Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Fantasia On A Theme Of Purpose: Using A Music-Guided Scribble Technique To Support Meaning-Making In Older Adult Retiree Musicians, Sophia R. Smith

Art Therapy | Master's Theses

Within the population of older adults, overall well-being corresponds with the ability to self-actualize and seek meaning, but age-related changes combined with ageism and isolation can negatively impact this capacity to maintain a sense of purpose, especially following retirement. It may be that retired musicians are especially vulnerable to this experience later in life due to a loss of the primary method of creative engagement and community that is facilitated by musical performance in a group setting. Integrating phenomenological and ethnographic approaches, this study utilized a qualitative design to understand how music-guided art-making incorporating the scribble technique could support a …

Enhancing The Quality Of Life For Senior Citizens: A Facilitator’S Guidebook For Mindful Music And Movement, Shannon Sexton

Mindfulness Studies Theses

Music appreciation and enjoyment enhance well-being throughout the lifespan. The challenges and constraints that people experience as they age can lead to lack of access to music, decreased physical activity, and fewer avenues for creative expression. Group music and movement interventions created for older populations offer opportunities for social connection and improved quality of life. Mindful practices add further benefit when combined with these interventions. Current available programs are scarce and most often do not encompass mixed modalities. In addition, the benefits of these programs do not show long-term sustainability. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the effects …

Polyrhythmic Pathways: Using Bimanual Coordination Research To Develop A New Framework For Practice, Performance, And Pedagogy, Christian Swafford

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This study reviews and compares percussion literature pertaining to polyrhythms and scientific literature pertaining to bimanual coordination. There exists a gap in the pedagogical approach to polyrhythms, and there is much disagreement between common instructional methods, especially when considered against the findings of several bimanual coordination studies. The purpose of this study is to reveal insight to the percussion community that the learning of polyrhythms is facilitated by the brain in novel ways, and the uniqueness of this learning process requires a rethinking of the current pedagogical approach. Percussion articles, method books, popular literature, and music scores are surveyed alongside …

The Significance Of Sonic Branding To Strategically Stimulate Consumer Behavior: Content Analysis Of Four Interviews From Jeanna Isham’S “Sound In Marketing” Podcast, Ina Beilina

Student Theses and Dissertations

Purpose:
Sonic branding is not just about composing jingles like McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It.” Sonic branding is an industry that strategically designs a cohesive auditory component of a brand’s corporate identity. This paper examines the psychological impact of music and sound on consumer behavior reviewing studies from the past 40 years and investigates the significance of stimulating auditory perception by infusing sound in consumer experience in the modern 2020s.

Design/methodology/approach:
Qualitative content analysis of audio media was used to test two hypotheses. Four archival oral interview recordings from Jeanna Isham’s podcast “Sound in Marketing” featuring the sonic branding experts …

Eye-Movements Of Vocal Performers Across Experience Levels, Charlotte Kelly

Honors Program Theses

Expertise, such as music expertise, is commonly studied through an analysis of eye-movements. Experts typically have fewer fixations, longer saccade amplitudes, and thus greater perceptual spans when reading music than non-experts. Most musical expertise literature is focused on instrumentalists and sight-reading. The current study aimed to extend the research to include vocalists and to see if there are still expertise effects when both experts and non-experts are familiar with the piece of music. Participants were recruited to sing a piece from their choir once when they had first started learning the piece and again right before their concert. They were …

A Schema-Theoretic Approach To Hierarchy In Eighteenth-Century Tonality, Simon K. S. Prosser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prevalent modern-day theories of tonal hierarchy for eighteenth-century music, especially those influenced by the ideas of Heinrich Schenker, have been called into question by schema theorists such as Robert Gjerdingen and Vasili Byros, who argue from both cognitive and historical evidence that eighteenth-century tonal cognition was sequential or “windowed” rather than hierarchical. This dissertation seeks to recuperate the concept of tonal hierarchy in eighteenth-century music, drawing on research that reconstructs the implicit tonal theories of the partimento and thoroughbass traditions, as well as concepts of hierarchy from schema theory itself, to formulate a historically and cognitively grounded theory of tonal …

And The Stars Look Very Different Today, Amy Rogin

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

A personal reflection about synesthesia

Effects Of Chair Testing In Orchestra On Student Motivation: Student Perspectives And Applications From Motivational Theories, Rosanna Christine Honeycutt

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine how string students perceive achievement on chair testing through the lens of attribution and achievement goal motivational self-theories. A teacher survey was administered to identify the goals of chair testing in two high school and seven middle school orchestra classrooms. A student survey was used to collect data in those same classrooms on (a) the reasons why students do and do not do well on chair tests, (b) the perceived goals of chair testing and (c) the ratings of motivation and self-achievement. Qualitative techniques were used to analyze attributions within both …

Impact Of Music On Categorical Facial Perceptions, Andrew Segre

CMC Senior Theses

This paper explores the effect music has on inducing an emotion that impacts a person’s perception of facial expressions through two experiments. Previous research suggests that music has a significant impact on a person’s mood and a vast amount of research has been conducted analyzing facial perception. Extending previous literature, this study will investigate how the impact music has on a person’s mood can affect the way a person perceives the facial expression of another. Experiment 1 uses the anchor effect to highlight the ability music has to anchor a person’s mood powerfully enough to influence that person’s perception of …

Consonant And Dissonant Music Chords Improve Visual Attention Capture, Graham Spurrier

CMC Senior Theses

Recent research has suggested that music may enhance or reduce cognitive interference, depending on whether it is tonally consonant or dissonant. Tonal consonance is often described as being pleasant and agreeable, while tonal dissonance is often described as being unpleasant and harsh. However, the exact cognitive mechanisms underlying these effects remain unclear. We hypothesize that tonal dissonance may increase cognitive interference through its effects on attentional cueing. We predict that (a) consonant musical chords are attentionally demanding, but (b) dissonant musical chords are more attentionally demanding than consonant musical chords. Using a Posner cueing task, a standard measure of attention …

Entropy, Order, And Agency: The Cognitive Basis Of The Link Between Agents And Order, Adena Schachner, Minju Kim

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

People often believe that orderly structures were created by agents. We examine the cognitive basis of this tendency, asking if learned associations or causal reasoning drives us to link order with agents. Causal reasoning predicts that knowledge of an alternative physical-mechanical cause should ‘explain away’ orderliness, weakening the link with agents. In a preregistered experiment, we manipulated the context to provide (or not provide) a physical-mechanical explanation for orderly outcomes, and participants judged if an object or agent had been present. We compared outcomes differing in (a)levels of orderliness and (b)whether context provided an alternative explanation. We found that environmental …

A Nirs Study Of Violinists And Pianists Employing Motor And Music Imageries To Assess Neural Differences In Music Perception, Sonja Prychitko

All NMU Master's Theses

Do musicians imagine movements differently? Are instrument-specific movements represented differently in the brain? The current study explores the perceptual differences in imagining music and movements. While attached to a near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) device, violinists and pianists of diverse experience levels viewed a series of performance videos (piano, violin) and performed associated imagery tasks. It was hypothesized that musicians will show diverse levels of brain activity in the motor areas during imagery tasks, depending on their primary instrument and the movements within their repertoire. Results revealed that violinists and pianists significantly differ in imagining movements and music of their non-primary …

The Influences Of Musical Training And Spectral Centroid On Perceptual Interactions Of Pitch And Timbre, Heather Daly

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Perceptual interactions of pitch and timbre have frequently been observed, and the nature of these interactions differs between musicians and nonmusicians. Yet, few researchers have investigated which aspects of timbre or musical training contribute to such interactions. Recently, Becker and Hall (2014) demonstrated that the spectral centroid contributed to pitch-timbre interactions in missing-F0 experiments, particularly for nonmusicians. The present experiment investigated whether the centroid also accounted for previously observed interactions between pitch and timbre (see Pitt, 1994) in a Garner speeded classification task designed to evaluate the perceptual independence of dimensions. There were two sets of synthetic stimuli involving orthogonal …

Music And Language Development: Traits Of Nursery Rhymes And Their Impact On Children's Language Development, Ashley Lauren Gonzalez

Music

From birth--possibly even before birth--the amount and array of external stimuli profoundly affect a child’s cognitive and linguistic development. In addition to verbal communication from parent to child, singing proves to be an integral aid to a child’s development of speech and language, allegedly due to repetitions of words and rhythms. Nursery rhymes are, from infancy, among the most commonly presented forms of musical stimulus for children. The repetitive nature of the nursery rhymes undoubtedly supports language and speech development, but various characteristics of nursery rhymes, specifically pitch interval, meter, phrase length, contour, and harmony, also contribute substantially to the …

Music And Memory: A Qualitative Look At How Music Affects Episodic Memory, Jonathan A. Coad

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This study was designed to examine qualitative data regarding gender and age differences about significant life events that are recalled when music is remembered. Two groups of participants were recruited, younger adults (M = 19.78, SD = 4.99) and older adults (M = 49.31, SD = 8.72). Data were collected by creating a survey and allowing participants to choose whichever songs, from their own experience, they like and asking them to list detailed memories that are attached to the song. Using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (2015) software, data was coded into categories of word count, positive and negative emotions, …

The Effect Of Social Media On Sexual Cognitions And Behaviors, Joshua Duarte

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Pop culture and social media have become a prime source of entertainment and communication. The current study focuses on the potential effects of consuming this form of media and how it affects our sexual cognitions and behaviors. A sample of nine hundred and two university students were given self-reporting questionnaires concerning demographics, sexual cognitions, and exposure to sexual content in music. An analysis of music artist’s posts on social media was also performed. It was hypothesized that artists who have sexual content published in their work will also have the same amount of sexual content on social media. However, there …

Impacts Of Music On Sectional View Drawing Ability For Engineering Technology Students As Measured Through Technical Drawings, Petros J. Katsioloudis, Mildred Jones, Vukica Jovanovic

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Results from a number of studies indicate that the use of different types of music can influence cognition and behavior; however, research provides inconsistent results. Considering this, a quasi-experimental study was conducted to identify the existence of statistically significant effects on sectional view drawing ability due to the impacts of music. In particular, the study compared the use of three different types of music; classical, rock, heavy metal and whether a significant difference exists towards sectional view drawing ability, among engineering technology students. According to the results of this study it is suggested that the impact of music provides no …

Modulation Of Behavior In Communicating Emotion, Martin Gardiner

Animal Sentience

King discusses many examples where two animals, as they bond, behave in ways we interpret as expressing love for one another. If one of the bonded animals then dies, signs of loving are replaced by signs we interpret as expressing grief by the animal who remains. I propose a pathway for emotional communication between an animal and an observer that can have a central role in these and other observations by King and in our overall ability to interpret observed behavior in relation to emotion. This pathway provides evidence of emotion in an observed animal by communicating evidence of emotion’s …

Physiological Response To Dissonance In Musicians And Nonmusicians, Angela Beth Biehl

Masters Theses

Knowing the human response to musical dissonance could have important therapeutic implications in the music therapy setting. The listener’s musical experience could significantly impact their response and subsequently its effect in a therapeutic setting. Thus, this study aimed to examine both the psychophysiological and subjective responses to dissonance and the difference in these responses between those with high experience and those with low experience. Participating groups, categorized as high experience (HE) and low experience (LE) in terms of musical knowledge, listened to consonant and dissonant musical excerpts, and rated each excerpt on its pleasantness; their physiologic responses were measured to …

Editorial: Neural Implementation Of Expertise, Merim Bilalic, Robert Langner, Guillermo J. Campitelli, Luca Turella, Wolfgang Grodd

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

How the brain enables humans to reach an outstanding level of performance typical of expertise is of great interest to cognitive neuroscience, as demonstrated by the number and diversity of the articles in this Research Topic (RT). The RT presents a collection of 23 articles written by 80 authors on traditional expertise topics such as sport, board games, and music, but also on the expertise aspects of everyday skills, such as language and the perception of faces and objects. Just as the topics in the RT are diverse, so are the neuroimaging techniques employed and the article formats. Here we …

Infants’ Responses To Affect In Music And Speech, Daniel K. Feinberg

Pitzer Senior Theses

Existing literature demonstrates that infants can discriminate between categories of infant-directed (ID) speech based on the speaker’s intended message – that is, infants recognize the difference between comforting and approving ID speech, and treat different utterances from within these two categories similarly. Furthermore, the literature also demonstrates that infants understand many aspects of music and can discriminate between happy and sad music. Building on these findings, the present study investigated whether exposure to happy or sad piano music would systematically affect infants’ preferences for comforting or approving ID speech. Five- to nine-month-old infants’ preferences for comforting or approving ID speech …

Music And Movement Share A Dynamic Structure That Supports Universal Expressions Of Emotion, Beau Sievers, Larry Polansky, Michael Casey, Thalia Wheatley

Dartmouth Scholarship

Music moves us. Its kinetic power is the foundation of human behaviors as diverse as dance, romance, lullabies, and the military march. Despite its significance, the music-movement relationship is poorly understood. We present an empirical method for testing whether music and movement share a common structure that affords equivalent and universal emotional expressions. Our method uses a computer program that can generate matching examples of music and movement from a single set of features: rate, jitter (regularity of rate), direction, step size, and dissonance/visual spikiness. We applied our method in two experiments, one in the United States and another in …

Memory, Cognition, And The Effect Of A Music Intervention On Healthy Older Adults, Shannon L. Bowles

Theses and Dissertations--Gerontology

Music is a powerful modality that can bring about changes in individuals of all ages. This research employed both an experimental and quasi-experimental design to identify the effects of music as it influenced psychological well-being, memory, and cognition among older adults. Specifically, it addressed three aims: (a) To determine to what extent learning to play a music instrument later in life influenced psychological well-being and cognitive function of non-institutionalized healthy seniors, (b) To determine the effects of the amount of music involvement on psychological well-being and cognitive function (c) To determine the benefit of music for those with limited/no music …