Harmonic organisation conveys both universal and culture-specific cues for emotional expression in music

Comparison of Occupational Noise Exposure Assessment Methods: A Systematic Review

OBJECTIVES

The purpose of this systematic review of publications was to evaluate existing evidence on the accuracy and precision of alternative occupational noise assessment methods, with personal noise dosimetry as the reference.

DESIGN

A structured literature search was performed in Ovid MEDLINE(R) and Embase in July 2021 and 2022. The Covidence software was used for importing articles, screening titles and abstracts, full-text review, and study selection. Two reviewers independently conducted the title, abstract, and full-text screening of eligible studies. The reporting of this systematic review was guided by the recommendations of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) statement. The quality of selected articles was assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute checklist for analytical cross-sectional studies.

RESULTS

In total, 11 studies consistent with the study selection criteria were identified out of 327 articles from the initial search. The noise-measurement methods identified in the selected studies included subjective rating through a questionnaire, expert opinion, smartwatch, sound level meter, sound level meter combined with a radio-frequency identification system, smart devices, workgroup dosimetry sampling, task-based measurement (TBM), and hybrid TBM. The hybrid method (a combination of task-based, subjective rating, and trade mean measurements) was the best alternative to full-shift personal noise-dosimetry with a negligible bias of 0.1 dB, precision of 2.4 dBA, and accuracy of 2.4 dBA.

CONCLUSION

A variety of lower-cost TBM methods had relatively high accuracy and precision levels comparable to personal dosimetry. These findings are particularly relevant for low-income countries where occupational noise measurements should be obtained with minimal work disruptions and costs. However, it should also be noted that TBMs are greatly affected by job variation, multiple tasks, or mobile tasks.

Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries

Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random 'seed' rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of 'telephone'), such that their biases (the prior) could be estimated from the distribution of reproductions. Every tested group showed a sparse prior with peaks at integer-ratio rhythms. However, the importance of different integer ratios varied across groups, often reflecting local musical practices. Our results suggest a common feature of music cognition: discrete rhythm 'categories' at small-integer ratios. These discrete representations plausibly stabilize musical systems in the face of cultural transmission but interact with culture-specific traditions to yield the diversity that is evident when mental representations are probed across many cultures.

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.g., stimulus symmetry can only affect liking if it is perceived). The present research addresses this gap for the first time, analyzing perceptual and liking ratings of 96 nonmusicians (power of 0.99) and finding that perceptual representations mediate effects of feature-based and information-based stimulus properties on liking for a novel set of melodies varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity. Moreover, variability due to individual differences and stimuli accounts for most of the variance in liking. These results have broad implications for psychological research on sensory valuation, advocating a more explicit account of random variability and the mediating role of perceptual representations of stimulus properties.

Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures

Emotions, bodily sensations and movement are integral parts of musical experiences. Yet, it remains unknown i) whether emotional connotations and structural features of music elicit discrete bodily sensations and ii) whether these sensations are culturally consistent. We addressed these questions in a cross-cultural study with Western (European and North American, n = 903) and East Asian (Chinese, n = 1035). We precented participants with silhouettes of human bodies and asked them to indicate the bodily regions whose activity they felt changing while listening to Western and Asian musical pieces with varying emotional and acoustic qualities. The resulting bodily sensation maps (BSMs) varied as a function of the emotional qualities of the songs, particularly in the limb, chest, and head regions. Music-induced emotions and corresponding BSMs were replicable across Western and East Asian subjects. The BSMs clustered similarly across cultures, and cluster structures were similar for BSMs and self-reports of emotional experience. The acoustic and structural features of music were consistently associated with the emotion ratings and music-induced bodily sensations across cultures. These results highlight the importance of subjective bodily experience in music-induced emotions and demonstrate consistent associations between musical features, music-induced emotions, and bodily sensations across distant cultures.

Harmonizing minds and machines: survey on transformative power of machine learning in music

This survey explores the symbiotic relationship between Machine Learning (ML) and music, focusing on the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the musical sphere. Beginning with a historical contextualization of the intertwined trajectories of music and technology, the paper discusses the progressive use of ML in music analysis and creation. Emphasis is placed on present applications and future potential. A detailed examination of music information retrieval, automatic music transcription, music recommendation, and algorithmic composition presents state-of-the-art algorithms and their respective functionalities. The paper underscores recent advancements, including ML-assisted music production and emotion-driven music generation. The survey concludes with a prospective contemplation of future directions of ML within music, highlighting the ongoing growth, novel applications, and anticipation of deeper integration of ML across musical domains. This comprehensive study asserts the profound potential of ML to revolutionize the musical landscape and encourages further exploration and advancement in this emerging interdisciplinary field.

Evidence for a universal association of auditory roughness with musical stability

We provide evidence that the roughness of chords-a psychoacoustic property resulting from unresolved frequency components-is associated with perceived musical stability (operationalized as finishedness) in participants with differing levels and types of exposure to Western or Western-like music. Three groups of participants were tested in a remote cloud forest region of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and two groups in Sydney, Australia (musicians and non-musicians). Unlike prominent prior studies of consonance/dissonance across cultures, we framed the concept of consonance as stability rather than as pleasantness. We find a negative relationship between roughness and musical stability in every group including the PNG community with minimal experience of musical harmony. The effect of roughness is stronger for the Sydney participants, particularly musicians. We find an effect of harmonicity-a psychoacoustic property resulting from chords having a spectral structure resembling a single pitched tone (such as produced by human vowel sounds)-only in the Sydney musician group, which indicates this feature's effect is mediated via a culture-dependent mechanism. In sum, these results underline the importance of both universal and cultural mechanisms in music cognition, and they suggest powerful implications for understanding the origin of pitch structures in Western tonal music as well as on possibilities for new musical forms that align with humans' perceptual and cognitive biases. They also highlight the importance of how consonance/dissonance is operationalized and explained to participants-particularly those with minimal prior exposure to musical harmony.

Children's associations between space and pitch are differentially shaped by language

Musical properties, such as auditory pitch, are not expressed in the same way across cultures. In some languages, pitch is expressed in terms of spatial height (high vs. low), whereas others rely on thickness vocabulary (thick = low frequency vs. thin = high frequency). We investigated how children represent pitch in the face of this variable linguistic input by examining the developmental trajectory of linguistic and non-linguistic space-pitch associations in children who acquire Dutch (a height-pitch language) or Turkish (a thickness-pitch language). Five-year-olds, 7-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and 11-year-olds were tested for their understanding of pitch terminology and their associations of spatial dimensions with auditory pitch when no language was used. Across tasks, thickness-pitch associations were more robust than height-pitch associations. This was true for Turkish children, and also Dutch children not exposed to thickness-pitch vocabulary. Height-pitch associations, on the other hand, were not reliable-not even in Dutch-speaking children until age 11-the age when they demonstrated full comprehension of height-pitch terminology. Moreover, Turkish-speaking children reversed height-pitch associations. Taken together, these findings suggest thickness-pitch associations are acquired in similar ways by children from different cultures, but the acquisition of height-pitch associations is more susceptible to linguistic input. Overall, then, despite cross-cultural stability in some components, there is variation in how children come to represent musical pitch, one of the building blocks of music. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Children from diverse cultures differ in their understanding of music vocabulary and in their nonlinguistic associations between spatial dimensions and auditory pitch. Height-pitch mappings are acquired late and require additional scaffolding from language, whereas thickness-pitch mappings are acquired early and are less susceptible to language input. Space-pitch mappings are not static from birth to adulthood, but change over development, suggesting music cognition is shaped by cross-cultural experience.

Universality, domain-specificity, and development of psychological responses to music

Humans can find music happy, sad, fearful, or spiritual. They can be soothed by it or urged to dance. Whether these psychological responses reflect cognitive adaptations that evolved expressly for responding to music is an ongoing topic of study. In this Review, we examine three features of music-related psychological responses that help to elucidate whether the underlying cognitive systems are specialized adaptations: universality, domain-specificity, and early expression. Focusing on emotional and behavioural responses, we find evidence that the relevant psychological mechanisms are universal and arise early in development. However, the existing evidence cannot establish that these mechanisms are domain-specific. To the contrary, many findings suggest that universal psychological responses to music reflect more general properties of emotion, auditory perception, and other human cognitive capacities that evolved for non-musical purposes. Cultural evolution, driven by the tinkering of musical performers, evidently crafts music to compellingly appeal to shared psychological mechanisms, resulting in both universal patterns (such as form-function associations) and culturally idiosyncratic styles.

Lessons learned in animal acoustic cognition through comparisons with humans

Humans are an interesting subject of study in comparative cognition. While humans have a lot of anecdotal and subjective knowledge about their own minds and behaviors, researchers tend not to study humans the way they study other species. Instead, comparisons between humans and other animals tend to be based on either assumptions about human behavior and cognition, or very different testing methods. Here we emphasize the importance of using insider knowledge about humans to form interesting research questions about animal cognition while simultaneously stepping back and treating humans like just another species as if one were an alien researcher. This perspective is extremely helpful to identify what aspects of cognitive processes may be interesting and relevant across the animal kingdom. Here we outline some examples of how this objective human-centric approach has helped us to move forward knowledge in several areas of animal acoustic cognition (rhythm, harmonicity, and vocal units). We describe how this approach works, what kind of benefits we obtain, and how it can be applied to other areas of animal cognition. While an objective human-centric approach is not useful when studying traits that do not occur in humans (e.g., magnetic spatial navigation), it can be extremely helpful when studying traits that are relevant to humans (e.g., communication). Overall, we hope to entice more people working in animal cognition to use a similar approach to maximize the benefits of being part of the animal kingdom while maintaining a detached and scientific perspective on the human species.

Consonance and dissonance perception. A critical review of the historical sources, multidisciplinary findings, and main hypotheses

Revealed more than two millennia ago by Pythagoras, consonance and dissonance (C/D) are foundational concepts in music theory, perception, and aesthetics. The search for the biological, acoustical, and cultural factors that affect C/D perception has resulted in descriptive accounts inspired by arithmetic, musicological, psychoacoustical or neurobiological frameworks without reaching a consensus. Here, we review the key historical sources and modern multidisciplinary findings on C/D and integrate them into three main hypotheses: the vocal similarity hypothesis (VSH), the psychocultural hypothesis (PH), and the sensorimotor hypothesis (SH). By illustrating the hypotheses-related findings, we highlight their major conceptual, methodological, and terminological shortcomings. Trying to provide a unitary framework for C/D understanding, we put together multidisciplinary research on human and animal vocalizations, which converges to suggest that auditory roughness is associated with distress/danger and, therefore, elicits defensive behavioral reactions and neural responses that indicate aversion. We therefore stress the primacy of vocality and roughness as key factors in the explanation of C/D phenomenon, and we explore the (neuro)biological underpinnings of the attraction-aversion mechanisms that are triggered by C/D stimuli. Based on the reviewed evidence, while the aversive nature of dissonance appears as solidly rooted in the multidisciplinary findings, the attractive nature of consonance remains a somewhat speculative claim that needs further investigation. Finally, we outline future directions for empirical research in C/D, especially regarding cross-modal and cross-cultural approaches.

Emotional responses in Papua New Guinea show negligible evidence for a universal effect of major versus minor music

Music is a vital part of most cultures and has a strong impact on emotions [1–5]. In Western cultures, emotive valence is strongly influenced by major and minor melodies and harmony (chords and their progressions) [6–13]. Yet, how pitch and harmony affect our emotions, and to what extent these effects are culturally mediated or universal, is hotly debated [2, 5, 14–20]. Here, we report an experiment conducted in a remote cloud forest region of Papua New Guinea, across several communities with similar traditional music but differing levels of exposure to Western-influenced tonal music. One hundred and seventy participants were presented with pairs of major and minor cadences (chord progressions) and melodies, and chose which of them made them happier. The experiment was repeated by 60 non-musicians and 19 musicians in Sydney, Australia. Bayesian analyses show that, for cadences, there is strong evidence that greater happiness was reported for major than minor in every community except one: the community with minimal exposure to Western-like music. For melodies, there is strong evidence that greater happiness was reported for those with higher mean pitch (major melodies) than those with lower mean pitch (minor melodies) in only one of the three PNG communities and in both Sydney groups. The results show that the emotive valence of major and minor is strongly associated with exposure to Western-influenced music and culture, although we cannot exclude the possibility of universality.

Crossmodal Harmony: Looking for the Meaning of Harmony Beyond Hearing

The notion of harmony was first developed in the context of metaphysics before being applied to the domain of music. However, in recent centuries, the term has often been used to describe especially pleasing combinations of colors by those working in the visual arts too. Similarly, the harmonization of flavors is nowadays often invoked as one of the guiding principles underpinning the deliberate pairing of food and drink. However, beyond the various uses of the term to describe and construct pleasurable unisensory perceptual experiences, it has also been suggested that music and painting may be combined harmoniously (e.g., see the literature on “color music”). Furthermore, those working in the area of “sonic seasoning” sometimes describe certain sonic compositions as harmonizing crossmodally with specific flavor sensations. In this review, we take a critical look at the putative meaning(s) of the term “harmony” when used in a crossmodal, or multisensory, context. Furthermore, we address the question of whether the term's use outside of a strictly unimodal auditory context should be considered literally or merely metaphorically (i.e., as a shorthand to describe those combinations of sensory stimuli that, for whatever reason, appear to go well together, and hence which can be processed especially fluently).

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Influence of Timbre on Affect Perception in Western Classical Music and Chinese Music Traditions

Timbre is one of the psychophysical cues that has a great impact on affect perception, although, it has not been the subject of much cross-cultural research. Our aim is to investigate the influence of timbre on the perception of affect conveyed by Western and Chinese classical music using a cross-cultural approach. Four listener groups (Western musicians, Western nonmusicians, Chinese musicians, and Chinese nonmusicians; 40 per group) were presented with 48 musical excerpts, which included two musical excerpts (one piece of Chinese and one piece of Western classical music) per affect quadrant from the valence-arousal space, representing angry, happy, peaceful, and sad emotions and played with six different instruments (erhu, dizi, pipa, violin, flute, and guitar). Participants reported ratings of valence, tension arousal, energy arousal, preference, and familiarity on continuous scales ranging from 1 to 9. ANOVA reveals that participants’ cultural backgrounds have a greater impact on affect perception than their musical backgrounds, and musicians more clearly distinguish between a perceived measure (valence) and a felt measure (preference) than do nonmusicians. We applied linear partial least squares regression to explore the relation between affect perception and acoustic features. The results show that the important acoustic features for valence and energy arousal are similar, which are related mostly to spectral variation, the shape of the temporal envelope, and the dynamic range. The important acoustic features for tension arousal describe the shape of the spectral envelope, noisiness, and the shape of the temporal envelope. The explanation for the similarity of perceived affect ratings between instruments is the similar acoustic features that were caused by the physical characteristics of specific instruments and performing techniques.

Musical Scents: On the Surprising Absence of Scented Musical/Auditory Events, Entertainments, and Experiences

The matching of scents with music is both one of the most natural (or intuitive) of crossmodal correspondences and, at the same time, one of the least frequently explored combinations of senses in an entertainment and multisensory experiential design context. This narrative review highlights the various occasions over the last century or two when scents and sounds have coincided, and the various motivations behind those who have chosen to bring these senses together: This has included everything from the masking of malodour to the matching of the semantic meaning or arousal potential of the two senses, through to the longstanding and recently-reemerging interest in the crossmodal correspondences (now that they have been distinguished from the superficially similar phenomenon of synaesthesia, with which they were previously often confused). As such, there exist a number of ways in which these two senses can be incorporated into meaningful multisensory experiences that can potentially resonate with the public. Having explored the deliberate combination of scent and music (or sound) in everything from "scent-sory" marketing through to fragrant discos and olfactory storytelling, I end by summarizing some of the opportunities around translating such unusual multisensory experiences from the public to the private sphere. This will likely be via the widespread dissemination of sensory apps that promise to convert (or translate) from one sense (likely scent) to another (e.g., music), as has, for example already started to occur in the world of music selections to match the flavour of specific wines.

Sweetness is in the ear of the beholder: chord preference across United Kingdom and Pakistani listeners

The majority of research in the field of music perception has been conducted with Western participants, and it has remained unclear which aspects of music perception are culture dependent, and which are universal. The current study compared how participants unfamiliar with Western music (people from the Khowar and Kalash tribes native to Northwest Pakistan with minimal exposure to Western music) perceive affect (positive versus negative) in musical chords compared with United Kingdom (UK) listeners, as well as the overall preference for these chords. The stimuli consisted of four distinct chord types (major, minor, augmented, and chromatic) and were played as both vertical blocks (pitches presented concurrently) and arpeggios (pitches presented successively). The results suggest that the Western listener major-positive minor-negative affective distinction is opposite for Northwest Pakistani listeners, arguably because of the reversed prevalence of these chords in the two music cultures. The aversion to the harsh dissonance of the chromatic cluster is present cross-culturally, but the preference for the consonance of the major triad varies between UK and Northwest Pakistani listeners, depending on cultural familiarity. Our findings imply not only notable cultural variation but also commonalities in chord perception across Western and non-Western listeners.

Psychological and Physiological Signatures of Music Listening in Different Listening Environments-An Exploratory Study

We compared music emotion ratings and their physiological correlates when the participants listened to music at home and in the laboratory. We hypothesized that music emotions are stronger in a familiar environment, that is, at home. Participants listened to their self-selected favorite and neutral music excerpts at home and in the laboratory for 10 min in each environment. They completed the questionnaires about their emotional states and gave saliva samples for the analyses of the stress hormone cortisol. We found that in the context of music listening, the participants’ emotion ratings differed between home and the laboratory. Furthermore, the cortisol levels were generally lower at home than in the laboratory and decreased after music listening at home and in the laboratory. However, the modulatory effects of music listening on cortisol levels did not differ between the home and the laboratory. Our exploratory multimethodological data offer novel insight about the psychological and physiological consequences of music listening. These data reveal the sensitivity of the current research methods to investigate human emotions in various contexts without excluding the use of laboratory environment in investigating them.

Sonic Seasoning and Other Multisensory Influences on the Coffee Drinking Experience

The coffee drinking experience undoubtedly depends greatly on the quality of the coffee bean and the method of preparation. However, beyond the product-intrinsic qualities of the beverage itself, there are also a host of other product-extrinsic factors that have been shown to influence the coffee-drinking experience. This review summarizes the influence of everything from the multisensory atmosphere through to the sound of coffee preparation, and from the typeface on the coffee packaging through the drinking vessel. Furthermore, the emerging science around sonic seasoning, whereby specific pieces of music or soundscapes, either pre-composed or bespoke, are used to bring out specific aspects in the taste (e.g., sweetness or bitterness) or aroma/flavor (nutty, dark chocolate, dried fruit notes, etc.) of a coffee beverage is also discussed in depth. Relevant related research with other complex drinks such as beer and wine are also mentioned where relevant.