A Set of 200 Musical Stimuli Varying in Balance, Contour, Symmetry, and Complexity: Behavioral and Computational Assessments

Loop and Enjoy: A Scoping Review of the Research on the Effects of Processing Fluency on Aesthetic Reactions to Auditory Stimuli

Processing fluency has been shown to affect how people aesthetically evaluate stimuli. While this effect is well documented for visual stimuli, the evidence accumulated for auditory stimuli has not yet been integrated. Our aim was to examine the relevant research on how processing fluency affects the aesthetic appreciation of auditory stimuli and to identify the extant knowledge gaps in this body of evidence. This scoping review of 19 studies reported across 13 articles found that, similarly to visual stimuli, fluency has a positive effect on liking of auditory stimuli. Additionally, we identified certain elements that impede the generalizability of the current research on the relationship between fluency and aesthetic reactions to auditory stimuli, such as a lack of consistency in the number of repeated exposures, the tendency to omit the affective component and the failure to account for personal variables such as musical abilities developed through musical training or the participants' personality or preferences. These results offer a starting point in developing novel and proper processing fluency manipulations of auditory stimuli and suggest several avenues for future research aiming to clarify the impact and importance of processing fluency and disfluency in this domain.

Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on U.S. charts from 1950 to 2023

In the past century, the history of popular music has been analyzed from many different perspectives, with sociologists, musicologists and philosophers all offering distinct narratives characterizing the evolution of popular music. However, quantitative studies on this subject began only in the last decade and focused on features extracted from raw audio, which limits the scope to low-level components of music. The present study investigates the evolution of a more abstract dimension of popular music, specifically melody, using a new dataset of popular melodies spanning from 1950 to 2023. To identify "melodic revolutions", changepoint detection was applied to a multivariate time series comprising features related to the pitch and rhythmic structure of the melodies. Two major revolutions in 1975 and 2000 and one smaller revolution in 1996, characterized by significant decreases in complexity, were located. The revolutions divided the time series into three eras, which were modeled separately with autoregression, linear regression and vector autoregression. Linear regression of autoregression residuals underscored inter-feature relationships, which become stronger in post-2000 melodies. The overriding pattern emerging from these analyses shows decreasing complexity and increasing note density in popular melodies over time, especially since 2000.

The Role of Art Expertise and Symmetry on Facial Aesthetic Preferences

Humans, like other species, have a preference for symmetrical visual stimuli, a preference that is influenced by factors such as age, sex, and artistic training. In particular, artistic training seems to decrease the rejection of asymmetry in abstract stimuli. However, it is not known whether the same trend would be observed in relation to concrete stimuli such as human faces. In this article, we investigated the role of expertise in visual arts, music, and dance, in the perceived beauty and attractiveness of human faces with different asymmetries. With this objective, the beauty and attractiveness of 100 photographs of faces with different degrees of asymmetry were evaluated by 116 participants with different levels of art expertise. Expertise in visual arts and dance was associated with the extent to which facial asymmetry influenced the beauty ratings assigned to the faces. The greater the art expertise in visual arts and dance, the more indifferent to facial asymmetry the participant was to evaluate beauty. The same effect was not found for music and neither for attractiveness ratings. These findings are important to help understand how face aesthetic evaluation is modified by artistic training and the difference between beauty and attractiveness evaluations.

Evaluative judgment across domains: Liking balance, contour, symmetry and complexity in melodies and visual designs

Evaluative judgment-i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked-is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To investigate whether evaluative judgments are based on modality-specific or modality-general attributes, we compared the extent to which balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity affect liking responses in the auditory and visual modalities. We found no significant correlation for any of the four attributes across sensory modalities, except for contour. This suggests that evaluative judgments primarily rely on modality-specific sensory representations elaborated in the brain's sensory cortices and relayed to the reward circuit, rather than abstract modality-general representations. The individual traits art experience, openness to experience, and desire for aesthetics were associated with the extent to which design or compositional attributes influenced liking, but inconsistently across sensory modalities and attributes, also suggesting modality-specific influences.