Psychology of Music

Music performance anxiety (MPA) is one of the main problems experienced by music students. It manifests in affective, cognitive, somatic, and behavioral symptoms that can occur regardless of the quality of the musical performance. The aim of this study was to perform a regression analysis to determine the variables that contribute to the prediction of MPA in conservatory students. A total of 295 Spanish music students aged 15–68 years enrolled in Spanish conservatories completed a battery of questionnaires selected to collect information about demographic characteristics, musical training, learning processes, and health and psychological variables. Pearson’s correlations and ANOVA were calculated, and a regression analysis was done to predict the development of MPA. The results showed that MPA is largely predicted by health and psychological variables, including depression, fear of negative evaluation, social avoidance, poor achievement motivation, and use of substances to alleviate MPA. Age at first musical performance with an audience was the only musical training variable with sufficient strength to predict MPA (the older the participant, the greater the MPA). The article concludes with a discussion of the need to implement psychological and educational counseling in music education centers as well as specific training to increase the quality of the musical career and personal wellbeing of the students.

Performing music at the highest levels involves great competitiveness. When each performance represents a major personal challenge, success is no longer solely dependent on a high level of technical mastery: the psychological aspects of the performance also have a decisive impact. The concept of flow is presented as a phenomenon associated with significant improvements in the musician’s performance and well-being. This work explores musicians’ positive experiences in performance situations and studies the factors that promote the emergence of flow during competitions. Eleven musicians, both professionals and students, were interviewed to consider ways of promoting the emergence of flow that help them to produce high-quality performances. Our analysis revealed several different factors promoting the emergence of flow: social standing, performance preparation, connection to one’s body, awareness of skills and self-confidence, intrinsic motivation, attentional focus, and transcendence. These findings enhance our understanding of the conditions influencing the emergence of flow. We consider work pathways which might facilitate the emergence of flow experiences and thus help musicians to produce high-quality performances while protecting them from the harmful effects of stress and anxiety.

While the ensemble is a ubiquitous learning environment within jazz education, opportunities to learn through engagement in ensemble performances and industry-level recording opportunities are rare classroom environments tertiary jazz music institutions offer. This qualitative study examines jazz performance contexts within an Australian tertiary music course, exploring students’ learning experience spanning three diverse collaborative projects across nine months. Phenomenological analysis explores the instructional relationship outlining connection between the student and instruction, the subject matter that is taught, and the connection between the student and the teacher as master improviser. Findings outline substantive teacher crafting of learning, relationship building and learning experiences garnered from interpersonal learning relationships, and the application of content with pedagogy that aims to build a positive learning climate between improvising teachers and their students. The author contends that a phenomenological perspective can highlight this diversity and emphasize effective interpersonal strategies and ensemble pedagogies that enhance student learning and potentially enculturate richer and more sophisticated musicianship in students and their developing creative abilities.

The purpose of this narrative study is to explain the role that musicking plays in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic for 11 South African musicians. The research question is: How do the stories of 11 South African musicians explain the role that musicking plays in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic? There have been studies on how music helps in therapeutic and everyday settings, but there has been limited research on the role musicking plays in coping with pandemics. The 11 author-participants in the study have lived through this pandemic, and their stories served as the data. We used a narrative coding scheme to enable co-coding. Our findings are a collaborative interpretation of our analyses and are represented as a fictionalized dialogue. This dialogue revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic had a range of psychological effects on the participant researchers. Musicking contributed to proactive and reactive coping strategies, including listening to music actively, making music with others virtually and in their homes, finding solidarity through engaging with musical icons, allowing them to connect with others, escape, focus, relax, and find hedonic well-being and hope. Further research will be needed to understand the roles musicking may play in coping with pandemics.

Previous research has led to the hypothesis that poor-pitch singing is the result of a weakness in the auditory/vocal loop. The present study evaluated this hypothesis in a training paradigm that used visual feedback to augment potentially faulty auditory-vocal associations. Following pretest with the Seattle Singing Accuracy Protocol (SSAP), participants were randomly assigned to one of three 20-min training conditions: (1) visual feedback training with auditory doubling, in which participants could both see and hear real-time feedback showing the relationship between their sung pitch and the target, (2) auditory feedback training, where participants relied only on airborne auditory feedback from their own voice, and (3) control training which involved imitation of speech from a foreign language instruction recording. After training, the SSAP was administered again as a posttest measure. There was a general improvement from pretest to posttest across all groups. However, the effect of training was only significant for participants who received visual feedback training, with greater gains in visual training than either of the other conditions. This pattern of results was particularly pronounced for performance on 4-note melodies in the SSAP, in contrast to single pitch matching. Visual feedback may facilitate accuracy by substituting for inaccurate auditory-motor associations. The fact that training, even over a very short time-span, can have significant effects on singing underlines the importance of practice, and supports the hypothesis that singing is a learned skill that can benefit from experience and may not simply reflect an inherited talent.

Recent research has shown that formal musical training has a wealth of benefits in terms of cognition, mental health, social skills, and even speech perception. Of these benefits, there is strong support for a relationship between formal musical training and an improved ability to recognize emotions in speech prosody. Given this connection, interpersonal relationships stand to benefit from improved communication efficacy, which includes an improved ability to recognize emotions in speech. Interpersonal relationships rely on successful expression and interpretation of emotions in speech. If formal musical training can improve the perception of emotions in speech, it should indirectly benefit interpersonal relationship quality. The current study collected data from 197 undergraduate students about their formal musical training and interpersonal relationship quality through an online survey. The results showed that formal musical training accounted for 8% of the difference in relationship conflict but did not benefit relationship support or depth. While musical expertise does not necessarily improve relationship quality overall, it may help reduce conflict in relationships. Further research is needed, with participants who have greater musical expertise, to clarify the relationship between formal musical training and relationship conflict.

The relationship between parameters extracted from the musical stimuli and emotional response has been traditionally approached using several physical measures extracted from time or frequency domains. From time-domain measures, the musical onset is defined as the moment in that any musical instrument or human voice issues a musical note. The onsets’ sequence in the performance of a specific musical score creates what is known as the onset curve (OC). The influence of the structure of OC on the emotional judgment of people is not known. To this end, we have applied principal component analysis on a complete set of variables extracted from the OC to capture their statistical structure. We have found a trifactorial structure related to activation and valence dimensions of emotional judgment. The structure has been cross-validated using different participants and stimuli. In this way, we propose the factorial scores of the OC as a reliable and relevant piece of information to predict the emotional judgment of music.

Small ensemble participation represents a unique form of human social activity involving a profound level of interpersonal and emotional communication. Previous researchers have suggested that engagement in group music making may have a positive influence on various social-emotional skills, including empathy. In line with this view, the initial study explored the relationship between small ensemble experience and empathy among college music students in the United States. The study results revealed a close association between the two, with students who participated in small ensembles more frequently showing a higher level of empathy. This study aimed to replicate the initial study using the identical survey questionnaire in a college music student population in South Korea (N = 183). Overall, Korean students scored significantly lower in the empathy measure than the US student sample, which echoed relatively lower empathy among Asian American students in the initial study. Also, consistent with the previous finding, an association between the primary area of music study and empathy was found, with popular music majors showing a higher level of empathy than classical music major students. Finally, some of the small ensemble experience variables appeared to be significant predictors of students’ empathy skills, which partially replicated the initial study.

The present study investigated the effects of pairing a comedic movie trailer with emotive music on subsequent recognition memory of the events depicted in the trailer. In an independent groups design, the comedic trailer was paired with happy music (congruent condition) or sad music (incongruent condition). A no music condition served as the control condition. The results showed that participants in the incongruent condition displayed a recognition memory advantage for visual test items over participants in the congruent and control conditions. While changes in self-reported positive and negative affect did not correlate significantly with recognition memory, the perception of emotion-specific categories did. These findings help to establish an empirical basis of ironic contrast techniques and propose an affective component in the integration and representation of audiovisual action that is likely to emerge where a participant perceives or recognizes expressed emotions in music, without necessarily feeling an overall positive or negative affect.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many aspects of life, including the instructional practices of music educators. The purpose of this study was to examine music teachers’ well-being following the disruptions in schooling that resulted from the pandemic in the Spring of 2020. We also investigated how disruptions may have affected music teachers’ perceptions of their efficacy and the status of the profession. A questionnaire was completed by 2,023 music teachers who were members of the National Association for Music Education. We collected data related to (a) demographic and institutional information, (b) well-being, (c) teaching efficacy, (d) the impact of the pandemic upon the profession, and (e) the impact of the pandemic upon student learning. The questionnaire included the PERMA Profiler, a measure of well-being, and a portion of the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS-21). Both PK–12 and collegiate teachers reported significantly lower levels of overall well-being and significantly higher levels of depression than published norms. Additional analyses examined the relationship of individual difference and teaching context variables to the well-being measures, perceptions of teaching efficacy, and perceptions of the pandemic’s impact on student learning.

This exploratory case study investigated the grounds of the material and physical aspects of compositional thinking, viewing musical composing as organizing the world of sounds. The data tracks one compositional process, including the full body of the manuscripts and verbal data accounting those manuscripts. The results present a composer, who wishes to create music that has performative power, that is, expressivities that have the capacity to move the mind of the listener. The composer is inspired by the materiality of sound and musical instruments, but on the other hand constrained and challenged by the corporal affordances of performers and their instruments as well as by the (im)practicalities and intelligibility of notational practices. Five different aspects of materiality were identified: (1) visual images and representations, (2) the score as the material object of composition, (3) the material and physical affordances of musical instruments, performers that play them, and sounds that are produced by them, (4) physical reactions entailing embodied intuitive knowledge of the composer, and (5) metaphoric processes, where the composer, when shaping timbres and musical structures, “pushes,” even “forces” sounds to “move” and sound in a way that is meaningful and transpires to the listener as music that moves the mind.

This study was undertaken with the intent of exploring three overarching research questions concerning music performance anxiety (MPA). The first objective was to collect descriptive accounts of the everyday experiences of MPA in educational settings. The second objective was to investigate the adaptive coping strategies students utilized to manage their MPA, which were distilled from the data in light of the self-regulated learning framework. Finally, the perceived institutional support around MPA was investigated. A semi-structured interview approach was used as the main data collection method (n = 10). All students interviewed perceived themselves as experiencing MPA to some extent; however, the intensity of these experiences varied. The most common MPA coping strategies mentioned were increasing individual practice time, and mental skill practices. All students mentioned the importance of preparation, which was associated with self-confidence, leading to higher self-efficacy beliefs, which in return had a positive impact on their management of MPA. Teachers and peers were identified as integral to sustaining students’ well-being and MPA regulation efforts. A positive teacher attitude toward the management of MPA appeared to encourage students’ help-seeking efforts.

The role of music in second-language (L2) learning has long been the object of various empirical and theoretical inquiries. However, research on whether the effect of background music (BM) on language-related task performance is facilitative or inhibitory has produced inconsistent findings. Hence, we investigated the effect of happy and sad BM on complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of L2 speaking among intermediate learners of English. A between-groups design was used, in which 60 participants were randomly assigned to three groups with two experimental groups performing an oral L2 English retelling task while listening to either happy or sad BM, and a control group performing the task with no background music. The results demonstrated the happy BM group’s significant outperformance in fluency over the control group. In accuracy, the happy BM group also outdid the controls (error-free clauses, correct verb forms). Moreover, the sad BM group performed better in accuracy than the controls but in only one of its measures (correct verb forms). Furthermore, no significant difference between the groups in syntactic complexity was observed. The study, in line with the current literature on BM effects, suggests that it might have specific impacts on L2 oral production, explained by factors such as mood, arousal, neural mechanism, and the target task’s properties.

Mind wandering is a prevalent and ubiquitous phenomenon. Several studies suggest that mind wandering benefits creativity if it occurs in the incubation period of a creative problem-solving task. However, it could be impairing real-time expression of creative behavior if it occurs during the course of a creative task. This dissociation between incubation and performance suggests that mind wandering poses a double-edged sword to creative cognition. Jazz improvisation provides an ecologically useful framework for studying the effects of mind wandering on creativity. Here we hypothesized that mind wandering during a musical improvisation task would be associated with higher levels of musical creativity, compared with on-task attention. Nine experienced musicians performed several jazz improvisation tasks interleaved with the presentation of random thought probes. The results showed that musical improvisation during unintentional mind wandering was associated with higher musical creativity when compared with improvisation during on-task attention. However, mind wandering did not impact overall improvisational quality. Altogether, these data suggest that the positive relationship between mind wandering and creativity also extends to artistic performance domains.

This study aimed at analyzing the influence of receptive organizational therapy on the levels of stress of nursing professionals in a public hospital. Concerning the methodology, the study has a quantitative approach and an explanatory nature and adopts quasi-experimental procedures. The research universe encompassed 74 nursing professionals. As a research tool, the study used the Lipp’s Stress Symptoms Inventory for Adults. Primary results showed that, out of the 74 professionals, 20.3% (n = 15) were classified as having no levels of stress. However, 79.7% (n = 59) of the participants had some levels of stress. Out of these professionals, 71.6% (n = 53) were in the second stage, known as resistance. Thirty days after the application of receptive musical therapy, the 74 professionals who took part in this experience had their levels of stress reevaluated and compared to the levels of stress from before the musical intervention with the use of the Wilcoxon test. The test results highlighted that the levels of stress during the resistance, near-exhaustion, and exhaustion stages were minimized. As a conclusion, therefore, receptive organizational musical therapy has meaningful effects on reducing stress and improving the work life quality of professionals.

This case study focuses on the processes involved in co-constructing an interpretation of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Romancero Gitano with a non-professional choir. Rehearsals began in April 2018 and culminated with a performance in June 2018. In order to develop an understanding of the individual and collective processes involved, data were generated through autoethnography and journaling. These texts tracked our regular weekly rehearsals, any extra individual practice, and the performance experience. Seven journals were subsequently compiled and analyzed together with my autoethnography. The findings show that the bulk of the writings focused on technical questions like correctly executing the information contained in the score, with significantly fewer references to other aspects of musical interpretation, such as timbre, or personal reflections regarding our perception of the music and our journey in learning and performing the work. Furthermore, the texts reveal a hierarchical structure within the choir, especially related to perceived levels of musical literacy and/or institutionalized knowledge. In this article, I discuss the various experiences relating to the process of co-constructing a musical interpretation, together with the potential of journaling to develop reflexive, conscious, and inclusive processes of collective musical development within the context of a non-professional choir.

While the phenomenon of beat-deafness has been explored in clinical contexts, few studies have investigated how rhythmically challenged people experience the act of keeping time with music. Task-based semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight participants who self-identified as being unable to clap in time to a beat. Participants were asked to keep time with a gradated battery of musical stimuli using both claps and alternative gestures (e.g. head nodding, swaying) and to articulate their timekeeping experience and strategies. Analysis reveals three core themes: (a) an apparent disconnect between the act of identifying the beat and the physical act of clapping, (b) variation in strategies for keeping time depending on the type of musical example (i.e., whether the beat was explicitly played by a percussive instrument or not), and (c) variation in the ease of coordination and listening experience when a movement other than clapping was used to keep time. Despite being small in scale, this qualitative study sheds light on some of the underlying strategies and processes involved in beat abstraction and keeping time to music, informing options for the musical training of rhythmically challenged people.

According to the Stress Vulnerability Model, affect regulation is crucial to manage stressors and promote recovery for adults with mental health conditions. Education regarding music-based affect regulation can be delivered in group formats using a transdiagnostic approach to increase access to services and vicarious learning. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine if there were between-diagnosis and between-substance differences in music-based affect regulation via the Brief Music in Mood Regulation Scale (B-MMR) and Healthy-Unhealthy Music Scale (HUMS) subscales in adults with mental health and substance use conditions. Adults with mental health (n = 147) and substance use (n = 221) conditions completed the B-MMR and HUMS. Analyses of variance were conducted with participants’ mental health diagnosis or primary substance as independent variables and the B-MMR and HUMS subscales as dependent variables. There were only significant between-substance differences in revival and discharge subscales, with participants addicted to heroin having higher mean scores than participants addicted to alcohol. No other result was significant. Due to an overall lack of between-group differences in diagnoses and substances, transdiagnostic theory has applications for educating adults with mental health and substance use conditions about music-based affect regulation in group formats.

A limited amount of previous research suggests that deteriorating socioeconomic conditions may be associated with greater popularity of music lyrics featuring negative emotional content and references to relationships. The present research considered this in charting popular music before and during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. A dataset based on the song lyrics of the top-5 charting weekly songs in the United Kingdom and the United States from January 1999 to August 2020 was computer-analyzed for interpersonal variables, such as satisfaction and human interest, and positive and negative emotional valence. Results indicated lower satisfaction and human interest in lyrics in the United States and United Kingdom in the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the lyrics in charting songs in 2015–2019. The US charting songs in 2020 also saw higher leveling and negative emotional content, and, when considering monthly data from 1999 to 2020, there was a positive association between economic misery and the number of negatively valenced words. The findings broaden our understanding of the relationship between significant global events and trends in popular music.

Fans of extreme metal and rap music with violent themes, hereafter termed “violently themed music,” predominantly experience positive emotional and psychosocial outcomes in response to this music. However, negative emotional responses to preferred music are reported to a greater extent by such fans than by fans of non-violently themed music. We investigated negative emotional responses to violently themed music among fans by assessing their experience of depressive symptoms, and whether violently themed music functions to regulate negative moods through two common mood regulation strategies: discharge and diversion. Fans of violent rap (n = 49), violent extreme metal (n = 46), and non-violent classical music (n = 50) reported depressive symptoms and use of music to regulate moods. Participants listened to four one-minute excerpts of music in their preferred genres and rated negative emotional responses to each excerpt (sadness, tension, anger, fear). There were no significant differences between ratings of depression between groups, but depressive symptoms predicted negative emotional responses to music across all groups. Furthermore, depression ratings predicted the use of the mood regulation strategy of discharge in all groups. The discharge strategy did not reduce (or exacerbate) fans’ negative emotional responses, but may nevertheless confer other benefits. We discuss implications for the psychosocial well-being of fans of violently themed music.

Perfectionism as a construct has received increasing attention in recent years, in particular with regard to its potentially debilitating effects. In this critical literature review, the prevalence and development of perfectionism in school-age musicians are examined, with an eye to the implicit values of neoliberalism and settler colonialism represented in music curricula. Parent, teacher, and cultural influences are considered, as well as the role of perfectionism in children’s experience of music performance anxiety. Suggestions that perfectionism in this context may be a product of punitive methods in education and inequitable distribution of resources are discussed. Recommendations are made for pedagogical practices and research with children, as well as implications for parents, with specific attention focused on the need to deviate from the idea that perfect performances are the only measurements of success in music.

Our pilot study explored the effects of a new, five-session group keyboard music-making protocol on the mood states of non-musician college students. Twenty-five math and engineering students participated in a keyboard music-making program without the expectation or need for extensive technical preparation or regular music practice. To assess changes in mood states before and after music-making activities, we administered the Profile of Mood States-Short Form (POMS-SF) questionnaire. Here, we show significant and lasting improvements in participant’s negative and positive mood states, which were more robust than mood improvements reported with other Recreational Music Making (RMM) protocols, suggesting a strong therapeutic potential of our group keyboard music-making program.

Group singing elevates mood, increases social bonding, and regulates stress. However, the question remains as to how much of the singer’s mood-boost is derived from social aspects of group singing and how much can be achieved through singing alone. In the current study, we adopted a sociobiological approach to investigate the underpinnings of the mood-boosting effect of singing. Using a within-subjects design, self-report mood, salivary oxytocin, and salivary cortisol were assessed before and after group and individual singing conditions. This study uncovered several important findings: group singing elevated mood, whereas individual singing did not. Importantly, although both group and individual singing led to decreases in cortisol, only group singing led to increases in oxytocin. Further analysis revealed that oxytocin, but not cortisol, significantly correlated with mood. These findings suggest that the mood-boosting effect of singing is likely due to social aspects and is influenced by changes in oxytocin.

Listening to music is a common method of regulating unpleasant emotions such as sadness, but music listening has not been compared to prototypical interpersonal emotion-regulation strategies. We examined music’s response-independent benefits (i.e., benefits that do not require a response from another person) and response-dependent benefits (i.e., benefits that do require a response from another person) and compared those to other regulation strategies such as talking to a friend and asking someone for advice. College students (N = 353) completed an online survey in which they rated their likelihood of using eight different strategies to regulate sadness and the benefits of using each strategy. Repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed listening to music was the most likely strategy used when sad. Moreover, listening to music provided the most response-independent benefits of any strategy we examined, including talking to a friend and asking someone for advice. Talking to a friend provided more interpersonal support than listening to music did, but listening to music did not provide any less of a shared experience than talking to a friend or asking someone for advice. These findings suggest that listening to music shares much in common with interpersonal emotion-regulation strategies such as talking with other people when sad.

To identify and classify musical tastes, researchers have extensively relied on the use of music-genre labels. However, the validity and reliability of such a method remain unclear. In this study, we examined the extent to which 873 high school students felt able to assess their musical tastes based on music-genre labels. Participants were expressly asked to evaluate the usability of such labels. Results showed that a majority of respondents were uncomfortable with the use of music-genre labels, mainly because of music-genre labels’ complicatedness and internal heterogeneity. Sex and social milieu predicted the perception of the usability of music-genre labels only weakly. Overall, our findings suggest that the reliance on music-genre labels in research on musical tastes might be problematic. We recommend that complementary indicators of musical tastes be more widely employed in the future.