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.