The Effects of Music on Atmosphere in a Bank and a Bar1

This paper reports 2 studies of the effects of music on customers' perceptions of the atmosphere in a city center bank and a city center bar, respectively. In the first study, classical music, easy‐listening music, and no music were played over the course of 3 weeks, and customers were asked to rate the banking hall in which it was played and the music in terms of twenty 10‐point adjectival scales. Customers' responses indicated a positive correlation between ratings of the banking hall and the music on each of the scales. There were also statistically significant differences between the conditions on factor scores derived from a factor analysis of responses to the banking hall. The second study employed a similar methodology over 9 days in a bar, comparing classical, pop, and no music. Customers rated the atmosphere of the bar and the music played there in terms of II adjectival scales. Once again there was a positive correlation between ratings of the listening environment and ratings of the music. Type of music and volume level gave rise to main effects on ratings of the bar in terms of these adjectives. Factor analysis of the ratings gave rise to 3 factors, which were similar to those obtained in the first study, and also to those in an earlier study situated in a university cafeteria. Finally, there were significant Type of Music × Time of Day, and Volume × Time of Day interactions on customers' estimates of the maximum sum they would be prepared to pay for products on sale in the bar. These results demonstrate that music can have reliable effects on atmosphere and purchase intentions in commercial environments.     

Music and social identity: Stylistic identification as a response to musical style

One function of music is considered to be defining social identity for oneself and for others. This aspect of musical styles was investigated in the light of Social Identity Theory by examining how a college student population described fans of different musical styles. Respondents were questioned about their perception of listeners of six musical styles, two of which were indigenous to Turkey. Three basic dimensions that described the listeners of these styles emerged as the result of factor and scale reliability analyses. These dimensions were labelled the sophisticated, the sprightly, and the loser. Respondents associated these features with fans of different styles to different extents. The sprightly dimension characterized listeners of pop, rock, and rap best. The sophisticated dimension was most closely associated with listeners of classical and Turkish folk music. Listening to Arabesk, which is a style that is specific to Turkey, was most closely associated with the loser dimension. Consistent with the predictions of Social Identity Theory, evaluations by a person were affected by the attitude of that person towards a style in the cases of rock and Turkish folk music. Especially on the sophisticated dimension, respondents who liked rock or Turkish folk music rated the listeners of these styles closer to the ideal than respondents who disliked them. However, the self‐evaluations of these groups were similar. Furthermore, respondents typically described themselves as being closer to the ideal value on the three dimensions than the listeners of musical styles they liked. These results provide considerable support for the idea that liking a musical style shows characteristics of group membership according to Social Identity Theory.     

How do location and control over the music influence listeners’ responses?

This study uses Mehrabian and Russell's ( 1974 ) Pleasure‐Arousal‐Dominance (PAD) model to consider how responses to both the music heard and overall in‐situ listening experience are influenced by the listener's degree of control over music selected for a particular listening episode and the location in which the listening takes place. Following recruitment via campus advertisements and a university research participation program, 216 individuals completed a background questionnaire and music listening task in a 3 (location) × 2 (experimenter‐ or participant‐selected music) design. After the listening task, participants completed a short questionnaire concerning the music they heard and the overall in‐situ listening experience. Results demonstrated that there was a positive relationship between control and liking for the music and episode, whether the former was considered in terms of: (1) whether the music was self‐selected or experimenter‐selected or (2) overt ratings of perceived control. Furthermore, the location and liking for the music were related to people's judgments of their enjoyment of the overall experience. This research indicates that the PAD model is a useful framework for understanding everyday music listening and supports the contention that, in a musical context, dominance may be operationalized as control over the music.     

Responses to Music in a Dining Area1

Berlyne's theory of aesthetic response was tested in an ecologically valid setting by playing music in a university cafeteria. Four music conditions were employed representing low, high, and moderate complexity new age music, and moderate complexity mechanical organ music. Response measures were how readily diners cited the music as an aspect of the environment which they might like to change, and how much they liked the music. Liking for the new age extracts was consistent with Berlyne's theory, although liking for the moderate complexity mechanical organ music indicated that factors other than complexity may also determine musical preference. As dislike became more extreme, music became more salient as a feature of the environment that subjects might like to change.     

Does recall of a past music event invoke a reminiscence bump in young adults?

Many studies of the reminiscence bump (RB) in music invoke memories from different autobiographical times by using stimulus specific prompts (SSPs). This study investigated the utility of a non-SSP paradigm to determine whether the RB would emerge when participants were asked to recall a single memorable musical event from “a time long ago”. The presence of a RB in response to music has not been obtained in such a manner for younger participants. Eighty-eight 20–22 year olds reported music episodes that peaked when their autobiographical age was 13–14 years. Self-selected stimuli included a range of musical styles, including classical and non-Western pop forms, such as J-pop and K-pop, as well as generational pop music, such as the Beatles. However, most participants reported pop/rock music that was contemporaneous with encoding age, providing support for the utility of published SSP paradigms using pop music. Implications for and limitations of SSP paradigms are discussed. Participants were also asked to relate the selected musical piece to current musical tastes. Most participants liked the music that they selected, with many continuing to like the music, but most also reported a general broadening of their taste, consistent with developmental literature on open-earedness.     

The structure of musical preferences: a five-factor model

Music is a cross-cultural universal, a ubiquitous activity found in every known human culture. Individuals demonstrate manifestly different preferences in music, and yet relatively little is known about the underlying structure of those preferences. Here, we introduce a model of musical preferences based on listeners' affective reactions to excerpts of music from a wide variety of musical genres. The findings from 3 independent studies converged to suggest that there exists a latent 5-factor structure underlying music preferences that is genre free and reflects primarily emotional/affective responses to music. We have interpreted and labeled these factors as (a) a Mellow factor comprising smooth and relaxing styles; (b) an Unpretentious factor comprising a variety of different styles of sincere and rootsy music such as is often found in country and singer-songwriter genres; (c) a Sophisticated factor that includes classical, operatic, world, and jazz; (d) an Intense factor defined by loud, forceful, and energetic music; and (e) a Contemporary factor defined largely by rhythmic and percussive music, such as is found in rap, funk, and acid jazz. The findings from a fourth study suggest that preferences for the MUSIC factors are affected by both the social and the auditory characteristics of the music.     

Musical pleasure beneficially alters stride and arm swing amplitude during rhythmically-cued walking in people with Parkinson's disease

Entrainment of walking to rhythmic auditory cues (e.g., metronome and/or music) improves gait in people with Parkinson's disease (PD). Studies on healthy individuals indicate that entrainment to pleasant musical rhythm can be more beneficial for gait facilitation than entrainment to isochronous rhythm, potentially as a function of emotional/motivational responses to music and their associated influence on motor function. Here, we sought to investigate how emotional attributes of music and isochronous cues influence stride and arm swing amplitude in people with PD. A within-subjects experimental trial was completed with persons with PD serving as their own controls. Twenty-three individuals with PD walked to the cue of self-chosen pleasant music cue, pitch-distorted unpleasant music, and an emotionally neutral isochronous drumbeat. All music cues were tempo-matched to individual walking pace at baseline. Greater gait velocity, stride length, arm swing peak velocity and arm swing range of motion (RoM) were found when patients walked to pleasant music cues compared to baseline, walking to unpleasant music, and walking to isochronous cues. Cued walking in general marginally increased variability of stride-to-stride time and length compared with uncued walking. Enhanced stride and arm swing amplitude were most strongly associated with increases in perceived enjoyment and pleasant musical emotions such as power, tenderness, and joyful activation. Musical pleasure contributes to improvement of stride and arm swing amplitude in people with PD, independent of perceived familiarity with music, cognitive demands of music listening, and beat salience. Our findings aid in understanding the role of musical pleasure in invigorating gait in PD, and inform novel approaches for restoring or compensating impaired motor circuits.     

Uses of music and psychological well-being among the elderly

A questionnaire was sent to a random sample of 500 community living older adults in Sweden (aged 65–75 years). The questionnaire assessed uses of music in everyday life: frequency of listening, situations where music is encountered, emotional responses to music, and motives for listening (i.e., listening strategies). Also, different facets of psychological well-being (e.g., affective well-being, life satisfaction, and eudaimonic well-being) and selected background variables (e.g., education level, health status, activity level, and Big-5 personality characteristics) were assessed. Results showed that listening to music is a common leisure activity encountered in many everyday situations, and that listening to music is a frequent source of positive emotions for older adults. Also, the participants reported using a variety of listening strategies related to emotional functions (e.g., pleasure, mood regulation, and relaxation) and issues of identity, belonging, and agency. The associations between listening strategies and well-being were explored through correlation and multiple regression analyses where the influence of background variables was controlled for. Health status and personality were the most important predictors of well-being, but some listening strategies were also significantly associated with psychological well-being. The results give important insights into older adults’ uses of music in everyday life and give clues regarding possible relationships between musical activities and well-being.     

Sadness and happiness are amplified in solitary listening to music

Previous studies have shown that music is a powerful means to convey affective states, but it remains unclear whether and how social context shape the intensity and quality of emotions perceived in music. Using a within-subject design, we studied this question in two experimental settings, i.e. when subjects were alone versus in company of others without direct social interaction or feedback. Non-vocal musical excerpts of the emotional qualities happiness or sadness were rated on arousal and valence dimensions. We found evidence for an amplification of perceived emotion in the solitary listening condition, i.e. happy music was rated as happier and more arousing when nobody else was around and, in an analogous manner, sad music was perceived as sadder. This difference might be explained by a shift of attention in the presence of others. The observed interaction of perceived emotion and social context did not differ for stimuli of different cultural origin.     

The Subject (of) Listening

Jean-Luc Nancy's phenomenology of listening (trans. 2007) makes a series of claims about the sonic/auditory nature of the subject. First among these is the claim that the subject is a subject to the extent that it is listening, that it is all ears. The subject emerges on the back of the resonance of timbre in the body and the body's becoming-rhythmic. These claims are phrased often in musical terms, or making use of terms and rhetoric from the domains of music theory and music psychology. This article explores the role of music in Nancy's phenomenology with a particular view to the nature of listening in the contemporary world: both how listening is figured as a part of what Nancy terms the inoperative community and how listening figures the cognitive and phenomenological constitution of the subject.     

Young People's Musical Taste: Relationship With Gender and Gender‐Related Traits1

The present study extended previous findings of gender differences in young people's musical taste by examining whether identification with gender‐related expressive or instrumental traits contributes to these differences, and by examining the underlying structure of musical taste by gender. The results confirmed greater liking of heavier contemporary music among men and of chart pop music among women. Gender was a stronger predictor of taste for gender‐stereotyped styles than identification with gender‐related traits. The structure of style preferences in dimensions relating to mainstream styles varied by gender. Men and participants with higher scores on expressiveness gave higher ratings to more styles. The findings are discussed in relation to gender differences in the use of music and gender‐role socialization.     

Relative alpha desynchronization and synchronization during perception of music

Relative desynchronization (ERD) and synchronization (ERS) of the 8–10 Hz and 10–12 Hz alpha freqency bands elicited by music were studied in ten musically untrained right-handed subjects. The subjects listened to two five-minute musical excerpts representing two different musical genres, popular and classical, presented both foward and backward. ERD/ERS of the two alpha frequency bands was examined during the first four minutes of stimulus presentation using one-minute time windows. The results demonstrated that both the 8–10 Hz and the 10–12Hz frequency band exhibited reactivity to musical stimuli. The responses of the 8–10Hz and 10–12 Hz alpha frequency bands were dissimilar, dymanic and dependent on both time and stimulation type. The dynamics of these changes over time may explain some discrepancies in earlier EEG studies during listening to music.     

背景音乐对消费者的影响：音乐契合度的视角

音乐契合度指的是背景音乐与广告、消费环境及商品特征等消费要素的契合程度。背景音乐与消费要素的契合可以体现在音乐特性、社会隐义和文化意蕴三个方面,这些契合程度能够对消费者的认知、情绪和行为等方面产生影响。若背景音乐的音乐特性与消费要素之间存在较高契合度,则能够提升消费者的注意效果、加强对商品的记忆并提升购买意图;背景音乐的社会隐义也能与消费要素产生契合关系,两者之间的契合程度决定了消费者对品牌的态度、情绪状态、对商品的记忆和选择;背景音乐与消费要素在文化意蕴方面的高度契合则能够促进消费者对品牌的态度、提升购买意愿、促进购买行为。未来研究应探索背景音乐更多的结构属性,进一步挖掘背景音乐影响消费者的边界条件,突破现有理论探索更深入的理论机制,并进一步探索音乐契合对于消费者认知和情绪的影响效应及其影响机制。     

Jazz and Musical Works: Hypnotized by the Wrong Model

It is difficult to place jazz within a philosophy of music dominated by the concepts and practices of classical music. One key puzzle concerns the nature and role, if any, of musical works in jazz. I briefly describe the debate between those who deny that there are musical works in jazz (Andrew Kania) and those who affirm that there are such (Julian Dodd and others), and I distinguish between claiming that there are no musical works in the jazz tradition and the more provocative claim that they are not performed in jazz performances. I argue that each side of this debate is partially right and that the first step toward resolving the puzzle is to reject inappropriate concepts of a musical work. In particular, Kania's and Lydia Goehr's accounts, derived from classical music practice, are rejected as general accounts of musical works. I then contrast the norms governing work performance in classical music (the werktreue ideal) with the practices governing performances of works in jazz, which I call realization or staging. Finally, I propose a model of jazz appreciation that incorporates a role for jazz works and that fundamentally differs from the way that classical musical performances are appreciated.     

Reduced Memory Representations for Music

We address the problem of musical variation (identification of different musical sequences as variations) and its implications for mental representations of music. According to reductionist theories, listeners judge the structural importance of musical events while forming mental representations. These judgments may result from the production of reduced memory representations that retain only the musical gist. In a study of improvised music performance, pianists produced variations on melodies. Analyses of the musical events retained across variations provided support for the reductionist account of structural importance. A neural network trained to produce reduced memory representations for the same melodies represented structurally important events more efficiently than others. Agreement among the musicians' improvisations, the network model, and music-theoretic predictions suggest that perceived constancy across musical variation is a natural result of a reductionist mechanism for producing memory representations.     

THE BIAS OF “MUSIC‐INFECTED CONSCIOUSNESS”: THE AESTHETICS OF LISTENING IN THE LABORATORY AND ON THE CITY STREETS OF FIN‐DE‐SIÈCLE BERLIN AND VIENNA

Shifts in the psychophysical study of sound sensation reinforced the changing status of musical expertise in the nineteenth century. The Carl Stumpf‐Wilhelm Wundt debate about tone‐differentiation experimentation narrowed the conception of hearing. For Stumpf, “music consciousness” ( M usikbewusstsein) granted the experimental subjects exceptional insight into sound sensation. This belief reflected a cultural reevaluation of listening, exemplified in music critic Eduard Hanslick decrying the scourge of the city: the piano playing of the neighbors. Stumpf and Hanslick's defenses of subjective musical expertise both inside the laboratory and on the city streets reveal the increasingly divergent conceptions of hearing and listening.     

Aggressive Outcomes and Videogame Play: The Role of Length of Play and the Mechanisms at Work

We conducted three experiments to rectify methodological limitations of prior studies on selective exposure to music and, thereby, clarify the nature of the impact of sad mood on music preference. In all studies, we experimentally manipulated mood (sad vs. neutral in Experiments 1 and 2; sad vs. neutral vs. happy in Experiment 3) and then assessed participants' preferences for expressively happy versus sad musical selections. To further help illuminate the reasons for their music preferences, we also asked participants to indicate how they believed listening to each song would affect their current emotional state as well as how appropriate they felt it would be to select a given song. Results suggested that individuals in sad moods were not reliably inclined to listen to sad songs, but rather, were strongly averse to listening to happy songs, apparently out of concern that choosing such songs would feel inappropriate. We discuss implications of these findings for theories of selective media exposure and emotion regulation.     

When music tempo affects the temporal congruence between physical practice and motor imagery

When people listen to music, they hear beat and a metrical structure in the rhythm; these perceived patterns enable coordination with the music. A clear correspondence between the tempo of actual movement (e.g., walking) and that of music has been demonstrated, but whether similar coordination occurs during motor imagery is unknown. Twenty participants walked naturally for 8 m, either physically or mentally, while listening to slow and fast music, or not listening to anything at all (control condition). Executed and imagined walking times were recorded to assess the temporal congruence between physical practice (PP) and motor imagery (MI). Results showed a difference when comparing slow and fast time conditions, but each of these durations did not differ from soundless condition times, hence showing that body movement may not necessarily change in order to synchronize with music. However, the main finding revealed that the ability to achieve temporal congruence between PP and MI times was altered when listening to either slow or fast music. These data suggest that when physical movement is modulated with respect to the musical tempo, the MI efficacy of the corresponding movement may be affected by the rhythm of the music. Practical applications in sport are discussed as athletes frequently listen to music before competing while they mentally practice their movements to be performed.     

Music and driving game performance

This study investigated the effects of the nature of music and a concurrent task on measures of task performance and musical preference. Subjects completed 5 laps of a computer motor racing game whilst listening to either arousing or relatively unarousing music in either the presence or absence of a backward-counting task. Both these manipulations affected performance on the game with arousing music and backward-counting leading to slower lap times than relatively unarousing music and the absence of the backward-counting task. Backward-counting led to lower liking for the music than did the absence of this task. These results support the idea that music and the concurrent task competed for a limited processing resource. The results also indicated that liking for the music was positively related to task performance, and in conjunction these findings seem to suggest a direct link between music and the listening context.     

Rhythm histograms and musical meter: A corpus study of Malian percussion music

Studies of musical corpora have given empirical grounding to the various features that characterize particular musical styles and genres. Palmer & Krumhansl (1990) found that in Western classical music the likeliest places for a note to occur are the most strongly accented beats in a measure, and this was also found in subsequent studies using both Western classical and folk music corpora (Huron & Ommen, 2006; Temperley, 2010). We present a rhythmic analysis of a corpus of 15 performances of percussion music from Bamako, Mali. In our corpus, the relative frequency of note onsets in a given metrical position does not correspond to patterns of metrical accent, though there is a stable relationship between onset frequency and metrical position. The implications of this non-congruence between simple statistical likelihood and metrical structure for the ways in which meter and metrical accent may be learned and understood are discussed, along with importance of cross-cultural studies for psychological research.