Musicae Scientiae

Numerous studies have investigated the effects of pitch structures on perceived emotion in music, but the emotional effects of rhythm and meter have received far less attention. In the experiment reported here, we manipulated the metrical framework of music by Robert Schumann and asked participants to judge perceived emotion in the resulting excerpts. The distinction between metrical dissonance and consonance offered by Harald Krebs (1999) was the theoretical basis of this study. Stimuli were 10 metrically dissonant excerpts from Schumann’s Carnaval and 10 metrically consonant recompositions of these excerpts. Recompositions maintained original tempi, global meters, and harmonic frameworks. Participants—graduate-level pianists and non-musicians—heard all 20 excerpts in randomized order. On each trial, they chose a cluster of emotion words, based on Schubert (2003), that best described the excerpt, a cluster that worst described the excerpt, and rated their level of interest. Results indicate significant effects of both metrical character and expertise on perceived emotion. There were also significant differences in the likelihood of participants changing their responses between metrically dissonant and consonant versions as a function of musical excerpt. This last finding leads to suggestions for future investigations on degrees of metrical dissonance.

Recent studies have provided empirical support for the suggestion that there is an antithetical relationship between music performance anxiety (MPA) and flow, and that this antithetical relationship may have useful clinical applications for facilitating optimal performance by both encouraging flow and reducing MPA. In order to develop music performance skills interventions that can help facilitate optimal performance, promote psychological health, and are tailored to the particular needs of individual musicians, it is important to understand the contribution of contextual (e.g., orchestral role, instrument, performance context) and background variables (e.g., gender, age, culture) to experiences of MPA and flow, and the relationships between these variables. The current study investigated the contribution of background and contextual variables to experiences of MPA and flow in a sample of 202 professional orchestral musicians in Israel. The study findings showed evidence of significantly higher flow in principal players than associate principals and tutti players. Associate principals had higher MPA than principal players, percussionists experienced higher flow and lower MPA than string players, there was a significant moderating effect of instrument on the negative association between MPA and flow, and age was significantly positively associated with flow. The implications of the findings for developing methods for facilitating optimal performing experience are discussed.

Groove is a common experience in music listeners, often described as an enjoyable impulse to move in synchrony with the music. Research has suggested that the groove experience is influenced by listeners’ musical taste and their familiarity with a musical repertoire. This study reports the results from an online listening experiment in which 233 participants rated the groove quality of 208 short clips from different Western popular music styles. Findings show that participants’ familiarity with a song, its musical style, and listeners’ preference for that style have a considerable effect on the groove experience. Overall, pop and funk stimuli triggered a stronger groove experience than rock stimuli. Listeners had a tendency to give high groove ratings to music they had heard before and to music that belonged to a style they liked. Results also show that professional musicians had a tendency to experience more groove in response to funk compared to pop music, whereas non-musicians experienced more groove with pop compared to funk. Together, these effects explained approximately 15% of the groove ratings’ variance. In sum, listeners’ attitudes and their musical backgrounds have a considerable impact on their experience of groove.

This study aimed to uncover potential effects on and meanings experienced by audience members who participated in performances (‘participants’) of intentional efforts to integrate participatory elements in art music practice. We document a recent project in which two contemporary composers were commissioned to write new pieces including parts for audience participants. We analysed observational and questionnaire data from three concerts that interrogated the experiences of participants at three participatory performances in different countries (n = 273), and identified key emergent themes from participant responses: special group experience, interactive musical experience, experiencing shifting power relationships as well as an evaluative theme about the consequences of participatory elements. These categories connected substantially to concepts of active/passive, empowerment and community prevalent in discourses about participatory theatre. Quantitative analysis of participants’ ratings showed high levels of affective and cognitive engagement, moderated most by prior attendance at a preparatory workshop, and least by demographics or levels of prior musical engagement/experience.

Both music-theoretic accounts and corpus analyses indicate that rock routinely employs chords that deviate from the norms of common-practice music. Yet we know little about how listeners experience the chords that make up rock’s liberal harmonic palette. In the present study, participants in two online experiments rated major chords that followed a short tonal sequence (a major scale + tonic major triad). Liking ratings obtained in Experiment 1 replicated earlier work showing that listeners prefer rock-typical targets—chords that are common in rock, but lie outside the basic diatonic set—to atypical, rarely used targets (Craton, Juergens, Michalak, & Poirier, 2016). Goodness of fit ratings with the same stimuli in Experiment 2 were similar to the liking ratings. High ratings for rock-typical target chords across the two experiments were not an artifact of their register and the pattern of responses was similar across four levels level of music training. In addition, the mean fitness ratings were approximated by simulations conducted with an auditory short-term memory (ASTM) model (Leman, 2000). Considered together, the findings provide evidence that listeners perceive rock-typical chords to be normal components of a key and that they may do so based on information in the auditory signal alone, without recourse to statistical learning mechanisms or representations of tonal knowledge. We speculate that bottom-up processes operating directly on the auditory signal create a perceptual ranking of chord fitness, which provides the harmonic palette from which composers/improvisers in different musical systems may conservatively (common-practice) or liberally (rock) choose. The mean data are available in tabular form for modelers in the online supplemental material.

This study examines what creativity means to a group of Taiwanese music teachers and how it relates to their classroom experiences and teaching practices. The research followed a qualitative, interpretative approach. Interviews were used to gather data and were analysed according to phenomenographic principles. Analysis of the interviews indicated that two main approaches were taken by teachers regarding their experiences of creativity: a product-focused and a process-focused approach. In the product-focused approach, creativity was defined from the outside according to externally imposed factors, frames of reference and motivating forces. In the process-focused approach, creativity was defined from the inside, from the point of view of the individual involved, and in which personal agency, inclusion and collaboration were valued. The approach taken by teachers towards creativity also showed a relationship to how music education was perceived. Teachers who had a product-focused approach to creativity saw music education in terms of content, whereas those who were process focused had a meaning-oriented view of music education that valued the experience of students over the content that was taught. Similarly, a correspondence was found between how creativity was perceived and the nature of classroom interactions that varied between teacher centred and learner centred.