A model of time-varying music engagement

Curiosity and Mind Wandering During Music Listening Are Negatively Correlated

Curiosity, a crucial trigger of exploration and learning, has been described as the antithesis of mind wandering, a state of non-engagement with the external environment or a given task. Findings have confirmed that music's structure influences levels of curiosity in listeners as they listen and, as such, suggests that this context could be useful in examining the relationship between curiosity and mind wandering. Here, participants were exposed to extended melodies twice, during which they carried out two counterbalanced tasks: one requiring them, whenever probed, to indicate whether they had been mind wandering at that moment and the other requiring them to indicate, when probed, how curious they were feeling about the music at that moment. Critically, participants were probed at the exact same moments in the music when completing the two tasks, allowing the relationship between curiosity and mind wandering to be examined. Results confirmed our prediction of a negative relationship between curiosity and mind wandering, while exploratory analysis further suggested an influence of expertise and the music's information dynamics on patterns of mind wandering. We discuss the implications of our study for understanding music as an exploration-affording sound environment and outline directions for future work.

Audio-visual concert performances synchronize audience's heart rates

People enjoy engaging with music. Live music concerts provide an excellent option to investigate real-world music experiences, and at the same time, use neurophysiological synchrony to assess dynamic engagement. In the current study, we assessed engagement in a live concert setting using synchrony of cardiorespiratory measures, comparing inter-subject, stimulus-response, correlation, and phase coherence. As engagement might be enhanced in a concert setting by seeing musicians perform, we presented audiences with audio-only (AO) and audio-visual (AV) piano performances. Only correlation synchrony measures were above chance level. In comparing time-averaged synchrony across conditions, AV performances evoked a higher inter-subject correlation of heart rate (ISC-HR). However, synchrony averaged across music pieces did not correspond to self-reported engagement. On the other hand, time-resolved analyses show that synchronized deceleration-acceleration heart rate (HR) patterns, typical of an "orienting response" (an index of directed attention), occurred within music pieces at salient events of section boundaries. That is, seeing musicians perform heightened audience engagement at structurally important moments in Western classical music. Overall, we could show that multisensory information shapes dynamic engagement. By comparing different synchrony measures, we further highlight the advantages of time series analysis, specifically ISC-HR, as a robust measure of holistic musical listening experiences in naturalistic concert settings.

Music Listening as Exploratory Behavior: From Dispositional Reactions to Epistemic Interactions with the Sonic World

Listening to music can span a continuum from passive consumption to active exploration, relying on processes of coping with the sounds as well as higher-level processes of sense-making. Revolving around the major questions of "what" and "how" to explore, this paper takes a naturalistic stance toward music listening, providing tools to objectively describe the underlying mechanisms of musical sense-making by weakening the distinction between music and non-music. Starting from a non-exclusionary conception of "coping" with the sounds, it stresses the exploratory approach of treating music as a sound environment to be discovered by an attentive listener. Exploratory listening, in this view, is an open-minded and active process, not dependent on simply recalling pre-existing knowledge or information that reduces cognitive processing efforts but having a high cognitive load due to the need for highly focused attention and perceptual readiness. Music, explored in this way, is valued for its complexity, surprisingness, novelty, incongruity, puzzlingness, and patterns, relying on processes of selection, differentiation, discrimination, and identification.

Aesthetics and predictive processing: grounds and prospects of a fruitful encounter

In the last few years, a remarkable convergence of interests and results has emerged between scholars interested in the arts and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives and cognitive scientists studying the mind and brain within the predictive processing (PP) framework. This convergence has so far proven fruitful for both sides: while PP is increasingly adopted as a framework for understanding aesthetic phenomena, the arts and aesthetics, examined under the lens of PP, are starting to be seen as important windows into our mental functioning. The result is a vast and fast-growing research programme that promises to deliver important insights into our aesthetic encounters as well as a wide range of psychological phenomena of general interest. Here, we present this developing research programme, describing its grounds and highlighting its prospects. We start by clarifying how the study of the arts and aesthetics encounters the PP picture of mental functioning (§1). We then go on to outline the prospects of this encounter for the fields involved: philosophy and history of art (§2), psychology of aesthetics and neuroaesthetics (§3) and psychology and neuroscience more generally (§4). The upshot is an ambitious but well-defined framework within which aesthetics and cognitive science can partner up to illuminate crucial aspects of the human mind. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'.