Top Research Papers on Music

The Psychology of Music provides an overview of the perception of musical tones by discussing different sound characteristics, like loudness, pitch and timbre, together with interaction between these attributes.

Music is ubiquitous across human cultures - as a source of affective and pleasurable experience, moving us both physically and emotionally - and learning to play music shapes both brain structure and brain function. Music processing in the brain - namely, the perception of melody, harmony and rhythm - has traditionally been studied as an auditory phenomenon using passive listening paradigms. However, when listening to music, we actively generate predictions about what is likely to happen next. This enactive aspect has led to a more comprehensive understanding of music processing involving brai...

The proposed Therapeutic Music Capacities Model (TMCM) accounts for the profound value that music affords human health and well-being and provides a framework for the development of non-pharmaceutical treatments for neurological disorders.

A Pop Music Transformer is built that composes Pop piano music with better rhythmic structure than existing Transformer models, when the way a musical score is converted into the data fed to a Transformer model is improved.

In 1947 Theodor Adorno, one of the seminal European philosophers of the postwar years, announced his return after exile in the United States to a devastated Europe by writing Philosophy of New Music. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even reviled it. Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical repr...

Evidence of implementing the online flipped classroom approach to enhance students’ satisfaction and knowledge acquisition throughout Shubailan music making processes is presented, and recommendations for online music educators are offered.

A novel music recommendation technique based on the identification of personality traits, moods, and emotions of a single user, starting from solid psychological observations recognized by the analysis of user behavior within a social environment is described.

The knowledge and algorithms involved in each part are introduced with detailed analysis, including some commonly used datasets, emotion models, feature extraction, and emotion recognition algorithms.

It is shown that the combined model at scale can generate high-fidelity and diverse songs with coherence up to multiple minutes, and can condition on artist and genre to steer the musical and vocal style, and on unaligned lyrics to make the singing more controllable.

Abstract Music: A Very Short Introduction is a study of music and thinking about music, focusing on its social, cultural, and historical dimensions. It draws on a wealth of accessible examples, ranging from Beethoven to Chinese zither music. This VSI also discusses the nature of music as a real-time performance practice; the role of music in social and political action; and the nature of musical thinking, including the roles played in it by instruments, notations, and creative imagination. Digital technology has had a massive impact on the production and consumption of music, including transfo...

This article examines the case of the music streaming service Spotify to think through the variety of means, sonic, and otherwise, that artists, labels, and other platform stakeholders use to “optimize” music to respond to the pressures platformization creates.

Abstract Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT) is a form of music therapy developed for people suffering from cognitive, sensory, or motor dysfunctions arising from neurological diseases of the nervous system. People who can benefit from this therapy include sufferers from stroke, traumatic brain injury, Parkinson's and Huntington's disease, cerebral palsy, Alzheimer's disease, autism, and other neurological diseases affecting cognition, movement, and communication (e.g. muscular sclerosis, muscular dystrophy). The Handbook of Neurologic Music Therapy is a comprehensive landmark text presenting a new...

Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys the current state of the field and offers a number of concrete recommendations focused on issues involving ethics, empirical methods, and definitions o...

Abstract World Music: A Very Short Introduction looks at the history of world music and its many definitions. ‘World music’ is more than a marketing term for the music industry. During the Enlightenment, the idea of the ‘folk song’ encouraged European audiences to imagine music from around the world. Technology helped to create the ‘audio moment’—the transformation of sound into material which could be recorded and distributed worldwide. Throughout history, music has been used to express unity and national pride. World music both foregrounds and transgresses borders. Ideas in different culture...

A natural question arising in Music Source Separation (MSS) is whether long range contextual information is useful, or whether local acoustic features are sufficient. In other fields, attention based Transformers [1] have shown their ability to integrate information over long sequences. In this work, we introduce Hybrid Transformer Demucs (HT Demucs), an hybrid temporal/spectral bi-U-Net based on Hybrid Demucs [2], where the innermost layers are replaced by a cross-domain Transformer Encoder, using self-attention within one domain, and cross-attention across domains. While it performs poorly w...

For over twenty years, music theory has tried to diversify with respect to race, yet the field today remains remarkably white, not only in terms of the people who practice music theory but also in the race of the composers and theorists whose work music theory privileges. In this paper, a critical-race examination of the field of music theory, I try to come to terms with why this is so. I posit that there exists a “white racial frame” in music theory that is structural and institutionalized, and that only through a deframing and reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positiv...

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archaeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psych...

MusicLM is introduced, a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as "a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff" that can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption.

This work proposes ``Music Gesture," a keypoint-based structured representation to explicitly model the body and finger movements of musicians when they perform music, which adopts a context-aware graph network to integrate visual semantic context with body dynamics and applies an audio-visual fusion model to associate body movements with the corresponding audio signals.

It is argued that, because AD begins decades before the presentation of clinical symptoms, music interventions might be a promising means to delay and decelerate the neurodegeneration in individuals at risk for AD, such as individuals with genetic risk or subjective cognitive decline.

Band-split RNN (BSRNN) is proposed, a frequency-domain model that explictly splits the spectrogram of the mixture into subbands and perform interleaved band-level and sequence-level modeling and a semi-supervised model finetuning pipeline that can further improve the performance of the model.

This article presents a survey on the existing emotionally-relevant computational audio features, supported by the music psychology literature on the relations between eight musical dimensions and specific emotions.

This work introduces Editable Dance GEneration (EDGE), a state-of-the-art method for editable dance generation that is capable of creating realistic, physically-plausible dances while remaining faithful to the input music.

This article proposes a novel autoregressive generative model, DanceNet, to take the style, rhythm, and melody of music as the control signals to generate 3D dance motions with high realism and diversity and proposes the dilated convolution to improve the receptive field.

With the aid of AI, the combination of intelligent technology and on-site teaching solves the lack of individuation in the traditional mode and enhances students’ interest in learning.

Significance Do our subjective experiences when listening to music show evidence of universality? And if so, what is the nature of these experiences? With data-driven methodological and statistical approaches, we examined the feelings evoked by 2,168 music excerpts in the United States and China. We uncovered 13 distinct types of experiences that people across 2 different cultures report in listening to music of different kinds. Categories such as “awe” drive the experience of music more so than broad affective features like valence. However, emotions that scientists have long treated as discr...

Current knowledge and new evidence on how music preference factors into enhancing performance in various modes of exercise will be further discussed, incorporating practical considerations for individuals and practitioners in real-world applications to optimize performance.

A notion of fairness based on the performance gap of a RS between the users with different demographics is defined, and a variety of collaborative filtering algorithms are evaluated in terms of accuracy and beyond-accuracy metrics to explore the fairness in the RS results toward a specific gender group.

The results of an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) indicate large clusters in a range of structures, including amygdala, anterior hippocampus, auditory cortex, and numerous structures of the reward network, which underline the rewarding nature of music, the role of the auditory cortex as an emotional hub, and therole of the hippocampus in attachment-related emotions and social bonding.

It is suggested that more musicians rather than fewer might now be able to earn money from recorded music than in preceding recorded-music systems, and that better debate requires greater transparency about usage and payment on the part of streaming services and music businesses.

A GAN-based cross-modal association framework, DeepDance, which correlates two different modalities (dance motion and music) together, aiming at creating the desired dance sequence in terms of the input music, and is able to create long realistic dance sequences.

A multilevel meta-analysis showed that music therapy showed an overall medium-to-large effect on stress-related outcomes, and larger effects were found for clinical controlled trials compared to randomized controlled trials (RCT), waiting list controls instead of care as usual (CAU) or other stress-reducing interventions, and for studies conducted in Non-Western countries compared to Western countries.

Using the MCA for MPPT of PV systems considerably provided lower convergence times and failure rates than other optimization algorithms, and the results prove the superiority of the newly proposed MCA in the MPPTs of the PV system.

This research was conducted at PT. Musical Instruments that aim to analyze quality control to reduce appearance defects in piano products on the assembling production line. The problem faced by the company is the high level of product defects which has an impact on decreasing quality and customer satisfaction. The research method used is Six sigma with a DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) approach. This type of research is quantitative, with data collected in the form of the number of production defects in pianos. To analyze the causes of defects, a fishbone diagram with 4M + 1...

This article analyzes platform power dynamics through three of the most important markets that Spotify—the leading audio streaming platform—is embedded within: the music market; the advertising market; and the finance market through the lens of the playlist.

The results suggest that music interventions may have a large anxiety-reducing effect in adults with cancer, with a reported average anxiety reduction of 7.73 units.

This paper develops a novel CNN architecture that takes the multi-scale time-frequency information into considerations, which transfers more suitable semantic features for the decision-making layer to discriminate the genre of the unknown music clip.

It was shown that the intervention with music improves cognitive function in people living with dementia, as well as quality of life after the intervention and long-term depression.

Ballad of the Bullet is a sociological ethnography of drill musicians in Chicago in a neighbourhood dubbed Chiraq. Based on two years participant observation, the book follows a collective of drill...

The proposed AIST++ dataset contains 5.2 hours of 3D dance motion in 1408 sequences, covering 10 dance genres with multi-view videos with known camera poses—the largest dataset of this kind to the authors' knowledge.