Abstract

Reading, much like music listening, is an immersive experience that transports readers while taking them on an emotional journey. Listening to complementary music has the potential to amplify the reading experience, especially when the music is stylistically cohesive and emotionally relevant. In this paper, we propose the first fully automatic method to build a dense soundtrack for books, which can play high-quality instrumental music for the entirety of the reading duration. Our work employs a unique text processing and music weaving pipeline that determines the context and emotional composition of scenes in a chapter. This allows our method to identify and play relevant excerpts from the soundtrack of the book’s movie adaptation. By relying on the movie composer’s craftsmanship, our book soundtracks include expert-made motifs and other scene-specific musical characteristics. We validate the design decisions of our approach through a perceptual study. Our readers note that the book soundtrack greatly enhanced their reading experience, due to high immersiveness granted via uninterrupted and style-consistent music, and a heightened emotional state attained via high precision emotion and scene context recognition.

Abstract

Movement is a universal response to music, with dance often taking place in social settings. Although previous work has suggested that socially relevant information, such as personality and gender, are encoded in dance movement, the generalizability of previous work is limited. The current study aims to decode dancers’ gender, personality traits, and music preference from music‑induced movements. We propose a method that predicts such individual difference from free dance movements, and demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method by using two data sets collected using different musical stimuli. In addition, we introduce a novel measure to explore the relative importance of different joints in predicting individual differences. Results demonstrated near perfect classification of gender, and notably high prediction of personality and music preferences. Furthermore, learned models demonstrated generalizability across datasets highlighting the importance of certain joints in intrinsic movement patterns specific to individual differences. Results further support theories of embodied music cognition and the role of bodily movement in musical experiences by demonstrating the influence of gender, personality, and music preferences on embodied responses to heard music.

Abstract

The experience often described as feeling moved, understood chiefly as a social-relational emotion with social bonding functions, has gained significant research interest in recent years. Although listening to music often evokes what people describe as feeling moved, very little is known about the appraisals or musical features contributing to the experience. In the present study, we investigated experiences of feeling moved in response to music using a continuous rating paradigm. A total of 415 US participants completed an online experiment where they listened to seven moving musical excerpts and rated their experience while listening. Each excerpt was randomly coupled with one of seven rating scales (perceived sadness, perceived joy, feeling moved or touched, sense of connection, perceived beauty, warmth [in the chest], or chills) for each participant. The results revealed that musically evoked experiences of feeling moved are associated with a similar pattern of appraisals, physiological sensations, and trait correlations as feeling moved by videos depicting social scenarios (found in previous studies). Feeling moved or touched by both sadly and joyfully moving music was associated with experiencing a sense of connection and perceiving joy in the music, while perceived sadness was associated with feeling moved or touched only in the case of sadly moving music. Acoustic features related to arousal contributed to feeling moved only in the case of joyfully moving music. Finally, trait empathic concern was positively associated with feeling moved or touched by music. These findings support the role of social cognitive and empathic processes in music listening, and highlight the social-relational aspects of feeling moved or touched by music.

Abstract

Music listening is a great resource for mental well-being, pleasure, and self-regulation, but it may also be maladaptive. Depression, for instance, has been shown to relate to music use that is characterized by rumination, avoidance, and mood worsening. However, we know little of the role of individual differences in such maladaptive music use. Hence, this study focused on examining the role of personality, empathic traits, emotional contagion, and the types of musical reward as predictors of maladaptive music listening. Participants (N=318) answered an online survey comprising measures for the abovementioned traits in addition to the Healthy-Unhealthy Music Scale (HUMS) as a measure of maladaptive music use. Results demonstrated that Unhealthy musical engagement was predicted by a variety of traits representing general negative emotionality (e.g., Neuroticism, Personal Distress, contagion for negative emotions). Structural equation modeling highlighted the importance of the empathic trait Personal Distress in mediating Unhealthy musical engagement. Finally, we deliberate if maladaptive strategies are indeed “maladaptive” for such individuals or merely a coping mechanism, which is indeed adaptive for them, aiding to combat depressive and anxious states thereby preventing them from “tipping over” into depression.

Abstract

This chapter provides a behind-the-scenes account of the birth of a naturalistic approach to the neuroscience of the musical aesthetic experience. The story starts from a lab talk giving the inspiration to translate the naturalistic paradigm initially applied to neuroimaging studies of the visual domain into music research. The circumstantial co-presence of neuroscientists and computational musicologists at the same center did the trick, permitting the identification of controlled variables for brain signal processing from the automatic extraction of the acoustic features of real music. This approach is now well accepted by the music neuroscience community while still waiting for full exploitation by aesthetic research.

Abstract

Automatic identification of emotions from a given music track would be of significant importance in the area of Music Information Retrieval. Several studies have found lyrics an important feature in the task of emotion classification [1]. Using lyrics, till date, a transformer-model which is a Natural-Language-Processing (NLP) based Deep-Learning model has achieved state-of-the-art results in identifying music emotion as represented in the Valence-Arousal (VA) space [2]. While transformer models rely on parsing the syntactic structure of sequential input data, we assume that semantic relations could be efficiently learned from these representations using novel capsule networks [3]. The “capsules” are akin to neuronal populations breaking down information into parts that mimics human processing of information by chunking for efficient encoding and evaluation of the stimulus. We extend the same logic further to say that capsule networks should be able to look at the semantic representation of each word in the lyrics of a song and should be able to learn the relationship between these words and the emotion that they represent as a group

Abstract

Recent studies utilizing online music streaming data have found genre preferences to be associated with risk for depression (Surana et al., 2020). However, the mentioned study does not address gender differences among participants. Gender differences have been reported in depression in terms of the prevalence, symptomatology, and emotion regulation strategies used (Garnefski et al., 2004). Also, there exists a gender-specific tendency to choose certain kinds of music where females tend to prefer ‘softer’ styles like mainstream pop, while males are inclined towards ‘heavier’ styles like hard rock (North and Hargreaves, 2008). Martin et al.(1993) investigated the relationship between adolescents’ music preferences and risk factors for suicide, which included depression. Females preferring rock/metal music were found to have higher scores for depression as compared to males preferring rock/metal. Miranda and Claes (2009) found metal music-listening to be associated with higher depression levels in adolescent females, but only if they affiliate with peers who are more depressed. However, the above studies relied on self-reported music preferences. The current study explores these associations in more naturalistic settings using online music consumption.

Abstract

Personality is known to influence emotional experiences including those induced by music listening. Previous research has largely relied on self-report and models with limited terms, which may not adequately capture naturalistic behavior and experience. Data from the platform Last.fm allows for the analysis of listening behaviors using both musical features and semantic tags provided by listeners, for a more naturalistic exploration of personality, music and emotion.

Abstract

Studies have emerged characterizing naturally occurring music listening behaviour of individuals at-risk for depression via the online music streaming platform Last.fm (Surana et al. 2020a; Surana et al. 2020b), albeit limited to social tags and acoustic features. No studies have looked at artist preferences and predictive capacity using this information associated with risk for depression.

Abstract

Healthy-Unhealthy Music Scale (HUMS), a compact 13-item instrument was developed for assessing musical engagement that is indicative of adolescent well-being (Saarikallio et al, 2015, Child and Adolescent Mental Health). However, there have been no studies examining the validity of HUMS in a clinically depressed cohort (DC).