Auditory imagery ability influences accuracy when singing with altered auditory feedback.

In this preliminary study, we explored the relationship between auditory imagery ability and the maintenance of tonal and temporal accuracy when singing and audiating with altered auditory feedback (AAF). Actively performing participants sang and audiated (sang mentally but not aloud) a self-selected piece in AAF conditions, including upward pitch-shifts and delayed auditory feedback (DAF), and with speech distraction. Participants with higher self-reported scores on the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale (BAIS) produced a tonal reference that was less disrupted by pitch shifts and speech distraction than musicians with lower scores.

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.

Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on U.S. charts from 1950 to 2023.

In the past century, the history of popular music has been analyzed from many different perspectives, with sociologists, musicologists and philosophers all offering distinct narratives characterizing the evolution of popular music. However, quantitative studies on this subject began only in the last decade and focused on features extracted from raw audio, which limits the scope to low-level components of music. The present study investigates the evolution of a more abstract dimension of popular music, specifically melody, using a new dataset of popular melodies spanning from 1950 to 2023.

Perceptual representations mediate effects of stimulus properties on liking for music.

Perceptual pleasure and its concomitant hedonic value play an essential role in everyday life, motivating behavior and thus influencing how individuals choose to spend their time and resources. However, how pleasure arises from perception of sensory information remains relatively poorly understood. In particular, research has neglected the question of how perceptual representations mediate the relationships between stimulus properties and liking (e.

Cognitive and sensory expectations independently shape musical expectancy and pleasure.

Expectation is crucial for our enjoyment of music, yet the underlying generative mechanisms remain unclear. While sensory models derive predictions based on local acoustic information in the auditory signal, cognitive models assume abstract knowledge of music structure acquired over the long term. To evaluate these two contrasting mechanisms, we compared simulations from four computational models of musical expectancy against subjective expectancy and pleasantness ratings of over 1000 chords sampled from 739 US Billboard pop songs.

Implicit auditory memory in older listeners: From encoding to 6-month retention.

Any listening task, from sound recognition to sound-based communication, rests on auditory memory which is known to decline in healthy ageing. However, how this decline maps onto multiple components and stages of auditory memory remains poorly characterised. In an online unsupervised longitudinal study, we tested ageing effects on implicit auditory memory for rapid tone patterns.

Auditory and reward structures reflect the pleasure of musical expectancies during naturalistic listening.

Enjoying music consistently engages key structures of the neural auditory and reward systems such as the right superior temporal gyrus (R STG) and ventral striatum (VS). Expectations seem to play a central role in this effect, as preferences reliably vary according to listeners' uncertainty about the musical future and surprise about the musical past. Accordingly, VS activity reflects the pleasure of musical surprise, and exhibits stronger correlations with R STG activity as pleasure grows.

Probabilistic modelling of microtiming perception.

Music performances are rich in systematic temporal irregularities called "microtiming", too fine-grained to be notated in a musical score but important for musical expression and communication. Several studies have examined listeners' preference for rhythms varying in microtiming, but few have addressed precisely how microtiming is perceived, especially in terms of cognitive mechanisms, making the empirical evidence difficult to interpret. Here we provide evidence that microtiming perception can be simulated as a process of probabilistic prediction.

Worlds apart? Testing the cultural distance hypothesis in music perception of Chinese and Western listeners.

According to the cultural distance hypothesis (CDH), individuals learn culture-specific statistical structures in music as internal stylistic models and use these models in predictive processing of music, with musical structures closer to their home culture being easier to predict. This cultural distance effect may be affected by domain-specific (musical ability) and domain-general individual characteristics (openness, implicit cultural bias). To test the CDH and its modulation by individual characteristics, we recruited Chinese and Western adults to categorize stylistically ambiguous and unambiguous Chinese and Western melodies by cultural origin.

Musicians show more integrated neural processing of contextually relevant acoustic features.

Little is known about expertise-related plasticity of neural mechanisms for auditory feature integration. Here, we contrast two diverging hypotheses that musical expertise is associated with more independent or more integrated predictive processing of acoustic features relevant to melody perception. Mismatch negativity (MMNm) was recorded with magnetoencephalography (MEG) from 25 musicians and 25 non-musicians, exposed to interleaved blocks of a complex, melody-like multi-feature paradigm and a simple, oddball control paradigm.

Modeling enculturated bias in entrainment to rhythmic patterns.

Long-term and culture-specific experience of music shapes rhythm perception, leading to enculturated expectations that make certain rhythms easier to track and more conducive to synchronized movement. However, the influence of enculturated bias on the moment-to-moment dynamics of rhythm tracking is not well understood. Recent modeling work has formulated entrainment to rhythms as a formal inference problem, where phase is continuously estimated based on precise event times and their correspondence to timing expectations: PIPPET (Phase Inference from Point Process Event Timing).

Reduced cross-modal affective priming in the L2 of late bilinguals depends on L2 exposure.

Processing of emotional meaning is crucial in many areas of psychology, including language and music processing. This issue takes on particular significance in bilinguals because it has been suggested that bilinguals process affective words differently in their first (L1) and second, later acquired languages (L2). We undertook a series of five experiments examining affective priming between emotionally valenced language and emotionally valenced music.

Effects of statistical learning in passive and active contexts on reproduction and recognition of auditory sequences.

Statistical learning plays an important role in acquiring the structure of cultural communication signals such as speech and music, which are both perceived and reproduced. However, statistical learning is typically investigated through passive exposure to structured signals, followed by offline explicit recognition tasks assessing the degree of learning. Such experimental approaches fail to capture statistical learning as it takes place and require post hoc conscious reflection on what is thought to be an implicit process of knowledge acquisition.

Musicianship and melodic predictability enhance neural gain in auditory cortex during pitch deviance detection.

When listening to music, pitch deviations are more salient and elicit stronger prediction error responses when the melodic context is predictable and when the listener is a musician. Yet, the neuronal dynamics and changes in connectivity underlying such effects remain unclear. Here, we employed dynamic causal modeling (DCM) to investigate whether the magnetic mismatch negativity response (MMNm)-and its modulation by context predictability and musical expertise-are associated with enhanced neural gain of auditory areas, as a plausible mechanism for encoding precision-weighted prediction errors.

Predictive Uncertainty Underlies Auditory Boundary Perception.

Anticipating the future is essential for efficient perception and action planning. Yet the role of anticipation in event segmentation is understudied because empirical research has focused on retrospective cues such as surprise. We address this concern in the context of perception of musical-phrase boundaries.

The Relationship Between Valence and Chills in Music: A Corpus Analysis.

Chills experienced in response to music listening have been linked to both happiness and sadness expressed by music. To investigate these conflicting effects of valence on chills, we conducted a computational analysis on a corpus of 988 tracks previously reported to elicit chills, by comparing them with a control set of tracks matched by artist, duration, and popularity. We analysed track-level audio features obtained with the Spotify Web API across the two sets of tracks, resulting in confirmatory findings that tracks which cause chills were sadder than matched tracks and exploratory findings that they were also slower, less intense, and more instrumental than matched tracks on average.

Correction: PPM-Decay: A computational model of auditory prediction with memory decay.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.

Evaluative judgment across domains: Liking balance, contour, symmetry and complexity in melodies and visual designs.

Evaluative judgment-i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked-is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions.

PPM-Decay: A computational model of auditory prediction with memory decay.

Statistical learning and probabilistic prediction are fundamental processes in auditory cognition. A prominent computational model of these processes is Prediction by Partial Matching (PPM), a variable-order Markov model that learns by internalizing n-grams from training sequences. However, PPM has limitations as a cognitive model: in particular, it has a perfect memory that weights all historic observations equally, which is inconsistent with memory capacity constraints and recency effects observed in human cognition.

Auditory but Not Audiovisual Cues Lead to Higher Neural Sensitivity to the Statistical Regularities of an Unfamiliar Musical Style.

It is still a matter of debate whether visual aids improve learning of music. In a multisession study, we investigated the neural signatures of novel music sequence learning with or without aids (auditory-only: AO, audiovisual: AV). During three training sessions on three separate days, participants (nonmusicians) reproduced (note by note on a keyboard) melodic sequences generated by an artificial musical grammar.

Long-term implicit memory for sequential auditory patterns in humans.

Memory, on multiple timescales, is critical to our ability to discover the structure of our surroundings, and efficiently interact with the environment. We combined behavioural manipulation and modelling to investigate the dynamics of memory formation for rarely reoccurring acoustic patterns. In a series of experiments, participants detected the emergence of regularly repeating patterns within rapid tone-pip sequences.

A Set of 200 Musical Stimuli Varying in Balance, Contour, Symmetry, and Complexity: Behavioral and Computational Assessments.

We present a novel set of 200 Western tonal musical stimuli (MUST) to be used in research on perception and appreciation of music. It consists of four subsets of 50 stimuli varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity. All are 4 s long and designed to be musically appealing and experimentally controlled.

Musical prediction error responses similarly reduced by predictive uncertainty in musicians and non-musicians.

Auditory prediction error responses elicited by surprising sounds can be reliably recorded with musical stimuli that are more complex and realistic than those typically employed in EEG or MEG oddball paradigms. However, these responses are reduced as the predictive uncertainty of the stimuli increases. In this study, we investigate whether this effect is modulated by musical expertise.