Reminiscence bump invariance with respect to genre, age, and country.

We report a cross-cultural study investigating musical reminiscence bumps, the phenomenon whereby adults remain emotionally invested in the music they preferentially listened to in adolescence. Using a crowdsourcing service, 4,824 participants from 102 countries were each required to recall five songs (titles and artist names), resulting in a 24,120-song study. In addition, participants provided demographic information and answered questions relating to the songs they recalled, such as age first listened to, levels of nostalgia, and associated emotions.

Modelling song popularity as a contagious process.

Popular songs are often said to be 'contagious', 'infectious' or 'viral'. We find that download count time series for many popular songs resemble infectious disease epidemic curves. This paper suggests infectious disease transmission models could help clarify mechanisms that contribute to the 'spread' of song preferences and how these mechanisms underlie song popularity.

The Attraction of Synchrony: A Hip-Hop Dance Study.

This study investigated an evolutionary-adaptive explanation for the cultural ubiquity of choreographed synchronous dance: that it evolved to increase interpersonal aesthetic appreciation and/or attractiveness. In turn, it is assumed that this may have facilitated social bonding and therefore procreation between individuals within larger groups. In this dual-dancer study, individuals performed fast or slow hip-hop choreography to fast-, medium-, or slow-tempo music; when paired laterally, this gave rise to split-screen video stimuli in which there were four basic categories of dancer and music synchrony: (1) synchronous dancers, synchronous music; (2) synchronous dancers, asynchronous music; (3) asynchronous dancers, one dancer synchronous with music; and (4) asynchronous dancers, asynchronous music.

How Live Music Moves Us: Head Movement Differences in Audiences to Live Versus Recorded Music.

A live music concert is a pleasurable social event that is among the most visceral and memorable forms of musical engagement. But what inspires listeners to attend concerts, sometimes at great expense, when they could listen to recordings at home? An iconic aspect of popular concerts is engaging with other audience members through moving to the music. Head movements, in particular, reflect emotion and have social consequences when experienced with others.

Eye movements, attention, and expert knowledge in the observation of Bharatanatyam dance.

Previous research indicates that dance expertise affects eye-movement behaviour-dance experts tend to have faster saccades and more tightly clustered fixations than novices when observing dance, suggesting that experts are able to predict movements and process choreographic information more quickly. Relating to this, the present study aimed to explore (1) the effects of expertise on eye movements (as a proxy for attentional focus and the existence of movement-dance schemas) in Indian Bharatanatyam dance, and (2) narrative dance, which is an important component of Bharatanatyam. Fixation durations, dwell times, and fixation-position dispersions were recorded for novices and experts in Bharatanatyam (N = 28) while they observed videos of narrative and non-narrative Bharatanatyam dance.

Acoustic Features Influence Musical Choices Across Multiple Genres.

Based on a large behavioral dataset of music downloads, two analyses investigate whether the acoustic features of listeners' preferred musical genres influence their choice of tracks within non-preferred, secondary musical styles. Analysis 1 identifies feature distributions for pairs of genre-defined subgroups that are distinct. Using correlation analysis, these distributions are used to test the degree of similarity between subgroups' main genres and the other music within their download collections.

Effects on Inter-Personal Memory of Dancing in Time with Others.

We report an experiment investigating whether dancing to the same music enhances recall of person-related memory targets. The experiment used 40 dancers (all of whom were unaware of the experiment's aim), two-channel silent-disco radio headphones, a marked-up dance floor, two types of music, and memory targets (sash colors and symbols). In each trial, 10 dancers wore radio headphones and one of four different colored sashes, half of which carried cat symbols.

Traces across the body: influence of music-dance synchrony on the observation of dance.

In previous studies investigating entrainment and person perception, synchronized movements were found to enhance memory for incidental person attributes. Although this effect is robust, including in dance, the process by which it is actuated are less well understood. In this study, two hypotheses are investigated: that enhanced memory for person attributes is the result of (1) increased gaze time between in-tempo dancers; and/or (2) greater attentional focus between in-tempo dancers.