Browsing by Subject "Music perception"
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Item Music in motion : associations between musical pitch and visuospatial direction in infants and adults(2010-05) Brock, Ashley Heather; Gilden, David Loren, 1954-; Cohen, Leslie B.; Woolley, Jacqueline D.; Meier, Richard P.; Hixon, John G.Although many researchers investigate the senses separately, most people have a coherent conscious experience of the world that is not divided into separate perceptions of vision, hearing, or other senses. The brain integrates the information received from our senses into a unified representation of the world around us. Previous research has demonstrated that what people perceive with one sense can influence their perception of stimuli with the other senses (Roffler & Butler, 1968; Marks, 2000). The current set of studies was designed to illuminate the associations between musical pitch and visuospatial motion. The first two experiments with infants revealed that 11-month-old infants are sensitive to associations between ascending and descending musical pitch and the direction of an object’s motion. Additionally, two more experiments with infants revealed that infants of the same age do not show the associations of rightward motion with ascending pitch and leftward motion with descending pitch that adults have demonstrated in some experiments (Eitan & Granot, 2006). The fifth experiment tested the influence of ascending and descending musical stimuli on making a visuospatial motion to a target location. Adult subjects demonstrated faster reaction times when using a trackball to move a cursor to a target location on a computer screen when the direction of the target was congruent with the musical stimulus to which they were listening. The effect was stronger for vertical target locations than for horizontal target locations. The results of these studies indicate that both infants and adults are sensitive to associations between musical pitch and visuospatial motion in the vertical plane, and adults may also make associations between musical pitch and visuospatial motion in the horizontal plane.Item The power of music: The composition and perception of emotion in melody(2011-08) Trenck, Megan; Martens, Peter; Berry, Michael F.; Larsen, Jeff T.To investigate some specifics of what makes emotions attributable to melody, a combination of undergraduate and graduate music majors at Texas Tech University were asked to compose a melody depicting either happiness or sadness. No restrictions were placed on the use of time signature, key signature, or tempo, but melodies were restricted to one monophonic line of music. Melodies were analyzed for several structural features, some of which were drawn from previous studies, such as mode and note density, and others that are new to the present project, such as melodic span, and melodic contour. Next, a perceptual study was conducted to help determine how well melodies portrayed the intended emotions. Forty-nine undergraduate music majors rated their perceptions of twelve different emotions in each of the melodies; six emotions were positively valenced, including happy, and six emotions were negatively valenced, including sad. Perceptions of emotion in melody were dependent on several contributing factors ranging from those widely used such as mode and note density, to those not often connected with perceived emotion such as melodic contour and formal design. Overall, however, different combinations of these factors in individual melodies demonstrated that no single musical factor can determine emotional content.