Music Psychology

After lunch on the first day there was the first ‘emotion in music’ session, which contained three talks. I was hoping to see evidence for a move past the old methods of simply measuring people’s moods as they listen to different music, and indeed I was not disappointed. This session contained four different studies looking at very different methods in this growing field of study. 1) The first talk was on musical induction and persistence of mood and was given by Marjolein van der Zwaag.  Marjolein works for Philips who are apparently looking to develop a music player that responds to the mood of the listener by measuring basic bio-physiological…

There were three papers in this symposium, which focused on the effects of musical experience on musical development during infancy. They were nicely organised to include one paper on newborns, one on 6-12 month olds, and finally one on toddlers.  Glenn Schellenberg provided discussion at the end. 1) Henkjan Honing presented a study which investigated whether beat induction is a fundamental cognitive mechanism contributing to musicality and the origins of music. In order to answer this question his research group sought to determine if newborn babies (2 days) can induce the beat in music. If newborns notice a change to a beat then the assumption is that we are born…