Browse Articles

People react to music by moving and dancing. This study examined if different types of music were correlated with higher heart rates and if this was at all affected by music preferences.

Different songs can seem to evoke different emotions. Here the authors demonstrate that different songs can have a significant effect on the heart rate of listeners. A slower song slows heart rate, and a faster song increases it.

Here, the authors sought to better understand how and why people experience beauty in music. They explored this fundamental aesthetic response by considering numerous emotional responses of participants to diverse musical excerpts using a 42-item Aesthetic Emotions Scale assessment. They found that the highly nuanced emotional experience of beauty in music includes positive, negative, and knowledge-related feelings.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are useful for text generation since they can generate outputs in the context of previous ones. Baroque music and language are similar, as every word or note exists in context with others, and they both follow strict rules. The authors hypothesized that if we represent music in a text format, an RNN designed to generate language could train on it and create music structurally similar to Bach’s. They found that the music generated by our RNN shared a similar structure with Bach’s music in the input dataset, while Bachbot’s outputs are significantly different from this experiment’s outputs and thus are less similar to Bach’s repertoire compared to our algorithm.

Music is an important part of the day for many of us, but what makes some combinations of sound more pleasant to the ear than others? In this article the authors investigate the role of some characteristics of sound on the perception of a pleasant vs harsh musical note.

Jazz music is a unique American art form that has spread around the world. Iyer and Iyer study this spread through a computational sociology project examining how jazz popularity is correlated with postmaterialism (an ideology that values self-expression) and political activity.

In this article, the authors identify the characteristics that make a book a best-seller. Knowing what, besides content, predicts the success of a book can help publishers maximize the success of their print products.

Here, the authors investigated the role of nonpharmacological interventions in preventing or delaying cognitive impairment in individuals with and without dementia. By using a retrospective case-control study of 22 participants across two senior centers in San Diego, they found no significant differences in self-reported activities. However, they found that their results reflected activity rather than the activity itself, suggesting the need for an alternative type of study.

Here seeking to identify a possible solution to procrastination among college students, the authors used an online experiment that involved the random assignment of study partners that they shared their study time goal with. These partners were classified by status and group membership. The authors found that status and group membership did not significantly affect the likelihood of college students achieving their committed goals, and also suggest the potential of soft commitment devices that take advantage of social relationships to reduce procrastination.

Here in an effort to better understand how our brains process and remember different categories of information, the authors assessed working memory capacity using an operation span task. They found that individuals with higher working memory capacity had higher overall higher task accuracy regardless of the type of category or the type of visual distractors they had to process. They suggest this may play a role in how some students may be less affected by distracting stimuli compared to others.