Effect of Long-Term Music Training on Emotion Perception From Drumming Improvisation

AffectMachine-Classical: a novel system for generating affective classical music

This work introduces a new music generation system, called AffectMachine-Classical, that is capable of generating affective Classic music in real-time. AffectMachine was designed to be incorporated into biofeedback systems (such as brain-computer-interfaces) to help users become aware of, and ultimately mediate, their own dynamic affective states. That is, this system was developed for music-based MedTech to support real-time emotion self-regulation in users. We provide an overview of the rule-based, probabilistic system architecture, describing the main aspects of the system and how they are novel. We then present the results of a listener study that was conducted to validate the ability of the system to reliably convey target emotions to listeners. The findings indicate that AffectMachine-Classical is very effective in communicating various levels of Arousal (R² = 0.96) to listeners, and is also quite convincing in terms of Valence (R² = 0.90). Future work will embed AffectMachine-Classical into biofeedback systems, to leverage the efficacy of the affective music for emotional wellbeing in listeners.

Family Socioeconomic Status and Chinese Adolescents' Academic Achievement in the Arts: The Mediating Role of Family Arts Resources and the Moderating Role of Family Arts Atmosphere

In the present study, we examined the association between family socioeconomic status (SES) and adolescents' academic achievement in the arts and the mediating and moderating roles of family process factors, verified family investment model. Chinese adolescents (N = 8,723) in Grade 8 reported characteristics of family SES, family arts resources, and family arts atmosphere, and then completed a standardized test assessing academic achievement in music and visual art. The results showed that family SES significantly predicted adolescents' level of academic achievement in the arts after controlling for adolescents' gender and school location. The effect of family SES on adolescents' academic achievement in the arts was partly mediated by family arts resources, constituting 20.51% of the total predicted effect. In addition, family arts atmosphere moderated the association between family SES and adolescents' achievement in the arts. Specifically, family SES had a stronger relationship with academic achievement in the arts for adolescent with higher family arts atmosphere than for adolescent with poor family arts atmosphere. Findings in this study expands the field of influence of the family environments and enhance an understanding of the influence mechanisms of family environments on arts learning.

Emotion and expertise: how listeners with formal music training use cues to perceive emotion

Although studies of musical emotion often focus on the role of the composer and performer, the communicative process is also influenced by the listener's musical background or experience. Given the equivocal nature of evidence regarding the effects of musical training, the role of listener expertise in conveyed musical emotion remains opaque. Here we examine emotional responses of musically trained listeners across two experiments using (1) eight measure excerpts, (2) musically resolved excerpts and compare them to responses collected from untrained listeners in Battcock and Schutz (2019). In each experiment 30 participants with six or more years of music training rated perceived emotion for 48 excerpts from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) using scales of valence and arousal. Models of listener ratings predict more variance in trained vs. untrained listeners across both experiments. More importantly however, we observe a shift in cue weights related to training. Using commonality analysis and Fischer Z score comparisons as well as margin of error calculations, we show that timing and mode affect untrained listeners equally, whereas mode plays a significantly stronger role than timing for trained listeners. This is not to say the emotional messages are less well recognized by untrained listeners-simply that training appears to shift the relative weight of cues used in making evaluations. These results clarify music training's potential impact on the specific effects of cues in conveying musical emotion.