musical notes that are proportional to their perceived expectedness and are associated with characteristic patterns of neural activity

An Objective Basis for Music Theory: Information-Dynamic Analysis of Minimalist Music

We present evidence for a relationship between two objective measures of the information dynamics of music and points of structural importance in the music as analysed by an expert musicologist. Our approach is motivated by ecological validity: rather than taking musical stimuli and artificially simplifying them to make their study tractable, we have sought and found music which is appropriate to our study. We give a novel, detailed analysis of one piece, Glass’ Gradus, and show how the analysis corresponds with the information dynamics of the piece as heard. To show that this correspondence generalises, at least to music in a similar style by the same composer, we go on to analyse Glass’ Two Pages. We suggest that this research provides further evidence that information-dynamic modelling is a worthwhile approach to the study of music cognition and also has the potential, if automated, to be a powerful tool to increase objectivity in data-based music analysis

From learning to creativity: Identifying the behavioural and neural correlates of learning to predict human judgements of musical creativity

Human creativity is strongly linked to acquired knowledge. However, to date learning a new musical style and subsequent creativity have largely been studied in isolation. We introduced a novel experimental paradigm combining behavioural, electrophysiological, and computational methods, to examine the neural correlates of unfamiliar music learning, and to investigate how neural and computational measures can predict human creativity. We investigated music learning by training non-musicians (N = 40) on an artificial music grammar. Participants’ knowledge of the grammar was tested before and after three training sessions by assessing explicit recognition of the notes of the grammar, while additionally recording EEG. After each training session, participants created their own musical compositions, which were later evaluated by human experts. A computational model of auditory expectation was used to quantify the statistical properties of both the grammar and the compositions. Results showed that participants successfully learned the grammar. This was also reflected in the N100, P200, and P3a components, which were higher in response to incorrect than correct notes. Delta band power in response to grammatical notes during first exposure to the grammar positively correlated with learning, suggesting a potential encoding neural mechanism. On the other hand, better learning was associated with lower alpha and higher beta band power after training, potentially reflecting neural mechanisms of retrieval. Importantly, learning was a significant predictor of creativity, as judged by experts. There was also an inverted U-shaped relationship between percentage of correct intervals and creativity, as compositions with an intermediate proportion of correct intervals were associated with the highest creativity. Finally, the P200 in response to incorrect notes was predictive of creativity, suggesting a link between the neural correlates of learning, and creativity. Overall, our findings shed light on the neural mechanisms of learning an unfamiliar music grammar, as well as offering contributions to the associations between learning measures and human evaluation of creativity

The association between liking, learning and creativity in music

Aesthetic preference is intricately linked to learning and creativity. Previous studies have largely examined the perception of novelty in terms of pleasantness and the generation of novelty via creativity separately. The current study examines the connection between perception and generation of novelty in music; specifically, we investigated how pleasantness judgements and brain responses to musical notes of varying probability (estimated by a computational model of auditory expectation) are linked to learning and creativity. To facilitate learning de novo, 40 non-musicians were trained on an unfamiliar artificial music grammar. After learning, participants evaluated the pleasantness of the final notes of melodies, which varied in probability, while their EEG was recorded. They also composed their own musical pieces using the learned grammar which were subsequently assessed by experts. As expected, there was an inverted U-shaped relationship between liking and probability: participants were more likely to rate the notes with intermediate probabilities as pleasant. Further, intermediate probability notes elicited larger N100 and P200 at posterior and frontal sites, respectively, associated with prediction error processing. Crucially, individuals who produced less creative compositions preferred higher probability notes, whereas individuals who composed more creative pieces preferred notes with intermediate probability. Finally, evoked brain responses to note probability were relatively independent of learning and creativity, suggesting that these higher-level processes are not mediated by brain responses related to performance monitoring. Overall, our findings shed light on the relationship between perception and generation of novelty, offering new insights into aesthetic preference and its neural correlates

The role of attention in the perception of music structure

Existing models of the perception of musical structure mostly do not account for the fact that listeners’ hearings are known to vary substantially: the same passage can be interpreted differently by different listeners, or by the same listener at different times. Attention””the deliberate or unconscious focus a listener may place on a particular aspect of the music, such as its melody or rhythm””seems to play a role in the perception of structure, but whether it is an important cause of grouping preferences or the product of them is unclear. We study how paying attention to musical features (including harmony, melody, rhythm and timbre) influences grouping decisions. The experiments use composed musical stimuli exhibiting changes in particular features by design; some stimuli exhibit a single change, while others exhibit changes in different features at different times, leading to ambiguous segment boundaries and groupings.We first tested whether our subjects were able to correctly associate changes with musical features, to establish that their understanding of the stimuli was multidimensional and not purely holistic. Second, we tested whether an explicit instruction to focus on a feature increased the salience of boundaries marked by a change in that feature. Finally, we tested whether focusing on a feature would make groupings according to that feature preferable. To do so, we asked subjects to perform a distractor pattern-detection task that directed their attention to a particular feature. They then heard ambiguous stimuli, which had structure AAB and ABB with respect to two different features, and indicated their preferred grouping.The results showed that listeners were skilled at identifying changes, that correctly-directed attention boosted the salience of changes, and that focusing on a feature could indeed cause a listener to prefer one grouping over another. Whereas one’s level of musical training greatly impacted how one responded on the first two experiments, its impact was not significant in the third task, suggesting that attention is a general mechanism in guiding grouping preferences