Participate in a study about scary music! 🦇💀 📝 Anonymous online survey (20–30 min) 👥 Open to adults and adolescents over 15 years 🔤 Good English skills required 🎧 Please wear headphones! ♫ Listen to music clips, answer questions. Participate here: link.webropol.com/s/mapping-sc... #musicscience

Mapping scary music

Survey Powered by Webropol

link.webropol.com

Nature Beats is now available #OpenAccess: a timely, cross-disciplinary volume exploring the what, how, and why of rhythmic behaviour in animals. It brings together empirical findings, new data, and theories on the evolution of musical rhythm across species.

Nature Beats

This open access book offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of rhythmic behavior across the animal kingdom.

link.springer.com

🌏🎶 Special Many Voices: A world music podcast episode! 🎶🌏 The Season 1 finale ends with two very special guest hosts - my own kids! They interviewed me about my own NZ/US musical culture to make me see what it's like on the other end of the microphone: youtu.be/N9IZixq1pOs

Pat Savage@patrickesavage.bsky.social · last mo.

🌏🎶 Special @manyvoices.bsky.social podcast episode🎶🌏 The Season 1 finale ends with two very special guest hosts - my own kids! They interviewed me about my own NZ/US musical culture to make me see what it's like on the other end of the microphone: youtu.be/N9IZixq1pOs

🌏🎶 New @manyvoices.bsky.social podcast episode with @andrearavignani.bsky.social covers music from his homeland, from the Italian anti-fascist anthem "Bella Ciao" to pan-European instrumental music like Bach and John Powell's "How To Train Your Dragon", and beyond: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfju...

My new favourite game is Anthropeum. anthropeum.com

Anthropeum

A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artifact was made. See how you rank.

anthropeum.com

Who creates meaning in music? I've reviewed Janet Bourne's new book Who Listens? A fascinating exploration of how musical meaning emerges through the experiences, identities, and cultures we bring to listening. For music cognition, narrative, & music therapy. journals.qmu.ac.uk/approaches/a...

You can also listen on Spotify (open.spotify.com/episode/1Ie6...) or Apple Podcasts (podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/5...) For more episodes and playlists with full songs, visit many-voices.com. Let's keep the whole world singing! 🌏🎶

"Like IQ tests, this research has a dark history." In the 16th essay for our Legacies of Eugenics series, Daniel Shanahan traces the origins of algorithmically-mediated music recommendations: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/music-algorithm-spotify-eugenics-measure-talent-raymond-cattell/

Why Context Matters in Music and Emotions — a blog post on why emotional experiences with music cannot be explained by musical features alone, but require a contextualised understanding of the listener and situation.

Tearfloods (Homage to Miyazaki). I’m looking forward to singing in this at Cadogan Hall this evening. youtu.be/0HvLtNoFuBY?...

David Temple interviews Robin Haigh, composer of CEFC commission TEARFLOODS (Homage to Miyazaki)

YouTube video by Crouch End Festival Chorus

youtu.be

I’m looking forward to singing in this on Sunday. Robin Haigh’s TEARFLOODS is remarkable. youtube.com/shorts/Ur4gS...

Carmina Burana + TEARFLOODS at Cadogan Hall, don’t miss out on an epic choral Sunday

YouTube video by Crouch End Festival Chorus

youtube.com

Looking for some good readings for a graduate student who is interested in the philosophy and cognitive science of music #perception. Any recommendations—philosophical or otherwise? #PhilPerception #PhilQ

How it started / How it ended

Pat Savage@patrickesavage.bsky.social · 5mo ago

My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪
 You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do! I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41... Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!

Daniel Shanahan@danielshanahan.bsky.social · 5mo ago

slime-survey-app.vercel.app Please try this “What type of listening device are you?” quiz and share with friends!

We (@johnmcbride4lyf.bsky.social, @yutoozaki.bsky.social, @mhoeschele.bsky.social, Alex Ruf, Raphaël Powis, @musiccognition.bsky.social & I) wrote this up into a formal critique of the Science paper claiming to demonstrate beat synchronization in macaques: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Pat Savage@patrickesavage.bsky.social · 8mo ago

In journal club today an astute grad student pointed out that these macaque tapping data look nothing like human beat synchronisation data. Nor, for that matter, like data from vocal learners like Snowball the cockatoo. Doesn't seem like evidence for synchronisation - are we missing something?

A particular moment in my favourite Radiohead song always gives me goosebumps every time I play it. Turns out susceptibility to such “chills” (induced by music, poetry, art) varies between people & that genetic differences play a part. Check out our new paper, led by @giacomobignardi.bsky.social. 👇🧪

Genetic underpinnings of chills from art and music

Author summary Many people experience chills when listening to music, reading poetry, or viewing art. Yet not everyone feels these reactions in the same way. These differences provide a window into ho...

journals.plos.org

Does musical tension make the final resolution sweeter? 🎵 New research says perhaps no! We found that high dissonance in the penultimate chord actually makes the final tonic sound less pleasant, debunking the long-held "contrast effect" theory. #musicscience #musicresearch doi.org/10.1177/0305...

Last week to submit abstracts to join our group in Durham in July for the SysMus26 conference! Please share with any interested #musicscience students! musicscience.net/events/sysmu...

SysMus26

We are looking forward to hosting the next International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology very soon! SysMus26—the 19th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology—i…

musicscience.net

📣 Happy to share our new pre-print investigating rhythmic competencies in an internet-based sample of 300 participants - Check it out here! osf.io/preprints/ps... Nice collaboration with Nick Foster, Reyna Gordon, Simone Dalla Bella, and Barbara Tillmann 😁 🎵🧪 #musicscience 🎶

I love this.

Sylvie Nozaradan@sylvienozaradan.bsky.social · 7mo ago

How to think about culture in psychology and neuroscience? What about seeing it as a source and product of perceptual plasticity? Such an inspiring journey to co-write this paper with R Polak, A Danielsen, N Jacoby, L Pearson, S Horlor, S Aubinet, J London. osf.io/preprints/ps... Feedback welcome!

Do you know a parrot that talks or sings? Tell us about it at www.manyparrots.org @birdsingalong.bsky.social @laurynbenedict.bsky.social et al.

Happy new year! I wanted to share my new Python package called chatter that streamlines the process of applying AI/ML models to animal communication 🦜🦇🐋🐵👨‍🌾 masonyoungblood.github.io/chatter/

Nice new paper here providing a model of why we want to move. #musiccognition #music #research #musicscience nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

NYAS Publications

Prominent theories suggest that the urge to move along to rhythmic music is driven by precision-weighted prediction errors. We operationalized this account as a Bayesian model which outputs surprisal...

nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

A strange ad for Facebook to dangle in front of me.

In short, I believe the study provides evidence for isochrony perception rather than beat perception. I explain the difference in [1] and present empirical data in [2]. [1] youtu.be/hZlribCZAx8?... [2] doi.org/10.3389/fnin...

Probing beat and isochrony perception in primates | Paper at ICMPC17 | Henkjan Honing

YouTube video by Music Cognition Group (UvA)

youtu.be

Monkeys That Catch The Beat Rewrite The Story Of Rhythm #Science #Biology #Zoology #RhythmResearch #AnimalBehavior #MusicScience

OUT NOW!!! SoundPower with Stefan Koelsch, professor, music neuroscientist and violinist. We look at how musical pleasure shapes emotion, health and ageing. In his words “Dopamine can help keep the brain younger.” Listen here: www.tinyurl.com/ep18-SP-Stef...

I wrote some words about David Huron for Music and Science. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

David Huron (1954–2025) - Daniel Shanahan, 2025

journals.sagepub.com

Paper out with Atser Damsma, Tom Kaplan, Mohsen Ghorashi, & Marcus Pearce! How do listeners represent rhythmic patterns? Our probabilistic modelling 🎶 says using abstract, imprecise representations, like ratio and contour: "long, a bit shorter, shortish"! Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our next RITMO Seminar Series is Tuesday next week!🥳 Professor of Music Psychology at the University of Sheffield, Renee Timmers, will give a talk titled "Multimodality and Embodiment of Timing and Tempo". Read more here: www.uio.no/ritmo/englis...

Multimodality and Embodiment of Timing and Tempo - RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion

Professor of Music Psychology at the University of Sheffield, Renee Timmers, will speak at RITMO's Seminar Series.

uio.no