The authors looked at the effect of music therapy on visually impaired youth. They found that culturally relevant curricula is an important consideration while also showing that broadly music therapy enhances working memory, emotional well-being and inhibitory control.
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Investigating cross-cultural emotional responses to world music under simulated hearing loss
The authors survey how emotional responses to music differ across cultures and the impact of hearing loss on these emotional responses.
Read More...The influence of music on lexical decision-making in adolescents
The lexical decision task is designed to test aspects of vocabulary retrieval from short-term and long-term memory by prompting the subject to differentiate between words and non-words. From this task, researchers can determine the effects of certain stimuli on linguistic processing. Numerous studies have investigated the effects of music on various cognitive capacities, like memory and vocabulary. In the current study, we hypothesized that participants would show greater accuracy rates on the lexical decision task when exposed to a selected piece of classical music while completing the task, as compared to completing the task in silence. We tested this hypothesis on a group of 25 participants who completed the lexical decision task once in silence and once while listening to Beethoven's “Moonlight Sonata, 1st Movement”. The results suggest a positive association between the effects of classical background music and improved accuracy. Our results indicate that listening to certain types of music may enhance linguistic processes such as reading and writing. Further research with a larger group of participants is necessary to better understand the association between music and linguistic processing abilities.
Read More...Examining What Causes Perceived Dissonance in Musical Intervals and the Effect of Timbre on Dissonance
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.
Read More...Emotional and Psychological Effect of Music on People
Nolt and Elwonger examine how different types of music impact our emotional and physical states. They found that music can influence a subject's emotional state, with sad music inspiring sadness and exciting music bringing excitement. They were not able to find a clear relationship between heart rate and music type. Music's effect on emotional state can be useful when designing novel therapies for emotional and mental disorders.
Read More...Music's Effect on Dogs' Heart Rates
Music can affect the behavior of humans and other animals. In this study, the authors studied five types of music with different tempos and demonstrated how each one affected dogs' heart rates.
Read More...Does Music Directly Affect a Person’s Heart Rate?
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.
Read More...The Effect of Music on Heart Rate
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.
Read More...The effect of music on teenagers in combatting stress and improving performance
Here, the researchers investigated how exposure to active versus passive music affects a teenager's ability to perform a challenging task, namely a Sudoku puzzle, under stressful conditions. Following testing 75 high school teenagers split into two group, the researchers found that singing in a choir (active music) yielded a greater improvement in performance compared to passive listening for brief time periods.
Read More...The feeling of beauty in music: Relaxing and not confusing
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.
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