tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54302073720859230752024-03-18T22:40:07.985-07:00Smart Lab BlogSMART labhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239659544800634346noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430207372085923075.post-89770911057180404532017-07-18T07:43:00.000-07:002017-07-31T08:26:36.455-07:00Emotional communication in speech and music in hearing impaired and hearing aided individuals<style>@font-face {
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}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri; }p.MsoFootnoteText, li.MsoFootnoteText, div.MsoFootnoteText { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri; }span.MsoFootnoteReference { vertical-align: super; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: rgb(5, 99, 193); text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: rgb(149, 79, 114); text-decoration: underline; }p.MsoNoSpacing, li.MsoNoSpacing, div.MsoNoSpacing { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri; }span.FootnoteTextChar { }.MsoChpDefault { font-family: Calibri; }div.WordSection1 { }</style><i><b>Written by: </b>Rachel Hottle</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times"; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">The roar of a train, the laughter of
children, the swell of a symphony. All are colorful aspects of daily life that
are communicated to us via our sense of hearing. Hearing is an important asset
that helps us respond to and interact with the world around us. Age-related
hearing loss is a pervasive problem that often affects older adults’ quality of
life. Such hearing loss can make it difficult to perform everyday tasks, such
as determining where a sound is coming from, distinguishing speech from
background noise, and understanding emotions conveyed in speech—all of which
can lead to isolation and depression. Over the last few years, researchers in
the SMART (Science of Music, Auditory Research, and Technology) lab at Ryerson
University have become especially interested in the interaction between hearing
loss and perception of emotion from auditory cues. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj85gGA2pZ4AsLYIRaNw2XHpWsHQikJo40TxDfnSgPi5LJ1G23gaB_XPY36QWdPt7Jx3id13WPjfGZflcBL34xMlTekFUfmaakCPxPDYub3GPMtx1fZmVCk8hWlMuCBQVFXZ_jIzgg8_WQ/s1600/dreamstime_xxl_74687634.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj85gGA2pZ4AsLYIRaNw2XHpWsHQikJo40TxDfnSgPi5LJ1G23gaB_XPY36QWdPt7Jx3id13WPjfGZflcBL34xMlTekFUfmaakCPxPDYub3GPMtx1fZmVCk8hWlMuCBQVFXZ_jIzgg8_WQ/s320/dreamstime_xxl_74687634.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>Hearing is an important asset to help us respond to and interact with the world.</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "times"; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Perceiving and correctly identifying emotion
in speech is important for interacting with and responding to others, and the
loss of this ability can cause social isolation in older adults. Emotion is
conveyed in speech through features such as pitch contour and dynamic
contrasts. For example, emotions such as anger and fear tend to be conveyed in
a loud voice, while sadness and tenderness are conveyed via softer tones. In
hearing impaired individuals, constrictions in the dynamic range may cause
“loud” emotions to be less well differentiated from “quiet” emotions such as
fear. This dynamic range is often limited in individuals with sensorineural
hearing loss due to a problem known as recruitment. In sensorineural hearing
loss, some of the hair cells in the inner ears die and are no longer able to
convey sound information to the brain. Our brains “recruit” adjacent hair cells
to vibrate at the frequency of the dead hair cells, as well as their original
frequency. This causes the vibration reaching the brain to sound louder than
usual. It can also cause hearing distortion, as hair cells for multiple
frequencies can be vibrating at the same time due to their now double or triple
function. As a result, hearing aids can be uncomfortable for individuals with
severe recruitment. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieiZtPRcdL9FNvBmNOmYKdzgsbOgasabdvMvVnab0Kz96zRxtFD5dtq-zSAgStUMWkYnN6JgYhC_oC0vk5sh-f6qvsNboZ0JhyphenhyphenMDrLECKRy-xyrGiMtYkx-iI0LM_dml9s_TWNcv6Kt3g/s1600/dreamstime_xxl_10575003.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieiZtPRcdL9FNvBmNOmYKdzgsbOgasabdvMvVnab0Kz96zRxtFD5dtq-zSAgStUMWkYnN6JgYhC_oC0vk5sh-f6qvsNboZ0JhyphenhyphenMDrLECKRy-xyrGiMtYkx-iI0LM_dml9s_TWNcv6Kt3g/s320/dreamstime_xxl_10575003.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">It is important to investigate the effects of hearing aids on perception of emotion in speech.</span></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "times"; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">To deal with the problem of recruitment,
hearing aids must both amplify quiet sounds and compress loud sounds to make
them less uncomfortable and minimize distortion. Since emotion in speech often
relies on a wide dynamic range, it is important to investigate the effects of
hearing loss as well as hearing aids on perception of emotion in speech. Our
lab has found small, but promising, results regarding the effect of hearing
aids on emotional perception. <a href="https://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2956/2670">A study</a><a href="https://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2956/2670" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""></a> led by PhD student Gabe
Nespoli found that hearing aided individuals have similar emotional responses
to emotional speech as normal hearing individuals (as measured by skin
conductance), but are slower and less accurate at identifying emotions
presented in speech (although still better than hearing impaired individuals
without hearing aids) (Nespoli, Singh, & Russo, 2016)</span><span style="font-family: "times"; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">. <a href="https://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2962/2674">A study</a><a href="https://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2962/2674" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""></a> conducted by Dr. Huiwen
Goy, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab, found that hearing aids yielded small
but significant improvements in emotion identification in speech compared to hearing
impaired individuals without hearing aids (Goy, Pichora-Fuller, Singh, & Russo, 2016). While hearing aids may not be able
to increase emotion recognition levels to that experienced by normal hearing
listeners, we see encouraging results when compared with individuals with
hearing loss who do not use hearing aids. Nonetheless, there is certainly room
for improvement.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEl4bnK4J2xiZWV_H_o5nMN_PszXr0ITj9F6Uw46C7hif_D1GTIqzmzJbhky_bczKNsXyqOfYfvIC6ogCo25tUylMY8-ZSKngPJNVo7NqCa91Q14UeOdDa4CEUk5x6sxlXYM3fQ-TU0oU/s1600/shutterstock_135389096.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEl4bnK4J2xiZWV_H_o5nMN_PszXr0ITj9F6Uw46C7hif_D1GTIqzmzJbhky_bczKNsXyqOfYfvIC6ogCo25tUylMY8-ZSKngPJNVo7NqCa91Q14UeOdDa4CEUk5x6sxlXYM3fQ-TU0oU/s320/shutterstock_135389096.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Musical emotion differs from spoken emotion in some important ways.</span></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "times"; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Although self-report questionnaires that
measure hearing loss and its associated limitations do exist, until recently,
no scale existed to assess the experiences of individuals with hearing loss with
respect to emotional communication. In collaboration with Dr. Gurjit Singh and
Stefan Launer, research scientists at Phonak, we developed the EmoCheQ<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5430207372085923075#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""></a> (Emotional Communication
in Hearing Questionnaire) to address this gap (Singh, Liskovoi, Launer, & Russo, submitted). Our seventeen-item questionnaire
includes questions relating to characteristics of talkers, speech production,
listening situations, and socio-emotional wellbeing. After validating our
scale, we tested it with older adults with normal hearing, hearing aids, and
hearing impairments without hearing aids. We found that, in the domain of
talker characteristics, individuals with normal hearing reported significantly
less handicap than those with hearing aids or hearing loss, while in the domain
of situational factors, there was no difference between the performance of
individuals with normal hearing and those with hearing aids. This provides yet
more evidence that hearing aids in their current form can help with some
features of emotional perception in speech, but not others.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times"; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">While musical emotions rely on some of the
same prosodic cues as spoken emotions (dynamic range, pitch contour, speed),
musical emotion differs from spoken emotion in some important ways. Emotions in
music are often redundantly coded, meaning that multiple emotional features are
present at once. For example, a “sad” musical passage may be simultaneously
soft, slow, and low in pitch. Since instrumental musical passages are lacking
in the semantic content of emotional speech (the words we speak, which may give
clues to the emotion we are attempting to convey), the emotions presented in
music need to be more exaggerated to be distinguishable to the audience. All
this might mean that it should be easier for hearing impaired and hearing aided
individuals to parse musical emotion compared with spoken emotion. However, it
is also possible that recruitment and dynamic range compression may make it
more difficult for hearing impaired and hearing aided individuals to appreciate
the emotion conveyed by music, which, especially in the classical genre, relies
on a wide dynamic range from pianissimo to fortissimo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh6Kb4QvRfVdX78aW5NqZnXtUjEkXb4dgWwGx_3AsFGgmevhWpe1ykfHSXO-2O-yGOGB0wfcgW_MSeqqA6R6UZdFj49_Dgidqxfd16VqB0GM6aPy88gI-OaxKwYQZLO9vAkWMwtaK4gGI/s1600/iStock-478815074.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh6Kb4QvRfVdX78aW5NqZnXtUjEkXb4dgWwGx_3AsFGgmevhWpe1ykfHSXO-2O-yGOGB0wfcgW_MSeqqA6R6UZdFj49_Dgidqxfd16VqB0GM6aPy88gI-OaxKwYQZLO9vAkWMwtaK4gGI/s320/iStock-478815074.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>Parsing emotion is a key part of speech communication and musical enjoyment</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "times"; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">A new preliminary study<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5430207372085923075#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""></a> led by undergraduate
Domenica Fanelli found promising results regarding the parsing of musical
emotion by hearing aided individuals (Fanelli, Good, & Russo, unpublished). Her study involved the presentation of
music stimuli judged to be either happy, sad, angry, fearful, or tender/calm to
older adults who were either hearing impaired, hearing aided, or had normal
hearing. She found that the hearing aided group was slightly better than the
other two groups at distinguishing low arousal emotions such as sadness and
tenderness, and performed just as well as the normal hearing group at judging
high arousal emotions of happiness, anger, and fear. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times"; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">While these results are preliminary, it
appears from our recent work that hearing aids are beneficial for those with
hearing loss in understanding emotional cues from speech and music. This is
encouraging, as parsing emotion is a key part of speech communication as well
as musical enjoyment. More research remains to be done to investigate if there
is a way to improve hearing aid technology to further increase emotional
understanding. </span></div>
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<b> <i> </i> </b><br />
<b>References:</b><br />
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Fanelli, D., Good, A., & Russo, F.A. (unpublished). Perception of
Emotion in <br />
<div style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Music by Hearing-Impaired and Hearing-Aided
Listeners. <i>Paper </i></div>
<div style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<i>submitted in 2017 for partial fulfillment of
the requirements of an</i></div>
<div style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>undergraduate thesis project at Ryerson
University.</i> Toronto, ON.</div>
Goy, H., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Singh, G., & Russo, F. A. (2016).
Perception <br />
<div style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
of emotional speech by listeners with hearing
aids. <i>Proceedings of Acoustics </i></div>
<div style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<i>Week in Canada. Canadian Acoustics, 44, </i>182-183,
Vancouver, BC.</div>
Nespoli, G., Singh, G., & Russo, F.A. (2016). Skin conductance responses
to <br />
<div style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
emotional speech in hearing-impaired and
hearing-aided listeners. </div>
<div style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<i>Proceedings of Acoustics Week in Canada.
Canadian Acoustics, 44, </i></div>
<div style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
184-185<i>, </i>Vancouver, BC.</div>
Singh, G., Liskovoi, L., Launer, S., & Russo, F.A (submitted). The
Emotional <br />
<div style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Communication in Hearing Questionnaire
(EMO-CHeQ): Development </div>
<div style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
and validation. </div>
<br />
<i>Rachel is a fourth-year undergraduate at Swarthmore College in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she is studying music and biology.
During summer 2017 she volunteered as a research assistant in the SMART
Lab.</i><br />
<br />
<b>Edited by: </b>Dr. Frank Russo<br />
<b>Formatted by: </b>Fran Copelli<br />
<br />
<b>Also published in <a href="http://hearinghealthmatters.org/hearthemusic/2017/emotion-speech-music/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email">HearingHealthMatters.org</a> on Tuesday, July 25, 2017.</b><i> </i></div>
SMART labhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239659544800634346noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430207372085923075.post-75900718179860569372016-04-01T06:44:00.001-07:002016-05-09T17:12:15.006-07:00 Expressive Singing In Parkinson's Disease <style>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 13.0pt;"><i>By: Esztella Vezer </i></span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Based on the findings of a novel study that our lab conducted last
year, last June we set up a choir exclusively for people with Parkinson’s
Disease, a neurodegenerative disease that affects the muscles of the body,
including the face and vocal cords. Through emotionally expressive singing, the
choir is specialized to target facial expressiveness and vocal deficits that
are so common in Parkinson’s, and our research team is currently tracking
improvements in these areas. The first term of the choir ended in early
September, but its popularity and impact motivated everyone involved to help
keep it going. With several fundraising performances by the choir, the
generosity of donors enabled us to keep the choir singing into the fall and
winter, and there are exciting plans to expand the program even further. </span></div>
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SMART labhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239659544800634346noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430207372085923075.post-5972903557527231832016-03-02T07:55:00.001-08:002016-03-02T08:14:53.421-08:00Seniors Improving Neurocognitive Goals through Song (SINGS): Teaching your brain to hear better while learning how to sing.<style>
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<i>By: Ella Dubinsky</i></div>
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As we age, most adults experience some degree of hearing
loss. Although hearing aids can be used to amplify sound, many adults
suffering from normal age-related declines simply learn to live with this
impairment. One issue that both aided and un-aided older adults experience is a
difficulty tracking speech in a noisy environment, making it hard to hear one
person talking in a crowded room. This has been linked to an age-related
degradation of the neural mechanisms with which the brain encodes auditory
signals; basically, as we age, our brains get worse at processing what we’re
hearing, making it harder to distinguish a relevant voice from background
noise. This can make it harder for aging adults to participate in group
conversations and social events, which can lead to feelings of isolation and emotional
withdrawal. As such, finding a way to help people preserve and regain this
ability is essential.</div>
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One thing that seems to help is a life of music. Aging
musicians have been shown to experience less neuronal degradation in auditory signal
processing than non-musicians, along with an enhanced ability to track pitch changes
and voices in a noisy environment. However, short-term musical training has not
yet been explored as an intervention to assist those already suffering from
hearing loss. Researchers at Ryerson University’s SMART Lab are asking the
question: can we use music to help older adults train their brains, and in
doing so, improve their hearing? And can we make the process engaging and fun?</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf9wv4rIxa45vxaK-HmKTsKP6TcLDLtG9Dth-k-hzmy95BQjgSNdf32cgUcPlslJowj_t9KcM6DPaNoYBa0zPBFkPau49IyM7Vez-a2AzfN3sn3alHCdzp2XT2L0IUGvHfGGACe1zo8RY/s1600/IMG_5518+copy.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf9wv4rIxa45vxaK-HmKTsKP6TcLDLtG9Dth-k-hzmy95BQjgSNdf32cgUcPlslJowj_t9KcM6DPaNoYBa0zPBFkPau49IyM7Vez-a2AzfN3sn3alHCdzp2XT2L0IUGvHfGGACe1zo8RY/s400/IMG_5518+copy.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
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The current study investigates whether taking part in a
10-week group singing program can improve hearing and cognitive functioning in
aging adults. Participants (aged 50+), recruited through the 50+ program, take
part in weekly group choir sessions and complete online musical training for 10
weeks. Individuals come into the lab at the beginning and end of the program,
for pre- and post-training assessments of hearing and cognition. Early findings
are very promising; participants show significant improvements in speech-in-noise
perception, pitch discrimination, and the neural response to sound, as well as cognitive
measures of attention. These results lend support to the use of choir
participation and musical training as an intervention for older adults, to help
mitigate age-related auditory and cognitive declines. Don’t be surprised if
someday your family doctor recommends joining a singing group to help with your
hearing!</div>
SMART labhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239659544800634346noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430207372085923075.post-48627615659023112662015-07-13T08:27:00.002-07:002015-07-13T08:29:06.086-07:00The SMART Lab Singers: Improving Age-Related Hearing Difficulties Through Choir Lessons <style>
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</style><i><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS; font-size: 12.0pt;">By Saul Moshé Steinberg
and Dr. Frank Russo </span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: #555555; font-family: georgia; line-height: 19px;">This is a reproduction of an article that was originally published in RSPP Newsletter (June, 2015):</span> </span></i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigtPG5RYKb2PmweuIAHw1AvQNApXOpJjw7HBZvVW7WarbkfIZsrC2GnUr0h6tqP62G9neCNnWv1nYkpvqajbaAElbXFC1KMq2QfQDXMb7y6Xj6QJVttS1WNItS7N9ke5FOnW54n_UZqZQ/s1600/SmartLabSingers-Pin-small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigtPG5RYKb2PmweuIAHw1AvQNApXOpJjw7HBZvVW7WarbkfIZsrC2GnUr0h6tqP62G9neCNnWv1nYkpvqajbaAElbXFC1KMq2QfQDXMb7y6Xj6QJVttS1WNItS7N9ke5FOnW54n_UZqZQ/s1600/SmartLabSingers-Pin-small.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Many
older adults who experience little difficulty hearing in quiet environments
will report having trouble understanding speech in the presence of competing
background noise. This is often first noticed when attempting to follow a
conversation at a large social gathering, in which many people are talking at
the same time. While amplifying the audio signal through a modern digital
hearing aid equipped with noise reduction can often go a long way towards
correcting the problem, in many cases there is still a residual difficulty that
persists. Part of the problem may lie in age-related changes in the brain. </span></div>
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw4BqEtx5AQCckNofnNFIbm0lHEsCre4YoPfUohNEVGq9WK2R35XAu9K6MxVbGlKu19QIaPsYO2gWp0xJ-DYS3KdPaNaHSokP7SyjDL0BEMLaK9UZ8UQQev8s5TyDkWRX2v3jcts0gR6I/s1600/FullSizeRender+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw4BqEtx5AQCckNofnNFIbm0lHEsCre4YoPfUohNEVGq9WK2R35XAu9K6MxVbGlKu19QIaPsYO2gWp0xJ-DYS3KdPaNaHSokP7SyjDL0BEMLaK9UZ8UQQev8s5TyDkWRX2v3jcts0gR6I/s320/FullSizeRender+%25282%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Specifically,
many older adults experience a degradation of neural timing in brain mechanisms
responsible for encoding the pitch of the voice. Being able to follow the pitch
of a speaker's voice helps to alert the listener to conversational cues,
particularly in noisy situations. Several researchers have recently proposed
the idea that musical engagement may be a means of supporting this neural
timing. Research has found that musicians show significantly less age-related
decline in their ability to detect speech in noise as compared to
non-musicians. Further, studies have shown that musicians demonstrate more
precise neural timing as compared to non-musicians. Actively engaging in music
requires the ability to track and discriminate<br />
multiple sources of complex sounds, just as a listener must do when attending
to a single voice among many. However, studies have not shown that being a
musician directly increases the neural timing of sound. So far studies have
only shown that musicians happen to show more accurate neural timing than
non-musicians. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAiBZm-aHqoP_urFP2uQbnuPdO9atGqT8_HPXrEIH3V9ETIkloUWSfbMoKrDRkjBBCAvh0zRivRHrnYYL3lQfZrsxf75AZruw6xbtX3eoFVa_Oaw2Xt6j29DFHt18QJhd8o9pP6NvRVnA/s1600/FullSizeRender+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAiBZm-aHqoP_urFP2uQbnuPdO9atGqT8_HPXrEIH3V9ETIkloUWSfbMoKrDRkjBBCAvh0zRivRHrnYYL3lQfZrsxf75AZruw6xbtX3eoFVa_Oaw2Xt6j29DFHt18QJhd8o9pP6NvRVnA/s320/FullSizeRender+%25281%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> For
our current study, we are interested in determining whether older adults with
mild hearing loss can show improvements in their ability to understand speech
in noise as a result of short-term musical training. Specifically, we are
testing the effects of singing training through group choir lessons. Since
January of 2015, 14 older adults have attended weekly choir sessions over a
13-week period. Participants were also required to complete one hour of
homework per week, through the use of online music training software, designed
to aid users to improve voice pitch control. So far, the results are very
promising. There has been significant improvement in the ability to perceive
speech in noise as a result of the choir training. In addition, participants
have shown improvement in their ability to discriminate pitch, which is
important for tracking speaking voices. These preliminary findings suggest that
short-term musical training is able to mitigate some of the age-related
difficulty in hearing that is experienced by older adults. </span></div>
SMART labhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239659544800634346noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430207372085923075.post-9651049897083362312015-06-11T10:40:00.001-07:002015-06-11T12:22:28.234-07:00The Vocal Template<div style="text-align: left;">
The US national anthem is notoriously difficult to sing. One problem is that it spans a wide range. If a singer chooses the wrong key, or drifts from the key they intended, they can find themselves <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJLvCM4j2mg" target="_blank">struggling</a> to hit notes at the very top or bottom of their range.</div>
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Most melodies are not as hard to sing as the US anthem. Besides having a narrower range, melodies tend to have notes spaced closely together, with not so many leaps between notes. Researchers call this universal feature of melodies <i>pitch proximity</i>.</div>
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SMART Lab director Frank Russo has proposed (<a href="https://acoustics.org/pressroom/httpdocs/137th/russo.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/108/37/15510.abstract" target="_blank">here</a>) that constraints such as pitch proximity may accommodate ease of vocal production. In other words, with or without their awareness, musicians have a template of what a melody should sound like that is based on what people can sing. It makes sense that musicians should tend to constrain their melodies in this way. Our first exposure to music-making is through singing. And it remains the easiest way of producing the music that is in your head.<br />
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What are the implications for instrumental melodies? For example, unlike with singing, on a piano it is just as easy to play a large leap than a small one. Therefore, we might expect a relaxation of pitch proximity in instrumental melodies. In fact, we recently <a href="http://www.researchgate.net/publication/264084034_Low-Skip_Bias_The_Distribution_of_Skips_Across_the_Pitch_Ranges_of_Vocal_and_Instrumental_Melodies_is_Vocally_Constrained" target="_blank">showed</a> that in a large sample of melodies, "skips", i.e., larger intervals that skip over one or more scale notes (e.g., from <i>do</i> to <i>fa</i>), occur more often in instrumental melodies than vocal ones.</div>
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We also showed that, when skips do occur in vocal melodies, they most often fall in the lower (i.e., more comfortable) part of the range. We refer to this as <i>low-skip bias</i>. Interestingly, although we found less low-skip bias in instrumental melodies, it was still apparent. This was puzzling since, unlike with singing, on many instruments (e.g., piano, strings) it is just as easy to play a high skip as a low one. </div>
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In a follow-up study, we showed that, even though instrumentalists may not face the same motor constraints as singers, low-skip bias in instrumental melodies may still be related to the application of a vocal template. The figure below plots how often skips occur in the instrumental melodies of nineteen classical composers as a function of how much vocal music they wrote. The more vocal music a composer wrote, the more they were inclined to have low skips in their instrumental melodies (left panel), and the less they were inclined to have high skips (right panel).</div>
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These findings are consistent with the idea that, whether writing for the voice or an instrument, musicians' melodic choices are influenced by singability.</div>
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As music perception researchers, we are interested in how a listener's vocal template may impact how she listens. For example, a recent <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2015.1020818?journalCode=pqje20" target="_blank">study</a> showed people (including trained pianists) are better at remembering vocal melodies than instrumental ones. What about expectancy? Many researchers consider music's emotional power to lie in its ability to fulfill and deny our expectations. Are expectations for what note comes next in a melody shaped by an awareness of what is singable?</div>
Paolo Ammirantehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10513516401999342579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430207372085923075.post-22551474575864250492014-07-28T15:53:00.000-07:002014-07-28T16:32:57.486-07:00How Music Moves Us<span style="color: #555555; font-family: georgia; line-height: 19px;">This is a reproduction of an article that was originally published in themarknews.com (January 28, 2011):</span><br />
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Music may be an art, but science can help explain why it makes us feel powerful emotions.</div>
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A number of reasonable proposals have been tabled over the years in an effort to explain how we experience emotion in music. This article outlines a few of these proposals and one in particular concerning movement, which has been gaining some attention recently in the growing field of music cognition.</div>
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<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“Ring a bell and I’ll salivate/how’d you like that?”</i></div>
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– <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch84fmOa414" target="_blank">“Brian Wilson,” Barenaked Ladies</a></div>
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Conditioning, or learning by association, is no doubt involved in our emotional response to music. We can develop a learned response to a neutral stimulus when it is paired with another stimulus that is clearly positive or negative. It’s remarkable how quickly those awkward feelings of middle school can come flooding back when we’re exposed, willingly or not, to that romantic last song of the last dance.</div>
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<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“It goes like this/the fourth, the fifth/the minor, fall the major lift”</i></div>
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– <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJTiXoMCppw" target="_blank">“Hallelujah,” originally recorded by Leonard Cohen</a>, with covers by K.D. Lang and Rufus Wainwright</div>
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Many structural aspects of music will give rise to expectations. Some of these expectations are culturally specific, while others appear more universal. For example, a large leap in a melody – such as the octave that occurs at the start of “(Somewhere) Over the Rainbow” – will give rise to the same expectation regardless of whether it’s experienced in Manhattan or Mumbai. The expectation is that the melody will change direction following the leap. If this expectation is denied by a continuation of the melody in the same direction, our autonomic nervous system gets a jolt, much as it would if a tiger were to enter the room. This jolt opens a window to emotional experience. However, other aspects of the music, which lie beyond the expectancy-denying event, are necessary in order to shape the interpretation of the emotional experience.</div>
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<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“Wild thing/I think you move me”</i></div>
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–<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hce74cEAAaE" target="_blank">“Wild Thing,” originally recorded by The Wild Ones</a>, with covers by The Troggs, Bryan Adams, and others</div>
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The etymology of the word “emotion” can be traced back to <i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">emovere</i> from medieval Latin, which means “to move.” Indeed, emotions tend to have their own characteristic patterns of movement – for instance, the slow and heavy movements associated with sadness or the intense and abrupt movements associated with anger. Sensitivity to the patterns of movement displayed by those around us provides us with important nonverbal insight that helps us to navigate our social world.</div>
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The idea of music conveying a sense of movement has a long history. Movement can be implied in music through the speed of event onsets, the range of pitches, and the smoothness of transitions between pitches, to name but a few variables. Making sense of all this implied movement may require the mirror neuron system, a collection of neurons in the frontal and parietal cortex that responds to the execution and observation of goal-directed actions. My students and I believe that the mirror neuron system runs a simulation of the actions necessary to create the music, which in turn activates primitive emotion networks.</div>
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<i style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“Keep smiling through/just like you always do/till the blue skies/drive the dark clouds far away”</i></div>
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–“<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHcunREYzNY" target="_blank">We’ll meet again,” originally recorded by Vera Lynn</a>, with covers by Johnny Cash, The Byrds, and others</div>
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It’s interesting to note that people observing song will routinely display subtle muscle activation that is consistent with a singer’s facial movements. This muscle activation is normally too subtle to observe by eye, but it can be detected by recording changes in the electrical potential at the surface of the skin using electromyography. Within approximately 100 milliseconds of seeing and hearing a singer smile, previous research in our lab suggests that the audience is already smiling in response (albeit subtly). This example of social contagion is likely an automatic feed-forward consequence of the movement simulation referred to above. It stands to reason that if this automatic process is kept up for long enough, the smiling will rub off and influence our own mood.</div>
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In sum, we experience emotion in music through conditioning, through culturally specific as well as universal expectations, and through the internal simulation of movement.<br />
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-- Frank Russo</div>
SMART labhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239659544800634346noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430207372085923075.post-31501645492781528152014-06-10T09:07:00.001-07:002015-06-12T07:31:33.549-07:00The Benefits of Creative Arts Therapies for Autism<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i style="text-indent: 36pt;">**If
you would like to be involved in autism research happening in our lab, or hear
updates about our new autism video game, </i><a href="http://emoteplay.us8.list-manage2.com/subscribe?u=5a249d982ded86b24c276613d&id=0c55b1e2dd" style="text-indent: 36pt;"><i>click here</i></a><i style="text-indent: 36pt;"> to join our mailing list!**</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"><a href="http://autismcanada.org/aboutautism/index.html?gclid=CjgKEAjwtZucBRD77aiiq_v4xnASJABkAg8J2UpANPFo4QZgAlljAC0Rq97OFsNQ3IaJkOG1X8qosfD_BwE" style="text-indent: 36pt;">Autism Spectrum Disorder</a></span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects a </span><a href="http://readingroom.mindspec.org/?page_id=6523&gclid=CjgKEAjwtZucBRD77aiiq_v4xnASJABkAg8JZIr2iXW2vkG2reVBWA_JrYrpKdSEAwZ_5MG-tg2h7_D_BwE" style="text-indent: 36pt;">growing number</a><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> of individuals all over the world. It is characterized by difficulties in communication. These include perceiving emotions in other individuals, language production, and emotion regulation.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In our social world,
we connect to people by subtly </span><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10402679"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">imitating</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> each
other. Many dating and job websites often recommend mimicking gestures of an
employer or a person of interest in order for that person to feel closer to
you. This is a behaviour that actually happens naturally and non-consciously in
many everyday social interactions. Mimicry facilitates closeness, as a result
of us perceiving the other person as being more akin to ourselves, and
therefore we accept them more readily. In addition, it is thought that we
understand their emotions more readily, because we are producing echoes of
those same emotional expressions ourselves. In autism, this tendency to imitate
across verbal and body language is impaired, leading to deficits in social understanding
and acceptance.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Photo source: http://www.hanen.org</span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Arts-based therapies provide an abstract route of communication that reaches individuals with autism. The enjoyment factor also creates a safe environment to experiment with imitation. It’s often been found that autistic individuals respond more towards emotion that is directed through song and creating visual art. While there is lots of room to conduct more research, initial research findings are incredibly promising. In the present article we will address a few of these findings and discuss the mechanisms by which these arts therapies may work. We will also discuss these findings in relation to work in our own laboratory, where we have found beneficial effects of song and movement therapy for children with autism.</span></span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Music therapy provides a promising route to emotional communication training and behaviour regulation in autism. In 1964, Norddoff and Robins developed Improvisational Music Therapy, which incorporated the use of musical instruments as voice during conversation. This therapy was later developed into Creative Music Therapy, yielding positive results in communicative responses from once non-verbal children.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">Drawing from Nordoff and Robins, Miller and Toca developed Melodic Intonation Therapy in 1979. They paired signs, then words with musical tones to assist in speech production with a 3-year-old nonverbal autistic boy. After 35 sessions, the child was capable of producing, responding, and understanding simple sentences.</span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Auditory Integration Training therapy has been used to treat self-destructive behaviour. </span><a href="http://foa.sagepub.com/content/13/3/163.extract" style="text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A particular study that adopted this methodology</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> managed to eliminate head-jerking in an 11 year-old. The method teaches beat entrainment to metered music that mimics the rhythm of a relaxed heartbeat. The goal effect is for the listener to relax with entrainment. In a way, it is teaching listeners how to relax by bopping to Pink Floyd rather than Metallica.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">Combining elements of Dance and Music therapy may prove to be effective in enhancing imitation and behaviour regulation, as well as emotional control and social interaction. In a more recent preliminary </span><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197455613001500" style="text-indent: 36pt;">study</a><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> conducted in 2013, sixteen adults with severe autistic syndrome participated in activities that involved drum and dance, expressive story-telling, and learned genre-specific dances such as the rhumba. Although more testing needs to be done, the results after 4 months of training have shown remarkable changes in the participants. See our review paper <a href="http://www.academia.edu/1375196/Mirroring_in_Dance_Movement_Therapy_Potential_mechanisms_behind_empathy_enhancement">here</a> for more information on the potential benefits of dance/movement therapy for autism.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="text-indent: 0px;"><i>Dance</i></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In Dance and Movement Therapy (DMT), an
individual is able to express internal impulses and emotions through guided and
controlled movement. Through synchronous movement with others, dance has also
been shown to enhance empathic understanding and </span><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197455611000426"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">social
connectedness</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. In two studies that involved group dance and “follow the
leader” activities, both autistic groups showed a decrease in </span><a href="http://www.autism-help.org/autism-repetitive-behaviors.htm"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">stimming</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
behaviour and aversive touch responses. There was also an increase in eye
contact and the use of communicative gesture. These studies span from </span><a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07303084.1989.10609812?queryID=%24%7BresultBean.queryID%7D"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1978</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> to </span><a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0300443011660101"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">2001</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">,
suggesting that the success of Dance Movement Therapy is not just a recent
finding. </span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyreUZ_bdSD35dKa1zjwmfQXT4XMPrW8XsPVXlb52NUphNe6-s4v16aDKrojyodiCrpdMahc6Buqr-jzy6bdWZ9Q2pg4ZjcPnOcUzbyACPfHKrF56Q_qV2USG8pVDXE3OkwT0lM96Hz1O-/s1600/Kidsdancing.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyreUZ_bdSD35dKa1zjwmfQXT4XMPrW8XsPVXlb52NUphNe6-s4v16aDKrojyodiCrpdMahc6Buqr-jzy6bdWZ9Q2pg4ZjcPnOcUzbyACPfHKrF56Q_qV2USG8pVDXE3OkwT0lM96Hz1O-/s1600/Kidsdancing.jpeg" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">Photo source: www.fitfutures.com</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i><b>Drama</b></i> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Drama has been found to be a promising avenue to promote prosocial behaviours in autistic children. In one </span><a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-010-1064-1"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">recent study</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, ASD participants aged 6-17 were paired with 8 typically developing children (peers). The children participated in a musical theatre production, and peers performed the participant’s roles on video for the participants to watch and practice at home via video modelling. Children with autism showed improvement on identification of faces and </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">theory of mind</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> skills. <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV3a9hY3YzLDicaW09Mj5RZ6b71bRpw5m2TbqA8-rMA-Fw-XYjzXC04IF3U1UuK6-5Zczpgup9slxH5KbufYkd2QVKSylYdL_JrcPTXTgTvQbjvs14ijhHtJv5fs5_5JGqaMat84DjDTAF/s1600/kids-acting-on-stage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV3a9hY3YzLDicaW09Mj5RZ6b71bRpw5m2TbqA8-rMA-Fw-XYjzXC04IF3U1UuK6-5Zczpgup9slxH5KbufYkd2QVKSylYdL_JrcPTXTgTvQbjvs14ijhHtJv5fs5_5JGqaMat84DjDTAF/s1600/kids-acting-on-stage.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">Photo source: blog.camperoo.com/</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In another </span><a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02630672.2013.773132#.U4NVm_ldWSo"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">study</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, children with ASD were provided with drama therapy in their schools. The drama therapists introduced structured ways of saying hello/goodbye, singing songs, playing ball games and drama games, storytelling, imaginary play, movement work, and relaxation. According to parent/caregiver and teacher feedback, improvements in five themes were found: feelings (a safe place to explore), peers (being included and making friends), social skills (role play provides a short cut to learning about and practicing social skills), structure (predictability lessens anxiety), and family (drama therapy supports families as well). These findings suggest that drama therapy is a suitable intervention for people with autism.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In a </span><a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02630672.2013.773130#.U4Nh8vldWSo" style="text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">recent study</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> involving children with </span><a href="http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/asperger/detail_asperger.htm" style="text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Asperger’s syndrome</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, each student was given time on stage to explore different roles that involved improvisation, role-play, and movement work. The students reported greater self-confidence, self-esteem, cooperation, and emotional expression. It appears that drama therapy is a prosocial venture that could help kids with autism to flourish socially.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There are further case studies that demonstrate individual situations in which </span><a href="http://aut.sagepub.com/content/6/2/169.short"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">acting</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><a href="http://jmt.oxfordjournals.org/content/39/2/117.short"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">song</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197455608000622"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">visual art</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, or a </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/reaching-my-autistic-son-through-disney.html?_r=0"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">combination</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, have helped families to make breakthroughs with their ASD children. While future research should use groups of individuals in order to be sure of the beneficial effects of arts therapies, current findings are incredibly promising.</span></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Future Directions</span></i></b><br />
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<span style="text-indent: 36pt;">In our own lab, we are currently using
song, slowly scaled back to speech, in order to facilitate understanding of
emotions in sentences for children with autism. We also ask the participants to
mimic the emotional expressions of individuals in videos. This action may help
them feel as though they were expressing the emotion themselves, and project
how they feel during that type of expression while discerning the expression of
the other person. So far, we have found that many of the children improve
following 2 weeks of playing a video game that capitalizes on these methods. On the basis of our preliminary results, we have received a government grant to further develop the video game for tablet devices (eg., iPad). The new version of the game will be released in October, 2014. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCygez7cAgCq-R0RbbpnZcEWwwV7YxnI5diIbyIVa-cw9lSWXL7KyTW_QckQPaGYAOYPckoKzzbKYxb0jhkxjcHB_-OCVtuL2HfRknEfE17C5c6qzm6rXep9mxfAY9AzeHPdFZAs-HsWp_/s1600/Photo3Blog.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center; text-indent: 36pt;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCygez7cAgCq-R0RbbpnZcEWwwV7YxnI5diIbyIVa-cw9lSWXL7KyTW_QckQPaGYAOYPckoKzzbKYxb0jhkxjcHB_-OCVtuL2HfRknEfE17C5c6qzm6rXep9mxfAY9AzeHPdFZAs-HsWp_/s1600/Photo3Blog.png" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-7qf04Td43tKtHWBwiNtfYK4AMWS3X1PHiZgF8OdaEHwsTiDAnEm7y-3phiEEBPDBD6A6DJRqa4gN6-jaWh6tlqGhaRTxDzRRxp1PHMwRsgdn2Gaa73EIRBP2QFjG150k1sNhVPhH-ec7/s1600/Photo4Blog.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center; text-indent: 36pt;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-7qf04Td43tKtHWBwiNtfYK4AMWS3X1PHiZgF8OdaEHwsTiDAnEm7y-3phiEEBPDBD6A6DJRqa4gN6-jaWh6tlqGhaRTxDzRRxp1PHMwRsgdn2Gaa73EIRBP2QFjG150k1sNhVPhH-ec7/s1600/Photo4Blog.png" width="400" /></a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-no-proof: yes;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shape id="Picture_x0020_4"
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">How does it work?</span></i></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 36pt;">What exactly is it that makes these
arts therapies so effective? There are a few different mechanisms at play here.
The opportunity to become specialized in a certain activity is definitely one –
there is plenty of research showing that mastery of a discipline enhances
self-esteem. Even after one class, these kids can feel proud about having
learned something new. In time, their talents will increase, along with their
confidence.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A second mechanism
involves the areas of the brain that are stimulated when people engage in
artistic endeavours, especially music and dance. The </span><a href="http://www.brainfacts.org/brain-basics/neuroanatomy/articles/2008/mirror-neurons/" style="text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">mirror
neuron system</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, which is noted to be deficient in activity during
perception of other people in autism, is engaged during </span><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811906000693" style="text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">dance</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> and </span><a href="http://www.jneurosci.org/content/27/2/308.short" style="text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">music</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. It is
even engaged by just watching dance or listening to music, but this is
increased when actually participating. Synchronizing one’s movements with
another person makes this system become especially engaged. Our theory is that
when these kids engage in music or dance therapy, they are exercising the part of their brain that is important for social understanding.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Music presents itself on a
multi-synchronous level due to the coordination of vocal inflection, entrainment to beat and meter, and facial manipulation in order to articulate notes.
By pairing music with imitation therapy, a multi-modal system of synchrony in
imitation is produced. Entrainment to the beat may help with the efficiency of movement production. </span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">In addition, since many individuals with ASD respond positively to music, this </span><a href="http://research.gold.ac.uk/3690/" style="text-indent: 36pt;">pairing</a><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> seems
promising in </span><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22752845" style="text-indent: 36pt;">social
development</a><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> training</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A third mechanism
relates to synchronization. Spontaneous, or non-conscious mimicry of postures
and <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>positions of peers is an example of matching yourself
to the surrounding social environment. Known as the </span><a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/76/6/893/" style="text-indent: 36pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">chameleon
effect</span></i></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, </span></i><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">mimicry
during social interaction creates rapport and encourages more prosocial
behaviour. Kids with autism exhibit some deficits when it comes to timing, as
well as binding of audio and visual information. Music and dance both rely
heavily on proper timing. In many cases, learning of music and dance involves
moving in synchrony with an instructor or moving in synchrony with a group of
peers. Synchronous movement has been shown to assist in cooperation, liking,
trust, and empathy for the person we are moving in synchrony with</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 36pt;">Think of when you were in school and
were part of a choir, or had to sing “Oh Canada” with your classmates in the
morning. It’s been found that this kind of synchronous behaviour enhances camaraderie.
In terms of autism, it is quite possible that practice with synchronous
behaviour will help with two things:</span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Myriad Pro";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 1.<span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It will help them practice moving
synchronously, and to practice their general timing skills. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Myriad Pro";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> 2.<span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Through practice with synchronous
movement, they may carry this skill over to their everyday life, which could
benefit them in terms of enhancing emotional understanding and trust for other
people.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">You can participate!<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The message is a
positive one when it comes to arts therapies and autism. If you are interested
in learning more about research going on in autism therapy, and new research
applications, </span><a href="http://eepurl.com/WcPjL"><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">click here to join our
mailing list</span></a><span style="font-family: "Myriad Pro"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. You can also participate in a study we are currently
running in the SMART lab at Ryerson University. We are looking for kids aged 8-12,
with high-functioning autism, as well as neurotypical kids who do not have
autism for our comparison group, to take part in a video game singing study
aimed at enhancing social skills and emotional understanding. We are measuring
changes in brain activity, emotional responsiveness, and social behaviours that evolve as a result of the
therapy. So far, we are seeing some promising benefits of synchronous singing and
speaking on social deficits in autism</span>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-align: center;">Written by </span><a href="http://www.ryerson.ca/smart/people/mcgarry/" style="text-align: center;">Lucy McGarry</a><span style="text-align: center;">, </span><a href="http://www.ryerson.ca/smart/people/brotolonvettor/index.html" style="text-align: center;">Emma Bortolon-Vettor</a><span style="text-align: center;">, Abby Tong, and <a href="http://www.ryerson.ca/smart/people/russo/">Frank Russo</a></span></span></div>
Lucy McGarryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09832720932667743535noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430207372085923075.post-83735207955692198412014-06-09T14:12:00.000-07:002015-06-11T15:54:49.433-07:00Music as social glue<span style="font-size: large;">In Martin Scorcese's The Wolf of Wall Street, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddtfoiaWGqs" target="_blank">a primitive chant</a> whips Jordan Belfort's stock brokers into a euphoric state of solidarity. (Note: NSFW. Chanting starts at about 1:00.) The chest-beating rhythm and wordless tune (consisting of just four pitches) evoke our early ancestors singing and dancing before a hunt.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In fact, recent psychological findings are at least consistent with the idea that human music-making evolved as a social bonding mechanism. Rhythmically moving together is unique among cooperative activities in its ability to promote feelings of <a href="http://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/soco.2009.27.6.949" target="_blank">social affiliation</a> and empathy. Young children are more likely to <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513810000462" target="_blank">engage in helpful behaviour</a> with someone after they have rhythmically moved together.</span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHMxnNetPWR11KNRwf5alIvvGChmr_KUwmWhMJWbo2LeVkTvu-7TGjzSoYmEummOK85lly-xQ2XyaZejY6fk7DipMBszVABV-C7XzUJKVIOcKPqu76c7IXejRNWV2ZdiFsfAgblGISs0I/s1600/Glue-150x150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHMxnNetPWR11KNRwf5alIvvGChmr_KUwmWhMJWbo2LeVkTvu-7TGjzSoYmEummOK85lly-xQ2XyaZejY6fk7DipMBszVABV-C7XzUJKVIOcKPqu76c7IXejRNWV2ZdiFsfAgblGISs0I/s1600/Glue-150x150.jpg" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Why should rhythmically moving together act as such a powerful social glue? One idea increasingly supported by neuroscience is that the act involves simulating or "playing out" another person's actions without necessarily producing them yourself. Simulating another person's actions may allow you to gain insights into their emotional state and make predictions about their future actions in a more direct way than through observation. For this reason, simulation may have had survival value for our early ancestors in deciding whether someone is friend of foe. Likewise, performing easily-simulated, predictable rhythmic movements, like clapping your hands or stomping your feet at regular intervals, may be an effective means of signalling good will towards others. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/05/24/scan.nst086.short" target="_blank">One interesting recent study</a> showed
evidence for simulation among musicians using transcranial magnetic
stimulation (TMS). TMS sends electrical impulses to the scalp that can
be used to selectively impair parts of the brain temporarily and
harmlessly. The experimental task was to play a right hand piano part in
synchrony with an audio recording of the left hand part. Prior to the
experiment, one group of musicians had no exposure to the left hand
part. The other group practised playing the left hand part, which, upon
subsequent hearing, would presumably elicit a motor simulation of those
actions required to produce it.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">In the
experiment, both groups played the right hand part in synchrony with an
audio recording of the left hand part. The recording contained
accelerations and decelerations in tempo typical of an expressive music
performance. At tempo changes, TMS was delivered to the right motor
cortex (which controls the left hand). Remarkably, only the group that
had practiced the left-hand part beforehand were impaired in their
ability to follow the tempo changes. This suggests they had been
attempting to simulate the actions required to produce the audible
left-hand part. More strikingly, extent of impairment was greatest for
those individuals that showed a stronger tendency to adopt others'
perspectives on an empathy questionnaire.</span><br />
Paolo Ammirantehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10513516401999342579noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430207372085923075.post-6301158365866044162014-06-04T07:18:00.000-07:002014-06-09T18:21:58.619-07:00Predicting a listener's emotional response to music<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Why do we listen to music? While there are several answers to this question, one common answer is that listening to music provides us with an emotionally rich experience. If music is rich with emotional content, would it be possible to predict a listener’s emotional assessment of a specific song? Additionally, to what degree is this assessment of emotion common across listeners with different musical interests and backgrounds, and to what degree is it subjective to each listener? Gaining a better understanding of this relationship between music and the listener, in the context of emotion, is an important topic in the domain of music composition and music recommendation applications. A good understanding of this relationship would enable music software applications to be customized for different types of listeners. Emotion assessments are collected either as predetermined categories (e.g. happy, sad, peaceful, angry for a music excerpt) or as ratings on a continuous scale (e.g. calm-to-excited, unpleasant-to-pleasant).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6WXW8kGEItjVVxcLpDDG6wREpuNWM7xET7dipxO6-rViRIfcbbfz4zeavP8TKlXoH_s1TRCPb8MOfjcF6gEW3aeVwgCujGl8oVrPpaXQ1SRwOLXPH04-TdOlJHoTMQCGjzSeZVrcK3B_d/s1600/notesandneurons.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6WXW8kGEItjVVxcLpDDG6wREpuNWM7xET7dipxO6-rViRIfcbbfz4zeavP8TKlXoH_s1TRCPb8MOfjcF6gEW3aeVwgCujGl8oVrPpaXQ1SRwOLXPH04-TdOlJHoTMQCGjzSeZVrcK3B_d/s1600/notesandneurons.png" height="216" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Photo Source: www.brainpickings.org (Maria Popova)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Studies have shown that it is possible to successfully predict emotion assessments using computational modelling methods. These approaches involve gathering ratings from several listeners for large datasets of music samples, and applying machine learning algorithms to train predictive models on these labeled ratings using features. The features are a combination of low-, mid-, and high-level audio features (spectral and temporal) and music features (tonal and rhythmic). <a href="http://www.cmmr2012.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/sites/cmmr2012.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/files/pdf/papers/cmmr2012_submission_66.pdf" target="_blank">Previous work in the SMART lab involved using neural networks based on audio features to successfully predict emotion ratings of listeners for a small dataset of 12 classical music excerpts.</a> While this approach is valuable for a general listener, it has its limits with respect to each specific listener.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Every listener brings his or her own cultural background, preferences, and familiarity to the music listening experience. In some cases, your <i>sad</i> could be my <i>happy</i>. One of the ways to hone in on a listener’s subjective emotional experience is through his or her physiological responses. Studies have shown that listeners experience physiological changes during music listening which parallel the kinds of physiological changes they experience with everyday emotion. This allows us to pursue the relationship between the types of physiological responses experienced by a listener and the reported emotion induced by the music they are listening to. An interesting question to consider is whether a listener's subjective assessments of felt emotion can be predicted from physiological responses occurring during music listening. In a paper we published in <a href="http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00468/full" target="_blank">Frontiers in Psychology</a>, neural networks were used to predict emotional responses of listeners based on five physiological features. Results from this paper suggest that physiological responses are powerful indicators of a listener’s emotional state, and a non-linear relationship may be used to map musical emotion onto physiological responses.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Further studies are currently in progress between the <a href="http://www.ryerson.ca/smart/" target="_blank">SMART lab</a> and <a href="http://www.wavedna.com/" target="_blank">WaveDNA</a>, a music software development company in Toronto, to explore and answer interesting questions at the intersection of musical emotion, musical features, listener physiological responses, and listener experience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Written by: <a href="http://www.ryerson.ca/~nvempala/index.html" target="_blank">Naresh Vempala</a></span></div>
</div>
Neural Karmichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06229527792165104253noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430207372085923075.post-39665670783422595692014-05-12T12:52:00.001-07:002015-06-11T17:22:12.286-07:00Plasticity in the deaf brain: Effects on the perception of music<!--[if !mso]>
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When it comes to music, how is the deaf brain different than the hearing brain?</span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 48px;">For more info see our article in </span><span style="line-height: 32px;"><a href="http://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/4/4/560" target="_blank">Brain Sciences</a></span><span style="line-height: 32px;"> (2</span><span style="line-height: 32px;">014).</span></span></div>
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</span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">A
number of researchers have explored how sensory deprivation in one modality may
affect the development of the remaining modalities. They have uncovered an
extraordinary capacity of the brain to adapt and adjust to the environment.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-size: 8.5pt;"> When
one sense is unavailable,</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> the</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-size: 8.5pt;"> sensory responsibilities appear
to shift and the processing of the remaining modalities may become enhanced.</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"> </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">Although
</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">investigations of brain plasticity in deaf
participants have led to some discrepant findings,</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span>the deaf
brain seems to be structurally and functionally different than the hearing
brain.</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">Arla Good</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">
</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpZpmUxNJ4j8_xZhU0euR8roAUr3D9iIgohJsiiOrb0dHx7p7JB6wbkJNfzeTmkIk0HOpFXXK0UOwfN8jVL4fjm9Vm5m3v4LnlDDdkcc7m6iJ5mHrIFXIAXMMWnPLRDL1pJ9dnhP4_c9Y/s1600/brainsci-04-00560-g001-1024.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpZpmUxNJ4j8_xZhU0euR8roAUr3D9iIgohJsiiOrb0dHx7p7JB6wbkJNfzeTmkIk0HOpFXXK0UOwfN8jVL4fjm9Vm5m3v4LnlDDdkcc7m6iJ5mHrIFXIAXMMWnPLRDL1pJ9dnhP4_c9Y/s1600/brainsci-04-00560-g001-1024.png" width="400" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: 28.0pt 56.0pt 84.0pt 112.0pt 140.0pt 168.0pt 196.0pt 224.0pt 252.0pt 280.0pt 308.0pt 336.0pt; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-size: 8.5pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span>This shift in sensory responsibility, and the enhancements in visual and tactile abilities, results in a non-auditory sensory experience that is unique to individuals who are deaf. This unique sensory experience may include the manner in which music is perceived (see Figure above).</span><br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Expanding our definition of music?<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Frequently
cited definitions of music, such as <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">"organized sound" or</span> <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">"an
ordered arrangement of sounds and silences” </span>emphasize the supremacy of
sound. <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">These definitions necessarily imply that the deaf
population has limited access to emotional, social, and pleasurable aspects of
music. However, a definition that focuses exclusively on sound fails to
incorporate multi-modal aspects of music that extend beyond hearing. Non-auditory
aspects of musical performance make music accessible to people of all hearing
abilities.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">How is music more than sound?<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-size: 8.5pt;">During a musical performance, the </span><span style="color: #232323; mso-bidi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">movements of musical
performers, including hand gestures, body movements and facial expressions, can
influence an audiences’ perceptual and aesthetic assessment of the music.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #232323; mso-bidi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">Furthermore, loud music may elicit vibrations
felt on the walls, on the floor and even in/on the body. </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Humans have the capacity to perceive musical
information, including rhythm, voice and instrumentation, </span>through <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0053585" target="_blank">vibrotactile sources alone</a>.<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"> These vibrations may support a unique
non-auditory experience for individuals who are deaf</span>.<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMqkNEWt6XxO8LFZtzkTo-bruzYHO8wahAPfWyvTt0_CjugrmXcHQjbyYejLjR_8JLGKOnkcaxlcAj6QvfR9-NR0TKNIn_brS3R-urJp4NYc6NSwaNovnJ3VOl9GRtxmTp8fnscbvwJnM/s1600/multi-modal.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMqkNEWt6XxO8LFZtzkTo-bruzYHO8wahAPfWyvTt0_CjugrmXcHQjbyYejLjR_8JLGKOnkcaxlcAj6QvfR9-NR0TKNIn_brS3R-urJp4NYc6NSwaNovnJ3VOl9GRtxmTp8fnscbvwJnM/s1600/multi-modal.png" width="320" /></span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">In addition, music can be manipulated through assistive,
multi-modal technologies, such as </span><a href="http://inclusivedesign.ca/research/ryerson/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">music visualizations</span></a><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"> and <a href="http://www.tadsinc.com/">vibrating chairs</a>,
which have been created to enhance the accessibility of music in the deaf population.</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: xx-small; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"><br /></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">So, can deaf people
experience music?<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-size: 8.5pt;">A wealth
of non-auditory information is available that helps to convey the structure and
emotion in music to a deaf audience.</span><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;"> </span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-size: 8.5pt;">The strengthened visual and tactile skills in individuals
who are deaf may even </span>provide enhanced processing of these non-auditory
aspects of musical performance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Tahoma;">The definition of music does
not have to rely solely on sound; </span><span style="color: #232323; mso-bidi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">music is capable of
incorporating important visual and tactile elements that communicate </span><span style="color: #232323; mso-bidi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.0pt;">structural
and emotional information. This realization of music as a multi-modal
experience</span> has the potential to be advanced by the deaf community,
leading to new forms of music that may transcend our current conceptualizations
and ultimately to the acceptance that music is so much more than “organized
sound.”</span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Arla Goodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11514616281137036106noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430207372085923075.post-71632952036273179582014-04-06T22:37:00.004-07:002015-06-11T17:21:27.580-07:00Film review: Alive Inside<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">An elderly woman sits before the camera, her face in close-up. A man off-screen leans over and places a pair of headphones over her head. With a press of a button, music fills the woman’s ears. The song playing is <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyLjbMBpGDA">When The Saints Go Marching In</a></i> by Louis Armstrong. She immediately recognizes the song, a smile spreading across her face. She moves her head along to the beat and we watch as she is transported into a distant world, a world that was lost to her until now. “Oh God, that’s beautiful,” she says as she allows herself to become absorbed into the music.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><i>Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory</i></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> came to life after filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett agreed to film social worker Dan Cohen for a day. Dan happened to discover that a surprisingly wonderful thing happened when he gave headphones and an iPod to nursing home residents with Alzheimer’s and played them their favourites songs from their past: they began accessing long-forgotten memories and regaining a sense of joy and identity. A day of filming turned into a documentary that spanned three years and followed Dan’s journey as he sought to change the way Alzheimer’s is treated in nursing homes around America.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">But <i>Alive Inside</i> is more than just a documentary about people with Alzheimer’s unlocking memories through music. It tells the story of the nursing home, an enigmatic world that’s distant from most people’s minds. It critiques the medical model as a platform of care in these homes. It provides insights into the still largely unknown neuroscience behind the remarkable power of music. It holds a mirror to society and the way in which we treat our elders. It asks what will happen when this small cross-section of our population becomes the majority.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Poignant personal stories are interspersed with related narratives by contributors from an array of backgrounds, all executed with stunning sound and visuals that to some could appear contrived, <span style="color: #1a1a1a;">but to me were fully complementary to the overall impact of the story</span>. There were moments of laughter and moments of tears, both sad and happy. It laid bare the human condition and put into sharp focus everything that is so scary and beautiful about it. And there, too, was music, a natural elixir for the spirit, potent beyond words. For a while, the neuroscientific aspect of all of this didn’t really seem important; the only possible reaction was awe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Having said that, it’s pretty neat to be involved in this important area of research, and the film puts into perspective just how much there is to uncover about the therapeutic potential of music. We are proud to be playing our own small part in the SMART Lab, where we’ve been looking at how music can be used to help better the lives of autistic children and people with Parkinson’s Disease.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The trailer for <i>Alive Inside</i> can be seen <a href="http://vimeo.com/80114021">here</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Esztella Vezer</span></div>
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EVhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04941466624191807469noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5430207372085923075.post-54266446956198221162014-03-09T20:29:00.000-07:002015-06-11T17:21:01.435-07:00Why singing out of tune is not always so bad<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVIfgHdzMVVA_rr6Ysm-93zPwG-73GC6JJgtdQX5FZxDLd4W03nguy8frpyZEsWnq5cYhRJJLPO0eYoNWriU_VePLqvZoZfRZu5vMW1yxhk3AFEB-j9RcHk5_isPhglTXVzGm8Dmc7UmM/s1600/i-cant-sing-bob-dylan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVIfgHdzMVVA_rr6Ysm-93zPwG-73GC6JJgtdQX5FZxDLd4W03nguy8frpyZEsWnq5cYhRJJLPO0eYoNWriU_VePLqvZoZfRZu5vMW1yxhk3AFEB-j9RcHk5_isPhglTXVzGm8Dmc7UmM/s1600/i-cant-sing-bob-dylan.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Bob Dylan can't sing or can he?</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When a singer hits the <span style="color: red;">wrong note</span>, whether at a karaoke bar or a concert, you can be sure that some portion of the audience can't help but cringe. Poor pitch accuracy is a salient indicator of an inexperienced performer. Yet there are other times when singing off pitch or bending the voice may actually improve an audience’s perception of the performance. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOHgNW8gdVy2U_cafrmlY3nVYrkazAVDl9gypH5WGWw_Vrb6IqpNiHABYfNTnew0fMpn9h4DECx8oNbw_3O0J7zWVaholJk50pOTZPdGPAeGdrUWBCyTu5PGwyCXyvFl0NXZrVt0GppCU/s1600/Figure_1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">In a study published last week in <i><a href="http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00156/full" target="_blank">Frontiers in Psychology</a></i>, we examined 12 professional male vocalists while they sang melodies with a range of different emotions. Vocalists with more years of acting experience sang the first note of their melody with greater pitch inaccuracy. More years of acting experience was also related to higher levels of jitter (fine-grained pitch perturbations). </span><br />
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In a second experiment, listeners rated the same recordings for their emotional genuineness – whether they thought the performer was truly feeling the emotion they were singing. Vocalists with more acting experience were rated as more genuine (A), while recordings with greater pitch inaccuracy (B), more jitter, and a higher harmonics-to-noise ratio were rated as more genuine.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The level of singing training had no effect on
audience perception. These results suggest that vocalists with more acting
experience – but not singing training - may sacrifice pitch
accuracy and certain aspects of voice quality to improve an audience’s emotional perception of the
performance. So the next time you hear a performer sing out of tune, ask
yourself whether they "can" or "can't" sing. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Steven Livingstone and Frank Russo</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00156/full">Read
the full article at Frontiers (Open Access)</a>.</span><br />
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