thesis statement about music influence

Music Thesis Statements

Music has been shown to have a profound effect on the human brain. It can alter our mood, relieve stress, and even boost our immune system. Music therapy is an increasingly popular treatment for a variety of conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and depression.

While the exact mechanisms by which music exerts its effects on the brain are not fully understood, there is no doubt that it has a powerful impact. In some cases, music may even be more effective than medication. If you are struggling with a mental health issue, consider giving music therapy a try.

Music stimulates brain development and productive function. In humans, music is an instinctive desire to create and enjoy, it is not forgotten by diseases such as Parkinson’s or dementia, and it has been shown to assist kids with ADHD and ADD focus. Charles Darwin, together with other experts, believes that music was used to aid human evolution and bonding over time.

There are different types of music for different purposes, such as: for relaxation, concentration, to increase productivity or creativity, to improve sleep quality, to boost energy and mood, to reduce stress levels and anxiety. Music can also be used as a form of therapy to help treat various conditions such as: Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, depression, stroke recovery and more.

A study done at the University of Southern California found that when people with Alzheimer’s disease listened to personalized music, it activated regions of their brain that were otherwise inactive. The music helped the patients reconnect with lost memories and improved their verbal skills.

In another study done at Stanford University School of Medicine, it was found that music can help reduce stress hormones and inflammation in the body. The study was done on rats, but the findings can be translated to humans as well.

So, what is it about music that has such a powerful effect on the brain and body?

Music affects different areas of the brain, which in turn affects our emotions, behavior and physical state. When we listen to music, our brains release dopamine, which is a feel-good chemical that makes us happy and motivated. Dopamine also helps to improve memory, focus and concentration.

In addition to releasing dopamine, music also activates the autonomic nervous system, which controls things like heart rate and blood pressure. This is why music can have such a profound effect on our physical state – it can make us feel more relaxed or energized, depending on the type of music we’re listening to.

Music is a language that people can use to better communicate emotions, sentiments, thoughts, and motivation than words can. It has almost the same effect as our natural language; it seems to be our native tongue. There are many instances in this essay where music’s impact on our mental processes cannot be denied or overlooked. It is written into our DNA to be affected by music, powered on its emotional energy, and to stimulate our brains in order for us to acquire knowledge and enhance natural mental operations.

Studies have found that music:

– Aids in focus and concentration

– Reduces stress and anxiety

– Helps with memory recall

– Encourages creativity

– Increases productivity

– And even promotes healing.

Music therapy is an ever growing field which uses music as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, mental, and social needs. This type of therapy has been shown to be helpful for those suffering from:

– Alzheimer’s disease and dementia

– chronic pain

– depression

– heart disease

– posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

There is no denying the power of music. It is an integral part of our lives, capable of affecting us on a physical, mental, and emotional level. It has the ability to improve our focus and concentration, reduce stress and anxiety, help with memory recall, encourage creativity, increase productivity, and promote healing. With all of these benefits, it is clear that music is a powerful tool that should not be underestimated.

Music has long been a part of our family’s history, and we’ve employed it as a means of communication before there was even language. Darwin believed that humans first utilized music to attract mates because a peacock flaunts its feathers. Dean Falk of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Ellen Dissanayake of the University of Washington at Seattle think that music was used to calm babies in addition.

The act of making music activates many different areas of the brain. The auditory cortex is responsible for processing sound, and the motor cortex controls movement. But music also engages the parts of the brain that control emotion, memory, and even social interaction.

Because it engages so many areas of the brain, music has a unique ability to affect our emotions. Studies have shown that music can lower anxiety levels and blood pressure, and it can also help to reduce symptoms of depression. Music therapy is now being used to treat a wide range of mental and physical health conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and even cancer.

So there you have it, the power of music is undeniable! It has been part of our history since the beginning, and it continues to have a profound impact on us today. Whether you’re using it to relax, or you’re using it to treat a health condition, there’s no doubt that music can have a real and lasting effect on our lives.

The term “motheresing” refers to this natural process, which is exactly what it sounds like. Just as contemporary moms perform lullabies for their children, primordial humans sang quiet songs to calm them. The method by which mothers motherese are similar in all societies: a softly sung song with a higher than usual tone and tempo. These professionals believe that grown-ups began creating music for their own pleasure after the fundamental elements were established and understood.

In other words, music is older than language. While the date of the first musical performance is lost to history, we do know that music has been an integral part of human culture for tens of thousands of years. The power of music is far-reaching and undeniable. It has the ability to affect our emotions, physiology, and even our behavior.

Numerous studies have shown that music can have a positive effect on the human brain and body. For example, music can:

– Lower blood pressure

– Slow heart rate

– Decrease levels of stress hormones

– Increase production of feel-good chemicals in the brain

– Boost immunity

– Improve sleep quality

– Enhance cognitive functioning and memory

In addition, music therapy is an evidence-based clinical use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music therapy program. Music therapy is an established mental health profession that uses music to address physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs of individuals of all ages.

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Article Contents

• Historical Review of Music and Emotion Theories
• Synthesis of Historical Theories
• Understanding Music and Emotions
• Conclusions and Future Directions
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Understanding the Influence of Music on Emotions: A Historical Review

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Kimberly Sena Moore, Understanding the Influence of Music on Emotions: A Historical Review, Music Therapy Perspectives , Volume 35, Issue 2, October 2017, Pages 131–143, https://doi.org/10.1093/mtp/miw026

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Music has long been thought to influence human emotions. There is significant interest among researchers and the public in understanding music-induced emotions; in fact, a common motive for engaging with music is its emotion-inducing capabilities ( Juslin & Sloboda, 2010). Traditionally, the influence of music on emotions has been described as dichotomous. The Greeks viewed it as either mimesis , a representation of an external reality, or catharsis , a purification of the soul through an emotional experience ( Cook & Dibben, 2010). This type of dichotomous viewpoint has persisted under various labels, such as formalist versus absolutist, and referential versus expressionist ( Meyer, 1956). However, these perspectives all emerged from musicology. Outside musicology, the scientific study of emotions was intermittent and, until recently, references to music’s effect on emotions were rare ( Sloboda & Juslin, 2010). Since the 1990s, there has been increased interest in studying music-induced emotions, particularly in psychology ( Juslin & Sloboda, 2010). This interest extends to the music therapy profession as well. For example, a professional music therapist in the United States is required to be able to develop and implement music therapy experiences designed to focus on emotion-related treatment goals, such as the ability to empathize, and the client’s overall affect, mood, and emotions ( Certification Board for Music Therapists [CBMT], 2015), and must apply knowledge of music-based emotional responses ( American Music Therapy Association [AMTA], 2013). Given the increased interest in psychology and the clinical implications for the music therapist, it seems timely to analyze and reflect on how the understanding of music-induced emotions has evolved in order to support current and future research and clinical practice. As current understanding is built upon prior knowledge, a historical review can serve to examine previous directions and help inform future study ( Hanson-Abromeit & Davis, 2007). Thus, the purpose of this inquiry was to provide a historical overview of prominent theories of music and emotion and connect them to current understanding. More specifically, the objectives were:

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Guide on How to Write a Music Essay: Topics and Examples

Let's Understand What is Music Essay

You know how some school assignments are fun to write by default, right? When students see them on the course syllabus, they feel less like a burden and more like a guaranteed pleasure. They are about our interests and hobbies and therefore feel innate and intuitive to write. They are easy to navigate, and interesting topic ideas just pop into your head without much trouble.

Music essays belong to the category of fun essay writing. What is music essay? Anything from in-depth analysis to personal thoughts put into words and then to paper can fall into a music essay category. An essay about music can cover a wide range of topics, including music history, theory, social impact, significance, and musical review. It can be an analytical essay about any music genre, musical instruments, or today's music industry.

Don't get us wrong, you will still need to do extensive research to connect your opinions to a broader context, and you can't step out of academic writing standards, but the essay writing process will be fun.

In this article, our custom essay writing service is going to guide you through every step of writing an excellent music essay. You can draw inspiration from the list of music essay topics that our team prepared, and later on, you will learn what an outstanding essay on music is by an example of a music review essay.

What are Some Music Topics to Write About

There are so many exciting music topics to write about. We would have trouble choosing one. You can write about various music genres, be it country music or classical music; you can research music therapy or how music production happens.

Okay, forgive us for getting carried away; music makes us enthusiastic. Below you will find a list of various music essay topics prepared from our thesis writing service . Choose one and write a memorable essay about everyone's favorite art form.

Music Argumentative Essay Topics

Music essays can be written about an infinite number of themes. You can even write about performance or media comparison.

Here is a list of music argumentative essay topics. These edge-cutting topics will challenge your readers and get you an easy A+.

• Exploring the evolution of modern music styles of the 21st century
• Is it ethical to own and play rare musical instruments?
• Is music therapy an effective mental health treatment?
• Exploring the Intersection of Technology and Creativity in electronic music
• The Relevance of traditional music theory in modern music production
• The Role of musical pieces in the Transmission of cultural identity
• The value of historical analysis in understanding the significance of music in society
• How does exposing listeners to different genres of music break down barriers
• Exploring the cognitive effects of music on human brain development
• The therapeutic potential of music in treating mental disorders

Why is Music Important Essay Topics

Do you know which essay thrills our team the most? The importance of music in life essay. We put our minds together and came up with a list of topics about why music is so central to human life. Start writing why is music important essay, and we guarantee you that you will be surprised by how much fun you had crafting it.  

• Popular Music and its Role in shaping cultural trends
• Music as a metaphorical language for expressing emotions and thoughts
• How music changes and influences social and political movements
• How the music of different countries translates their history to outsiders
• The innate connection between music and human beings
• How music helps us understand feelings we have never experienced
• Does music affect our everyday life and the way we think?
• Examining the cross-cultural significance of music in society
• How rock music influenced 70's political ideologies
• How rap music closes gaps between different racial groups in the US

Consider delegating your ' write my essay ' request to our expert writers for crafting a perfect paper on any music topic!

Why I Love Music Essay Topics

We want to know what is music to you, and the best way to tell us is to write a why I love music essay. Below you will find a list of music essay topics that will help you express your love for music.

• I love how certain songs and artists evoke Memories and Emotions
• I love the diversity of music genres and how different styles enrich my love for music
• I love how music connects me with people of different backgrounds
• How the music of Linkin Park helped me through life's toughest challenges
• What does my love for popular music say about me?
• How the unique sounds of string instruments fuel my love for music
• How music provides a temporary Release from the stresses of daily life
• How music motivates me to chase my dreams
• How the raw energy of rock music gets me through my daily life
• Why my favorite song is more than just music to me

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Music Therapy Essay Topics

One of the most interesting topics about music for an essay is music therapy. We are sure you have heard all the stories of how music cures not only mental but also physical pains. Below you can find a list of topics that will help you craft a compelling music therapy essay. And don't forget that you can always rely on our assistance for fulfilling your ' write my paper ' requests!

• The effectiveness of music therapy in reducing stress and pain for cancer patients
• Does pop music have the same effects on music therapy as classical music?
• Exploring the benefits of music therapy with other genres beyond classical music
• The potential of music therapy in aiding substance abuse treatment and recovery
• The Role of music therapy in Addressing PTSD and Trauma in military veterans
• The impact of music therapy on enhancing social interaction and emotional expression in individuals with developmental disabilities
• The use of music therapy in managing chronic pain
• Does musical therapy help depression?
• Does music reduce anxiety levels?
• Is music therapy better than traditional medicine?

History of Music Essay Topics

If you love analytical essays and prefer to see the bigger picture, you can always write a music description essay. Below you can find some of the most interesting topics for the history of music essay.

• The Significance of natural instruments in music production and performance
• Tracing the historical development of Western music theory
• How electronic music traces its roots back to classical music
• How the music industry evolved from sheet music to streaming services
• How modern producers relate to classical composers
• The Origins and Influence of Jazz Music
• How folk music saved the Stories of unnamed heroes
• Do we know what the music of ancient civilizations sounded like?
• Where does your favorite bandstand in the line of music evolve?
• The Influence of African American Music on modern pop culture

Benefits of Music Essay Topics

If you are someone who wonders what are some of the values that music brings to our daily life, you should write the benefits of music essay. The music essay titles below can inspire you to write a captivating essay:

• How music can be used to promote cultural awareness and understanding
• The benefits of music education in promoting creativity and innovation
• The social benefits of participating in music groups
• The Impact of Music on Memory and Learning
• The cognitive benefits of music education in early childhood development
• The effects of music on mood and behavior
• How learning to play an instrument improves cognitive functions.
• How music connects people distanced by thousands of miles
• The benefits of listening to music while exercising
• How music can express the feelings words fail to do so 

Music Analysis Essay Example

Reading other people's papers is a great way to scale yours. There are many music essay examples, but the one crafted by our expert writers stands out in every possible way. You can learn what a great thesis statement looks like, how to write an engaging introduction, and what comprehensive body paragraphs should look like. 

Click on the sample below to see the music analysis essay example. 

How to Write a Music Essay with Steps

Writing music essays is definitely not rocket science, so don't be afraid. It's just like writing any other paper, and a music essay outline looks like any other essay structure.

• Start by choosing a music essay topic. You can use our list above to get inspired. Choose a topic about music that feels more relevant and less researched so you can add brand-new insights. As we discussed, your music essay can be just about anything; it can be a concert report or an analytical paper about the evolution of music.
• Continue by researching the topic. Gather all the relevant materials and information for your essay on music and start taking notes. You can use these notes as building blocks for the paper. Be prepared; even for short essays, you may need to read books and long articles.
• Once you have all the necessary information, the ideas in your head will start to take shape. The next step is to develop a thesis statement out of all the ideas you have in your head. A thesis statement is a must as it informs readers what the entire music essay is about. Don't be afraid to be bold in your statement; new outlooks are always appreciated.
• Next, you'll need a music essay introduction. Here you introduce the readers to the context and background information about the research topic. It should be clear, brief, and engaging. You should set the tone of your essay from the very beginning. Don't forget the introduction is where the thesis statement goes.
• One of the most important parts of essay writing is crafting a central body paragraph about music. This is where you elaborate on your thesis, make main points, and support them with the evidence you gathered beforehand. Remember, your music essay should be well structured and depict a clear picture of your ideas.
• Next, you will need to come up with an ideal closing paragraph. Here you will need to once again revisit the main points in your music essay, restate them in a logical manner and give the readers your final thoughts.
• Don't forget to proofread your college essay. Whether you write a long or short essay on music, there will be grammatical and factual errors. Revise and look through your writing with a critical mind. You may find that some parts need rewriting.

Key Takeaways

Music essays are a pleasure to write and read. There are so many topics and themes to choose from, and if you follow our How to Write a Music Essay guide, you are guaranteed to craft a top-notch essay every time.

Be bold when selecting a subject even when unsure what is research essay topic on music, take the writing process easy, follow the academic standards, and you are good to go. Use our music essay sample to challenge yourself and write a professional paper. 

If you feel stuck and have no time our team of expert writers is always ready to give you help from all subject ( medical school personal statement school help ). Visit our website, submit your ' write my research paper ' request and a guaranteed A+ essay will be on your way in just one click.

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FAQs on Writing a Music Essay

Though music essay writing is not the hardest job on the planet, there are still some questions that often pop up. Now that you have a writing guide and a list of essay topics about music, it's time to address the remaining inquiries. Keep reading to find the answers to the frequently asked questions. 

Should Artists' Music be Used in Advertising?

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Understanding the Influence of Music on People’s Mental Health Through Dynamic Music Engagement Model

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• First Online: 10 March 2023
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• Arpita Bhattacharya 14 ,
• Uba Backonja 14 ,
• Anh Le 14 ,
• Ria Antony 14 ,
• Yujia Si 14 &
• Jin Ha Lee 14  

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13971))

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Research shows that music helps people regulate and process emotions to positively impact their mental health, but there is limited research on how to build music systems or services to support this. We investigated how engagement with music can help the listener support their mental health through a case study of the BTS ARMY fandom. We conducted a survey with 1,190 BTS fans asking about the impact BTS’ music has on their mental health and wellbeing. Participants reported that certain songs are appropriate for specific types of mood regulations, attributed largely to lyrics. Reflection, connection, and comfort were the top three experiences listeners shared during and after listening to BTS’ music. External factors like knowledge about the context of a song’s creation or other fans’ reactions to a song also influenced people’s feelings toward the music. Our research suggests an expanded view of music’s impact on mental health beyond a single-modal experience to a dynamic, multi-factored experience that evolves over time within the interconnected ecosystem of the fandom. We present the Dynamic Music Engagement Model which represents the complex, multifaceted, context-dependent nature of how music influences people’s mental health, followed by design suggestions for music information systems and services.

• Music information systems and services
• Mental health

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Bhattacharya, A., Backonja, U., Le, A., Antony, R., Si, Y., Lee, J.H. (2023). Understanding the Influence of Music on People’s Mental Health Through Dynamic Music Engagement Model. In: Sserwanga, I., et al. Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity. iConference 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13971. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_8

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Changing positive and negative affects through music experiences: a study with university students

• José Salvador Blasco-Magraner 1 ,
• Gloria Bernabé-Valero 2 ,
• Pablo Marín-Liébana 1 &
• Ana María Botella-Nicolás 1  

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Currently, there are few empirical studies that demonstrate the effects of music on specific emotions, especially in the educational context. For this reason, this study was carried out to examine the impact of music to identify affective changes after exposure to three musical stimuli.

The participants were 71 university students engaged in a music education course and none of them were musicians. Changes in the affective state of non-musical student teachers were studied after listening to three pieces of music. An inter-subject repeated measures ANOVA test was carried out using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) to measure their affective state.

The results revealed that: (i) the three musical experiences were beneficial in increasing positive affects and reducing negative affects, with significant differences between the interaction of Music Experiences × Moment (pre-post); (ii) listening to Mahler’s sad fifth symphony reduced more negative affects than the other experimental conditions; (iii) performing the blues had the highest positive effects.

Conclusions

These findings provide applied keys aspects for music education and research, as they show empirical evidence on how music can modify specific affects of personal experience.

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Introduction

The studies published on the benefits of music have been on the increase in the last two decades [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] and have branched out into different areas of research such as psychology [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ], education [ 1 , 9 , 10 ] and health [ 11 , 12 ] providing ways of using music as a resource for people’s improvement.

The publication in 1996 of the famous report “Education Hides a Treasure” submitted to the UNESCO by the International Commission was an important landmark in the educational field. This report pointed out the four basic pillars of twenty-first century education: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to be [ 13 ]. The two last ones clearly refer to emotional education. This document posed a challenge to Education in terms of both academically and emotionally development at all levels from kindergarten to university. In this regard, there has been a notable increase in the number of studies that have shown the strong impact of music on the emotions in the different stages of education and our lives. For example, from childhood to adolescence, involving primary, secondary and university education, music is especially relevant for its beneficial effects on developing students’ emotional intelligence and prosocial skills [ 1 , 14 ]. In adults, music benefits emotional self-regulation [ 15 ], while in old age it helps to maintain emotional welfare and to experience and express spirituality [ 16 ]. This underlines the importance of providing empirical evidence on the emotional influence of music.

Influence of music on positive affects

Numerous studies have used the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) to evaluate the emotional impact of music [ 17 ]. This scale is valid and effective for measuring the influence of positive and negative effects of music on listeners and performers [ 10 , 18 , 19 ]. Thus, for example, empirical evidence shows that exposure to a musical stimulus favours the increase of positive affects [ 20 , 21 ] found a significant increase in three positive affects in secondary school students after listening to music, and the same results has been found after listening to diverse musical styles. These results are consistent with Schubert [ 22 ], who demonstrated that music seems to improve or maintain well-being by means of positive valence emotions (e. g. happiness, joy and calm). Other research studied extreme metal fans aged between 18 and 34 years old and found statements of physiological excitement together with increased positive affects [ 21 ]. Positive outcomes after listening to sad music have also been found [ 23 ], who played Samuel Barbers’ Adagio for Strings , described by the BBC as the world’s saddest piece of classical music, to 20 advanced music students and 20 advanced psychology students with no musical background and subsequently found that the music only had positive affects on both groups.

Several experimental designs that used sad music on university students noticed that they experienced both sadness and positive affects [ 24 , 25 ] and also found that music labeled as “happy” increased positive affects while the one labeled as “sad” reduced both positive and negative affects [ 26 ]. For other authors the strongest and most pleasant responses to sad music are associated with empathy [ 27 ]. Moreover, listening to sad music had benefits since attributes of empathy were intensified [ 27 , 28 ]. In relation to musical performances, empirical evidence found a significant increase in positive affects [ 29 ]. Thus, music induces listeners to experience positive affects, which could turn music into an instrument for personal development.

Following on from Fredrickson’s ‘broaden‐and‐build’ framework of positive emotions [ 30 ], positive affects cause changes in cognitive activities which, in turn, can cause behaviour changes. They can also expand the possibilities for action and improve physical resources. According to Fredrickson [ 30 ], positive affects trigger three sequential effects: (1) amplification of the scope for thought and action; (2) construction of personal resources to deal with difficult simplifications; (3) personal transformation by making one more creative, with a better understanding of situations, better able to face up to difficulties and better socially integrated. This leads to an “upward spiral” in which even more positive affects are experienced. A resource such as music that can increase positive affects, can therefore be considered as a step forward in personal transformation. Thus, music teachers could have a powerful tool to help students enhance their personal development.

Influence of music on negative affects

There is a great deal of controversy as regards the influence of music on negative affects. Blasco and Calatrava [ 20 ] found a significant reduction of five negative affects in secondary school students after listening to Arturo Marquez’s typically happy Danzón N O 2. Different results were found in an experiment in which the change in participants ‘affects was assessed after listening the happy "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor and the sad "Everybody Hurts" by REM [ 26 ]. They found that the happy piece only increased the positive affects but did not reduce the negative ones, while the sad piece reduced both positive and negative affects. However, neither of these findings agree with Miller and Au [ 31 ], who carried out an experiment to compare the influence of sad and happy music on undergraduates ‘mood arousal and found that listening to both types had no significant changes on negative affects. Shulte [ 32 ] conducted a study with 30 university students to examine the impact that nostalgic music has on affects, and found that after listening to different songs, negative affects decreased. Matsumoto [ 33 ] found that sad music reduced sad feelings in deeply sad university students, while Vuoskoski and Eerola [ 34 ] showed that sad music could produce changes in memory and emotional judgements related to emotions and that experiencing music-induced sadness is intrinsically more pleasant than sad memories. It therefore seems that reducing negative affects has mostly been studied with sad and nostalgic musical stimuli. In this way, if music can reduce negative affects, it can also be involved in educational and psychological interventions focused on improving the emotional-affective sphere. Thus, for example, one study examined the effects of a wide range of music activities and found that it would be necessary to specify exactly what types of music activity lead to what types of outcomes [ 2 ]. Moore [ 3 ] also found that certain music experiences and characteristics had both desirable and undesirable effects on the neural activation patterns involved in emotion regulation. Furthermore, recent research on university students shows that music could be used to assess mood congruence effects, since these effects are reactions to the emotions evoked by music [ 35 ].

These studies demonstrate that emotional experience can be actively driven by music. Moreover, they synthesize the efforts to find ways in which music can enhance affective emotional experience by increasing positive affects and reducing the negative ones (e. g. hostility, nervousness and irritability). Although negative emotions have a great value for personal development and are necessary for psychological adjustment, coping with them and self-regulation capacities are issues that have concerned psychology. For example, Emotional Intelligence [ 36 ], which has currently been established in the educational field, constitutes a fundamental conceptual framework to increase well-being when facing negative emotions, providing keys for greater control and management of emotional reactions. It also establishes how to decrease the intensity and frequency of negative emotional states [ 37 ], providing techniques such as mindfulness meditation that have proven their effectiveness in reducing negative emotional experiences and increasing the positive ones [ 38 ]. The purpose of this research is to find whether music can be part of the varied set of resources that can be used by a teacher to modify students’ emotional experience.

Thus, although empirical evidence of the effects of music on the emotional sphere is still incipient. It seems that they can increase positive effects, but it is not clear their impact on the negative ones, since diverse and contradictory results (no change and reduction of negative affects after listening to music) were found. In addition, the effects of the type of musical piece (e.g. happy or sad music) need further investigation as different effects were found. Moreover, previous studies do not compare between the effects of listening to versus performing music. Such an approach could provide keys to highlight the importance of performing within music education. Therefore, this study aims to contribute to this scientific field, providing experimental evidence on the effects of listening to music as compared to performing music, as well as determining the effects of different types of music on positive and negative affects.

To this end, the effects of three different types of music experiences were compared: (1) listening to a sad piece, (2) listening to an epic and solemn piece, and (3) performing of a rhythm and a blues piece, to determine whether positive and negative affects were modified after exposure to these experimental situations. In particular, two hypotheses guided this study: (1) After exposure to each musical experience (listening to a sad piece; listening to a solemn piece and playing a blues), all participants will improve their emotional experience, increasing their positive affects and reducing their negative ones; and (2) the music performance will induce a greater change as compared to the listening conditions.

Participants

A total of 71 students were involved in this study, 6 men and 65 women between the ages of 20 and 40, who were studying a Teaching Grade. These students were enrolled in the "Music Education" program as part of their university degree’s syllabus. None of them had special music studies from conservatories, academies or were self-taught; thus, all had similar musical knowledge. None of them had previously listened to music in an instructional context nor had performed music with their fellow students. In addition, none of them had listening before to the musical pieces selected for this experiment.

All signed an informed consent form before participating and no payment was given for taking part in the study. As the experiment was carried out in the context of a university course, they were assured that their participation and responses would be anonymous and would have no impact on their qualifications. The research was approved by the ethical committee at the Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir: UCV2017- 18-28 code.

Questionnaire

To assess emotional states, the Positive and Negative Affective States scales (PANAS), was administered [ 39 ]. In particular, the Spanish version of the scale [ 17 ], whose study shows a high degree of internal consistency; in males 0.89 in positive affects and 0.91 in negative affects; in women 0.87 in positive affects and 0.89 in negative affects. In this study, good reliability level in each experimental condition was obtained (0.836–0.913 for positive affects and 0.805–0.917 for negative affects (see Table 1 for more information on Cronbach’s α for each experimental condition).

The PANAS consists of 20 items which describe different dimensions of emotional experience. Participants must answer them regarding to their current affective state. The scale is composed of 20 items; 10 positive affects (PA) and 10 negative affects (NA). Answers are graded in a 5-options (Likert scale), with reversed items, ranging from extremely (1) to very slightly or not at all (5).

Musical pieces

The musical pieces choice stemmed from the analysis of some of the music elements that most influence the perception of emotions: mode, melody and intervals. Within the melody, range and melodic direction were distinguished. The range or amplitude of the melodic line is commonly divided into wide or narrow, while the melodic direction is often classified as ascending or descending. Chang and Hoffman [ 10 ] associated narrow amplitude melodies with sadness, while Schimmark and Grob [ 40 ] related melodic amplitude with highly activated emotions. Regarding the melodic direction, Gerardi and Gerken [ 41 ] found a relationship between ascending direction and happiness and heroism, and between descending direction and sadness.

In relation to the mode, Tizón [ 42 ] stated that the major one is completely happy, while the minor one represents sadness. Thompson and Robitaille [ 43 ] considered that, in order to cause emotions such as happiness, solemnity or joy, composers use tonal melodies, while to obtain negative emotions, they use atonality and chromaticism.

In this research, the selected pieces (“Adagietto” from Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony, MML; and “Titans” from Alexander The Great from Vangelis, VML) are representative examples of the melodic, intervallic and modal characteristics previously exposed. Mahler's and Vangelis's pieces completely differ in modes and melodic amplitude (sad vs. heroism). Likewise, Mahler's piece is much more chromatic than Vangelis' one, which has a broader melody made up of third, fourth and fifth intervals, often representative of heroism. Those features justify the fact that they have been used as soundtracks in two films belonging to the epic genre (Alexander The Great, 2004) and drama (Death in Venice, 1971).

The musical piece that was performed by the students was chosen in order to be easy to learn in a few sessions, since they were not musicians. So, three musical pieces were used for the experimental conditions, the first two musical pieces were recordings in a CD, while the third one was performed by the subjects.

The three chosen pieces are described below:

Condition 1 (MML): “Adagietto” from Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (9:01 min), performed by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Claudio Abbado [ 44 ]. This is a sad, melancholic and dramatic piece that Luchino Visconti used in the film Death in Venice, made in 1971 and based on the book by Thomas Mann.

Condition 2 (VML): “Titans Theme” from Alexander the Great (3:59 min), directed by Oliver Stone and premiered in 2004, whose music was composed, produced and performed by Vangelis [ 45 ]. It has a markedly epic character with large doses of heroism and solemnity.

Condition 3 (BP): “Rhythm’s Blues” composed and played by Ana Bort (4:00 min). This is a popular African-American piece of music with an insistent rhythm and harmonically sustained by tonal degrees. This piece was performed by the participants using percussion instruments (carillons and a range of xylophones and metallophones).

The sample was divided into two groups (N 1  = 36 and N 2  = 35) that participated separately in all the phases of the study. The first two conditions (MML and VML) were carried out in each group's classroom, while the performance (BP) was developed in the musical instruments room. This room had 52 percussion instruments, including different types of chimes, xylophones and metallophones (soprano, alto and bass). It is a large space where there are only chairs and musical instruments and stands. The first group was distributed as follows: 6 chimes (3 soprano and 3 alto), 5 soprano xylophones, 5 alto xylophones, 5 bass xylophones, 5 soprano metallophones, 5 alto metallophones and 5 bass metallophones. The distribution of the second group was similar, but with one less alto metallophone.

Prior to the experiment, participants received two practical lessons in order to learn how to collectively perform the music score (third experimental condition). After the two practical lessons, during the next three sessions (leaving two weeks between each session), the experiment was carried out. In each session, an experimental condition was applied and PANAS was on-line administered online beforehand and afterwards (Pre-Post design). All participants were exposed to the three experimental conditions and completed the scale before and after listening to music.

In each of these three sessions, a different music condition was applied: MML in the first one, VML in the second one and BP in the third one.

As conditions VML and MML were listening to pieces of music, the instructions received by the subjects were: “You are going to listen to a musical piece, you ought to listen actively, avoiding distractions. You can close your eyes if you feel like to”. For the BP condition, they were said to play the musical sheet all together.

The aim of the study was to examine the effect of the music experience variable (with three levels: MML, VML and BP) in the Positive and Negative Affects subscales from the PANAS scale. The variable Moment was also studied to control biases and to analyze differences between the Pre and Post conditions.

The experiment was designed as a two-way repeated measure (RM) ANOVA with two dependent variables: Positive Affects and Negative Affects, one for each PANAS’ subscales.

The two repeated measures used in the experiment were the variables Musical Experience (ME), with three levels (MML, VML and BP) and the variable Moment, with two levels (PRE and POST). All participants were exposed to the three experimental conditions.

The design did not include a control group, similar to many other studies in the field of music psychology [ 27 , 30 ]. The control was carried out from the intra-subject pre-post measurement of all the participants. The rationale for this design lies in the complexity of the control condition (or placebo) design in psychology [ 46 ]. While placebos in pharmacological trials are sugar pills, in psychology it is difficult to establish an equivalent period of time similar to the musical pieces (e. g. 9 min) without activity, so that cognitive activity occurred during this period of time (e. g. daydreaming, reading a story, etc.) could bias and limit the generalization of results.

Additionally, one of the goals of this study was to compare the effects of listening to music compared to performance on affects. For this reason, two music listening experiences (MML and VML) and a musical performance experience (BP) were designed. In order to control potential biases, participants did not know the musical pieces in the experimental conditions and they had a low level of musical performance competence (musicians were excluded).

It was used SPSS statistics v.26 for the statistical analyzes.

Two ANOVA were performed. The first one, analyzed two dependent variables at the same time: Positive Affects (PA) and Negative Affects (NA).

In the second ANOVA, the 20 items of the PANAS scale were taken as dependent variables. The rest of the experimental design was similar to the first one, a two-way RM ANOVA with variables Musical Experience (ME) and Moment as repeated measures.

Examination of frequency distributions, histograms, and tests of homogeneity of variance and normality for the criterion measures indicated that the assumptions for the use of parametric statistics were met. Normality was met in all tests except for one, but the ANOVA is robust against this assumption violation. All the analyses presented were performed with the significance level (alpha) set at 0.05, two-tailed tests. Means and standard deviations for the 6 experimental conditions for both subscales, Positive Affects and Negative Affects, are presented in Table 1 .

Mauchly’s test of sphericity was statistically significant for Musical Experience and Musical Experience*Moment focusing on NA as the dependent variable ( p  < 0.05). The test only was significant for Musical Experience for PA as dependent variable ( p  < 0.05). The rest of the W’s Mauchly were not significant ( p  > 0.05), so we assumed sphericity for the non-mentioned variables and worked with the assumed sphericity univariate solution. For the variables which the W’s Mauchly was significant, the univariate solution was also taken, but choosing the corrected Greenhouse–Geisser epsilon approximation due to its conservativeness.

A significant principal effect of the Musical Experience variable F(1.710,119.691) = 22.505, p  < 0.05, η 2  = 0.243; the Moment variable F(1,70) = 45.291, p  < 0.05, η 2  = 0.393; and the Musical Experience*Moment interaction F(2,140) = 32.502, p  < 0.05, η 2  = 0.317 were found for PA.

Statistically significance was found for Moment F(1, 70) = 70.729, p  < 0.05, η 2  = 0.503 and Musical Experience*Moment interaction F(1.822, 127.555) = 8.594, p  < 0.05, η 2  = 0.109, but not for Musical Experience F(1.593, 111.540) = 2.713, p  < 0.05, η 2  = 0.037, for the other dependent variable, NA.

Table 2 shows pairwise comparisons between Musical Experience levels. Bonferroni’s correction was applied in order to control type I error. We only interpret the results for the Positive Affects because the Musical Experience effect was not statistically significant for Negative Affects. Results show that condition VML presents a significant higher punctuation in Positive Affects than the other two conditions ( p  < 0.05). It also shows that the musical condition MML is significantly above BP in Positive Affects ( p  < 0.05).

As regards Moment variable (Table 3 ), all but one Pre-Post differences were statistically significant ( p  < 0.05) for all the three conditions for both Positive and Negative Affects dependent variables. The Pre-Post difference found in Positive Affects for the VML Musical Experience did not reach the statistical level ( p  = 0.319).

Focusing on these statistically significant differences, we observe that conditions MML and BP, for PA, decreased from Pre to Post condition, indicating that positive emotions increased significantly between pre and post measures. On the other hand, for NA, all conditions increased from Pre to Post conditions, indicating that negative affects were decreased between pre and post conditions. Once again, one should bear in mind that items were reversed, thus, a higher scores in NA means a decrease in affects.

In order to measure the interaction effect, significant differences between simple effects were analysed.

The simple effect of Moment (level2-level1) in the first Music Experience condition (MML) in PA was compared with the simple effect of Moment (level2-level1) in the second Musical Experience condition (VML). Music Experience conditions 2–3 (VML-BP) and 1–3 (MML-BP) were compared in the same way. Thus, taking into account PA and NA variables, a total of 6 comparisons, 3 per dependent variable, were made.

The results of these comparisons are shown in Table 4 . Comparisons for PA range from T1 to T3 and comparisons for NA range from T4 to T6. All of them are significant ( p  < 0.05) which means that there are statistically significant differences between all the Musical Experience conditions when comparing the Moment (pre/post) simple effects.

In Table 5 , we can look at the differences’ values. As we said before the differences between Pre and Post conditions are significant when comparing the three musical conditions. The biggest difference for positive affects is between MML and BP (T3 = 8.443), and between VML and MML (T4 = − 6.887) for negative affects.

In this second part, the results obtained from the second two-way RM ANOVA with the 20 items as dependent variables are considered. Results of the descriptive analysis of each item: Interested, Excited, Strong, Enthusiastic, Proud, Alert, Inspired, Determined, Attentive, Active, Distressed, Upset, Guilty, Afraid, Hostile, Irritable, Ashamed, Nervous, Jittery, Scared ; in each musical condition: MML, VML and BP; and for the PRE and POST measurements, can be found in the Additional file 1 (Appendix A).

As regards the ANOVA test that compares the three experimental conditions in each mood, Mauchly’s Sphericity Test indicates that sphericity cannot be assumed for the musical experience in most of the variables of the items of effects, except for Interested, Alert, Inspired, Active and Irritable . For these items, the highest observed power index among Greenhouse–Geisser, Huynh–Feldt and Lower-bound epsilon corrections was taken for each variable. For the interaction Musical Experience*Moment, sphericity was not assumed for Distressed, Guilty, Hostile and Scared . For these items, the same above-cited criterion was followed.

Musical experience has a principal effect on all the positive affects, but only has it for 5 negative affects ( Nervous, Jittery, Scared, Hostile and Upset ) ( p  < 0.05). For more detail see Table S1 from Additional file 1 : Appendix B.

The principal effect of Moment is also statistically significant ( p  < 0.05) for all (positive and negative), but two items: Guilty ( p  = 0.073) and Hostile ( p  = 0.123). All the differences between Pre and Post for positive affects are positive, which means that scores in conditions Pre were significantly higher than in condition Post. The other way around occurs for negative affects, all the differences Pre-Post are negative, meaning that the Post condition is significantly higher than the Pre condition. For more detail, see Table S2 from Additional file 1 : Appendix B. In this way, Pre-post changes (Moment) improve affective states; the positive affects increase while the negative are reduced, except for Guilty ( p  = 0.073) and Hostile ( p  = 0.123).

Comparing the proportion of variance explained by the musical experienced and Moment (Tables s1 and s2 from the Additional file 1 : Appendix B), it is observed that most of the η 2 scores in musical experience are below 0.170, except Active and Alert , which are higher. On the other hand, the η 2 scores for Moment are close to 0.300. From these results we can state that, taking only one of the variables at a time, the proportion of the dependent variable’s variance explained by Moment is higher than the proportion of the dependent variable’s variance explained by Musical Experience.

The effect of interaction, shown in Table S3 from the Additional file 1 : Appendix B is significant in 7 positive moods ( Interested, Excited, Enthusiastic, Alert, Determined, Active and Proud ) and 4 negative moods ( Hostile , Irritable, Nervous , and Jittery ).

The pairwise comparisons of Musical Experience’s levels show a wide variety of patterns. Looking at Positive Affects, there is only one item ( Active ) which present significant differences between the three musical conditions. Items Concentrated and Decided do not present any significant difference between any musical conditions. The rest of the Positive items show at least one significant difference between conditions VML and BP. All differences are positive when comparing VML-MML, VML-BP MML-BP, except for Alert and Proud. So, in general, scores are higher for the first two conditions in relation to the third one, meaning that third musical condition presents the biggest increase for Positive Affects (remember items where reversed). For more detail see Additional file 1 : Appendix C.

As regard pairwise comparisons of Musical Experience’s for negative affects, only the items which had a significant principal effect of the variable Musical Experience are shown here. There is a significant difference between conditions VML and MML in item Nervous ; between VML and BP for Scared ( p  < 0.05). For Jittery ; all three conditions differed significantly from each other ( p  < 0.05). Conditions MML and BP differed significantly for Hostile ( p  < 0.05) and conditions VML and BP almost differed significantly for Upset item, but null hypothesis cannot be rejected as p  = 0.056. For more detail see Additional file 1 : Appendix C. All differences were negative when comparing VML-MML, VML-BP MML-BP, except for Nervous and Jittery . So, in general, scores are lower for the first and second condition in relation to the third one.

Positive effects increased significantly during the post phase of all the music experiences, showing that exposure to any of the three music stimuli improved positive affectivity. There were also significant differences between the three experiences in this phase, according to the following order of improvements in positive affectivity: (1) the rhythm and blues performance (BP), (2) listening to Mahler (MML) and (3) listening to Vangelis (VML). As regards the effects of the musical experience x Moment interaction , all the comparisons were significant, with bigger differences in the interpretation of the blues (BP) than in listening to Mahler (MML) and Vangelis (VML). However, the comparison between both experiences, although significant, was smaller. These results indicate that performing music is significantly effective in increasing positive effects. We will explain these results in greater detail below as regards the specific affective states.

As regards Negative Affects, the comparison of the simple effects showed that these decreased after the musical experiences, although in this first analysis the VML musical experience did not differ from the other two. However, the results of the effects of the interaction between musical experiencie x Moment showed that all the comparisons were significant, with a larger difference between MML and VML than the one between BP and each of the other experiences. Listening to Mahler (MML) was more effective in reducing negative affects, compared to both listening to Vangelis and interpreting the blues (BP). These results agree with previous studies [ 26 , 32 ], in which listening to sad music helped to reduce negative affectivity. In this study, it was the most effective condition, although exposure to all three musical experiences reduced negative affects.

The analysis of the specific affective states shows that most items that belong to Positive Affect scale are the most sensitive ones to the PRE-POST change, the different musical conditions and the interpretation of both effects. However, some items of the Negative Affect scale did not differ in the different music conditions or in the music experience × Moment interaction . For example, there were two items (Guilty and Hostile) that did not obtain significance. These results are consistent with the fact that music has certain limits as regards its impact on people’s affects and does not influence all equally. For example, Guilty has profound psychological implications that cannot be affected by simple exposure to certain musical experiences. This means we should be cautious in inferring that music alone can have therapeutical effects on complex emotional states whose treatment should include empirically validated methods. Also, emotional experiences are widely diverse so that any instrument used to measure them is limited as regards the affective/emotional state under study. These results suggest the importance of reviewing the items that compose the PANAS scale in musical studies to adapt it in order to include affective states more sensitive to musical experiences and eliminate the least relevant items.

The analysis of the results in the specific affective states, allows us to delve deeper into each experimental condition. Thus, regarding the results obtained in the complete scale of PANAS, listening to Mahler (MML), causes desirable changes by raising two positive affects ( Inspired and Attentive ) and reducing 10 negative affects ( Distressed, Upset, Afraid, Hostile, Irritable, Ashamed, Nervous, Jittery, and Scared ). This shows that this music condition had a greater effect on the negative affects than the other ones. These results agree with previous studies [ 26 , 32 ], which found that sad music could effectively reduce negative affects, although other studies came to the opposite conclusion. For instance, Miller and Au [ 31 ] found that sad music did not significantly change negative affects. Some authors [ 47 , 48 ] have argued that adults prefer to listen to sad music to regulate their feelings after a negative psychological experience in order to feel better. Taruffi and Koelsch [ 49 ] concluded that sad music could induce listeners to a wide range of positive effects, after a study with 772 participants. In order to contribute to this debate. It would be interesting to control personality variables that might explain these differences on the specific emotions evoked by sad music. In this study, it has been shown that a sad piece of music can be more effective in reducing negative affects than in increasing positive ones. Although the results come from undergraduate students, similar outcomes could be obtained from children and adolescents, although further research is required. In fact, Borella et al. [ 50 ] studied the influence of age on the effects of music and found that the emotional effects influenced cognitive performance (working memory) in such a way that the type of music (Mozart vs. Albinoni) had a stronger influence on young people than on adults. Kawakami and Hatahira [ 28 ], in a study on 84 primary schoolchildren, also found that exposure to sad music pleased them and their level of empathy correlated with their taste for sad music.

Listening to Vangelis (VML) increased 3 positive affects ( Excited, Inspired and Attentive ) and reduced 8 negative affects ( Distressed, Upset, Afraid, Irritable, Ashamed, Nervous, Jittery , and Scared ). Surprisingly, two positive affects were reduced in this experimental condition ( Alert and Attentive ). It could be explained due to the characteristic ostinato rhythm of this piece of music. It was found a similar effect in the study by Campbell et al., [ 26 ] in which sad music reduced both positive and negative affects. This musical condition also managed to modify negative affects more than positive ones.

Performing the blues (BP) increased all 10 positive affects, indicating that performing is more effective in increasing positive affects than listening. These results agree with the study by Dunbar et al. [ 29 ], who found that music performance significantly increased positive affects.

Performing the blues (BP) reduced 6 negative affects, although it was more effective in increasing positive affective states. Vigorous rhythmic music was also found to be positively associated with the use of all the forms of regulating emotions, which suggests that this type of music is especially useful for emotion modulation [ 51 ]. It was found an exception, since Jittery increased after the blues performance. It could be explained by the negative experience that is sometimes associated with music performance. Therefore, it should be taken into account that music performance could increase some negative effects. For example, Dimsdale et al. [ 52 ] found that a strong negative emotional response to a certain type of music in adolescents was related to risk behaviour, indicating that research into the repertory of music experiences needs to be broadened to diverse styles in different age groups to identify all the types of emotional response and their psychological consequences. However, this result should be taken with caution and further research should focus on whether the effect of increased agitation is usual after music performances.

To sum up, this study contributes to the scientific field on the following points: (1) all the musical experiences had significant effects on improving emotional states, increasing positive affects and decreasing the negative ones, which shows the importance of musical experiences on improving the affective sphere; (2) the specific affects that increased, decreased or did not change for each musical experience were identified, providing specific and useful keys for the design of future interventions; and (3) the differences between various types of musical experiences were analyzed, finding more improvements in the performing conditions than in the listening ones.

Limitations and future directions

Limitations.

The sample, made up of university students with a very homogeneous profile in terms of age and sociodemographic characteristics, could limit the generalization of the results. In addition, the low percentage of men in the sample could also affect the generalizability of the results, although no previous studies have reported gender-based differential effects on the positive and negative affects after musical experiences.

Besides, the choice of the pieces of music was based on theoretical criteria and students’ music preferences were not taken into account. This will be included in future research, since the specific choice of the pieces could affect the positive or negative valence of participants’ emotions. However, the goal of using pieces of music not chosen by participants was to elicit new musical experiences for them. Furthermore, no participant was a musician and none of them had previous knowledge of any of the pieces, which may lead to a bias in the results.

In relation to this, the huge amount of available pieces of music, all of them influenced by their cultural and historical context, make it difficult to generalize that certain music parameters correlate with specific emotions. It would be necessary a cross-cultural approach to reach that conclusion.

Future directions

It is recommended to introduce the variables of music preferences and music history to control their effect on the results and to be able to compare the different musical parameters of the pieces together with participants’ preferences.

Likewise, it would be interesting to identify the affects with a greater or lesser degree of influence by music, to adjust the psychological evaluation instrument to the characteristics of the experiment, including items of emotions that can be modified after exposure to a music experience.

The PANAS manual [ 39 ] indicates that a wide variety of affective states (60) and eight different temporal instructions were included in its construction, showing its great versatility. In further research, this instrument should be adapted to for a more specific application to music studies. For instance, by including other emotional states that could be related with the influence of music (e.g. Tranquility , Gratitude , Elevation ), in order to measure more exactly the effects of music on people’s affective experiences.

Accordingly, it would be interesting to evaluate participants' affective traits to establish a baseline and control personality variables, helping to delve into the different levels of the hierarchical structure of affectivity and its relationship with the various music parameters.

Finally, it is recommended that the psychology of music include objective psychophysiological measurements together with self-report evaluations, so that conclusions arising from the experiments have greater robustness and can increase the impact of the contribution to the scientific community.

This study have shown how different music experiences, such as listening and performing, influence the changes in positive and negative affects in student teachers. The results show that the three musical experiences studied are effective in improving the affects by comparing the emotional states before and after the music experiences. It was also showed that there are differences between the effects obtained in each of the music experiences. Besides, improving both types of affects will depend largely on the selected music for the purpose. Although further evidence is required, the results support the importance of music in education, since it provides tools to increase positive affects and to decrease the negative ones, which is important for emotional intelligence development [ 53 , 54 ].

The three music experiences studied are more effective in reducing negative emotional states than in increasing the positive ones. This finding provides useful clues for music teachers to provide strategies that favor emotional regulation. For instance, in order to reduce hostility, irritability and nervousness, students could be exposed to musical auditions of both sad and solemn pieces, choosing musical pieces with similar characteristics to those described in this study. These auditions will be a resource for stress management in the classroom, as well as a tool that students can adopt and generalize to other contexts. Moreover, it is highly likely that students have not heard this type of music before and this experience could increase their repertoire of musical preferences, enhancing their emotional regulation.

The blues performance had a greater impact on participants' positive affects than listening to the other two pieces so, if any teacher wants to increase them (e.g., enthusiasm, interest, etc.), students could be asked to perform simple pieces such as Rhythm's Blues. In this way, musical performance could increase students' resources, contributing to higher levels of motivation, concentration and interest, which promotes learning [ 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 ]. Likewise, it could be very useful for elementary and secondary music teachers, who will be able to contribute to socio-emotional improvement and personal development of their students. Particularly, musical experiences could be a valuable resource for secondary teachers, since music is important in adolescents' lives and can be an interesting tool for meeting their emotional needs [ 59 ]. This is supported by Kokotsaki and Hallam [ 60 ], who consider that performing music helps students feel like active agents of a group, develop a strong sense of belonging, gain popularity, make "like-minded" relationships, improve their social skills and foster a strong sense of self-esteem and satisfaction.

This study shows that experiencing with various unknown musical pieces can have positive effects on emotions. According to this finding, university professors of Teaching grade in music education should encourage future teachers to experience various musical styles, rhythms and tonalities, avoiding prejudices. Thereby, future music teachers will be able to use a diversity of musical experiences that broaden the emotional effects and fulfill the socio-emotional function of music education. In relation to Fredrickson's 'broaden‐and‐build' framework of positive emotions [ 30 ], music can become a mean of widening other positive emotional states, constructing personal resources and transforming people, and contribute to an upward spiral of positive emotions. Taking into account the underlying psychological mechanisms of the impact of music on the emotional states it will be possible to use it to improve emotional area and other aspects of the personal sphere, as Chang et al., [ 10 ] maintain. Therefore, music education is an important resource to improve the emotional development of students.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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We should like to express our gratitude to the Valencia University student teachers for their disinterested and valuable contribution to this study.

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Blasco-Magraner, J.S., Bernabé-Valero, G., Marín-Liébana, P. et al. Changing positive and negative affects through music experiences: a study with university students. BMC Psychol 11 , 76 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-023-01110-9

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Rock music is a significant part of American culture and has always had ties to the socialization of the youth since its rise in the 1950s. Many musicians and music journalists have pushed forth the opinion that the genre is “dead” as its relevance in young adult culture has faded away in favor of different genres of mainstream music. However, rock artists have seen more success and virality in the past few years. This is primarily true through the social media platform TikTok, the largest platform of its kind with most young people as part of its userbase. The following study intends to analyze and explain the relationship between rock music and members of Generation Z, particularly 18- to 24- year-olds, through an online Qualtrics survey. It highlights the musical preferences of this target group, including how they discover rock music and respond to the rock music they are presented on social media. Many of the participants embrace the genre with a feeling that it is rising in popularity in their age group. Secondary research was conducted to find data on some of the rock artists that have gained traction on TikTok, to highlight the impact that massive exposure to Generation Z has had on them. The effects of virality are evident in the short term for these artists, but the long term effects are minimal. Findings of the study suggest that artists and labels need to develop strategies to convert those who come across their viral music into devoted fans of the band.

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Cicchetti, Gianna, "Rock On: The State of Rock Music Among Generation Z" (2022). Honors College Theses . 352. https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/honorscollege_theses/352

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• Published: 30 August 2019

The effects of playing music on mental health outcomes

• Laura W. Wesseldijk 1 , 2 ,
• Fredrik Ullén 1   na1 &
• Miriam A. Mosing 1 , 3   na1  

Scientific Reports volume  9 , Article number:  12606 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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• Behavioural genetics
• Psychiatric disorders
• Risk factors

The association between active musical engagement (as leisure activity or professionally) and mental health is still unclear, with earlier studies reporting contrasting findings. Here we tested whether musical engagement predicts (1) a diagnosis of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar or stress-related disorders based on nationwide patient registers or (2) self-reported depressive, burnout and schizotypal symptoms in 10,776 Swedish twins. Information was available on the years individuals played an instrument, including their start and stop date if applicable, and their level of achievement. Survival analyses were used to test the effect of musical engagement on the incidence of psychiatric disorders. Regression analyses were applied for self-reported psychiatric symptoms. Additionally, we conducted co-twin control analyses to further explore the association while controlling for genetic and shared environmental confounding. Results showed that overall individuals playing a musical instrument (independent of their musical achievement) may have a somewhat increased risk for mental health problems, though only significant for self-reported mental health measures. When controlling for familial liability associations diminished, suggesting that the association is likely not due to a causal negative effect of playing music, but rather to shared underlying environmental or genetic factors influencing both musicianship and mental health problems.

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Introduction

The high suicide rate among famous musicians over the last few years, e.g. Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, Avicii and the Prodigy’s Keith Flint, has received a lot of media attention and raised the question about a possible relationship between mental health problems and musicianship. In line with that, a recent survey among 2,211 British self-identified professional musicians found musicians to be up to three times more likely to report depressive problems than individuals in the general population 1 . Furthermore, several famous people engaged in creative professions other than musicianship were also known for their psychiatric illnesses, like Vincent van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway or John Nash. It has been shown that unaffected relatives of individuals with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia have higher levels of creativity 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 . Overall, such findings suggest that creativity and musicianship are risk factors for mental health problems.

On the other hand, there are many studies that report positive relationships between musical engagement and indicators of mental health, thus suggesting the opposite, namely that engagement in music could be protective against psychiatric problems. Although epidemiological studies investigating the association between music and the risk of mental health problems are rare – for a review, see 6 – the few existing ones all tend to suggest a positive effect of music 7 . For example, singing or playing music has been reported to be have a positive influence on various subjective health outcomes, including anxiety and depression 8 . Singing in a choir is related to higher self-rated quality of life and satisfaction with health 9 , and playing an instrument, and singing or performing in theater, tend to be associated with increased self-rated health in women, but decreased all-cause mortality in men and not vice versa 10 . Hours of music practice has been shown to be associated with lower alexithymia (i.e., a dysfunction in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relating) 11 . Finally, in 50,797 Norwegian males, but not in females, it was found that active participation in music, singing or theater predicted significantly lower depressive symptoms 12 . It is important to note that the measures of health outcomes in these studies are retrospective self-reports. Therefore, the outcomes could partly reflect characteristics of the rater and may be subject to a recall bias.

Furthermore, there are numerous reviews on the effect of music interventions, both active (e.g. performing) and passive (e.g. listening), on individuals in clinical settings, e.g. during medical procedures or in mental health clinics (for reviews in children, see 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ; for reviews in adults, see 18 , 19 , 20 ). The majority of reviews conclude that music interventions have a positive effect on pain, mood, and anxious or depressive symptoms in both children and adults in clinical settings. This suggests not only a positive association in line with the epidemiological research, but also potentially a causal relationship. It is important to note that most of the music interventions described in these studies have been tailored to address individually assessed needs of a client by a music therapist, which differs significantly from self-initiated musical engagement in daily life. Furthermore, as pointed out in most of these reviews, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about protective effect of music due to the mixed quality of many of the conducted studies, i.e., studies had small samples, suffered from bias due to methodological issues, and there was great variability among the results of the studies.

In sum, the direction of the association between musical engagement and mental health is still unclear with powerful population based research still failing to establish a relation unequivocally. Furthermore, it seems that differentiating between active amateur and professional musicians might explain the discrepancy between, on the one hand research reporting beneficial effects of music in everyday life on mental health, and on the other hand the high rate of depression and suicides among professional musicians. This view is in line with findings from the recent study of Bonde, et al . 21 in which active professional musicians reported more health problems than active amateur musicians, while active amateur musicians reported significantly better self-reported health than non-musicians. Possibly, the strain and pressure experienced by professional musicians may override a possible overall positive effect of musical engagement. Furthermore, an association between engagement in music and mental health problems on a population level does not necessarily reflect causal effects; it could also reflect reverse causation or underlying shared genetic or shared environmental factors that influence both the choice to engage in music and the development of psychiatric problems. It is well known that genetic factors play a role both in mental health problems 22 and in individual variation in music-related abilities 23 . In line with that, there is evidence that the association between creativity and psychiatric disorders is largely driven by underlying shared genetic factors 24 . Studying twins can reduce genetic and shared environmental confounding and strengthen causal inferences.

Here, using a large genetically informative sample of Swedish twins, we aim to investigate whether there is an association between active musical engagement defined by whether an individual plays an instrument, on an amateur and professional level, and mental health and if so, whether the relationship is consistent with a causal hypothesis, i.e., that musical engagement truly affects mental health. We use data from the Swedish nationwide in-patient and outpatient registers for psychiatric diagnoses (i.e., diagnosis of depression, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar, stress disorder) as well as self-reports on mental health problems (depressive, burnout and schizotypal symptoms). As the association between playing sport and mental health is already well established, we conducted sensitivity analyses investigating a protective effect of sport against psychiatric problems in this sample.

Participants

Data for the present study was collected as part of “the Study of Twin Adults: Genes and Environment” (STAGE), a sub-study in a cohort of approximately 32,000 adult twins registered with the Swedish Twin Register (STR). The STAGE study sent out a web survey in 2012–2013 inquiring about, musical engagement and musical achievement and other potentially music related traits. The 11,543 responders were aged between 27 and 54 years and data were available for 10,776 individuals on musical engagement and for 6,833 on musical achievement.

The National Patient Register (NPR) records the use of the health care system in Sweden, which has nationwide coverage ensuring equal access to health care for all residents, using a 10-digit personal identification number assigned to all Swedish residents 25 . The NPR includes an in-patient register (IPR) and out-patient register (OPR). The IPR contains information about hospitalizations since 1964 (with full national coverage since 1977), while the OPR covers outpatient visits since 2001 26 . The Cause of Death Register (CDR) contains information from death records since 1961 27 . The Swedish twins from the STAGE study were linked to records from the IPR, OPR and CDR.

Informed consent was obtained from all participants. The study was approved by the Regional Ethics Review Board in Stockholm (Dnr 2011/570-31/5, 2012/1107-32, 2018/866-32). All research methods were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations.

Musical engagement

Participants were asked whether they ever played an instrument. Those who responded positively were asked at what age they started to play, whether they still played an instrument and, if not, at what age they stopped playing. From these questions, a music status variable was created (0: does not play, 1: used to play, 2: plays).

Sport engagement

Participants reported on whether they ever actively trained a sport (excluding exercise training or physical activity in general). Information on age they started training a sport, whether they still played and at what age they stopped playing resulted in a sport status variable with 0 ‘does not play’, 1 ‘used to play’ and 2 ‘plays sport’.

Musical achievement

Musical achievement was measured with a Swedish version of the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ) that assesses different domains of creativity, including music 28 , 29 . Individuals were asked to rate their musical achievement on a seven-point scale: 1 ‘I am not engaged in music at all’, 2’I have played or sang privately, but I have never played, sang or showed my music to others’, 3’I have taken music lessons, but I have never played, sang or showed my music to others’, 4 ‘I have played or sung, or my music has been played in public concerts in my home town, but I have not been paid for this’, 5 ‘I have played or sung, or my music has been played in public concerts in my home town, and I have been paid for this’, 6 ‘I am professionally active as a musician’ and 7 ‘I am professionally active as a musician and have been reviewed/featured in national or international media and/or have received an award for my musical activities’. To differentiate between amateur and professional musicians, we converted the scale to three groups: 1 ‘no engagement in music’, 2–4 ‘making music on an amateur level’, and 5–7 ‘professionally active in music’.

Registry-based mental health outcomes

For each individual we derived information (diagnosis and date of first diagnosis) on incidence of depression, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or stress disorder based on clinical diagnoses after any inpatient or outpatient visit, or underlying cause of death registered in the national registers according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes as reported in Table  1 . We created an ‘any psychiatric diagnosis’ variable indicating whether the participant has ever been diagnosed with any of the five categories of clinical diagnoses above. For this variable, we selected the earliest date of diagnosis in case of comorbidity.

Questionnaire-based self-reported mental health

In addition, self-reports on mental health outcomes (i.e., depressive, burnout and schizotypal symptoms) obtained in the web survey were analyzed. Depressive symptoms were measured with the depression scale of the Hopkins Symptom Checklist 30 . This scale contains of six items all ranging from 0 to 4 (0 ‘not at all’ to 4 ‘extremely’), measuring depressive symptoms in a work-related context, with higher scores indicating more depressive symptoms. Burn-out symptoms related to work were measured with the Emotional exhaustion subscale of the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey 31 . This scale consists of five items that range from 1 (every day) to 6 (a few times per year or less/never). Therefore, as higher scores reflect less burnout symptoms, we reversed this scale so that higher scores indicate more burnout symptoms in line with the other mental health outcomes. Schizotypal symptoms were measured with the “Positive Dimension Frequency Scale” of the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences (CAPE) questionnaire 32 . The score is based on 20 positive symptom items that can be answered with four different symptom frequency levels, from 1 ‘never’ to 4 ‘almost always’. Higher scores indicate more schizotypal symptoms. The Cronbach alpha reliability in present study was 0.89 for the depressive symptom scale, 0.87 for the burnout symptom scale and 0.79 for the schizotypal symptom scale.

Level of education

Educational achievement was dichotomized into ‘low and intermediate’ (1 to 7; unfinished primary school to bachelor education) and ‘high’ (8 to 10; master education to PhD).

Statistical analyses

All analyses were conducted in STATA 15.

Survival analyses , i.e., Cox proportional hazard regression, were conducted to explore the effect of musical engagement and musical achievement on the risk to receive a registry-based diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder 33 . Survival analysis is a method to analyze data where the outcome variable is the time until an event happens. The time (years) from the age of twelve to either the date of first receiving a psychiatric diagnosis or to the date of censoring (i.e., date of death or end of follow-up at January 1, 2015) were used as the time scale (i.e., the survival time). For the analyses on the effect of musical engagement , we had to take into account that some individuals had not yet started playing an instrument at the age of twelve (i.e., would start at a later age), or stopped playing at some stage. Therefore, years were split on whether the individual did not play, stopped or started playing, or currently played a musical instrument using the stsplit statement to differentiate between the three levels of musical engagement. We used Cox proportional hazard regressions, a method that assumes the effect upon survival to be constant over time, to calculate hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals. The HRs represent the effects of 1) playing an instrument versus never having played an instrument or 2) having played an instrument (but stopped before diagnosis) versus never having played an instrument on the baseline risk for a mental health diagnosis (independent of playing status) during the follow-up period. A HR value greater than one indicates an increased risk, while a value below one indicates a protective effect. Additionally, we conducted the survival analyses to estimate the effect of musical achievement in a lifetime on the risk of a mental health diagnosis, in which the HRs represent 1) the effect of having performed music as an amateur versus not being involved in music, or 2) the effect of having performed music professionally versus not being involved in music. As we analyzed the three level musical achievement in a lifetime, we did not split years on age (assuming that individuals have been on a lifelong ‘achievement’ trajectory). To correct for relatedness in the twin sample, the robust standard error estimator for clustered observations was used 34 . We fitted separate survival models for each of the five psychiatric disorder diagnoses as well as for the ‘any psychiatric diagnosis’ variable. Thus, first, we in total fitted six models for the effect of musical engagement and another six models for musical achievement. All models included sex as a covariate. Additionally, we fitted all models corrected for level of education, resulting in a small loss of data due to missing information for some individuals, therefore reducing the power. For each model, the proportional hazards assumption was tested using Schoenfeld residuals. No evidence for deviation from the proportional hazards assumption was found for any of the models (all p values > 0.01). As a sensitivity analysis, the above-described models for musical engagement (in which we used the stsplit statement) were repeated with sport engagement as the exposure variable instead, to estimate the effect of playing sport on registry-based psychiatric disorder diagnoses.

Self-reported mental health outcomes

Linear regression analyses were performed to explore the effect of musical engagement and musical achievement on the self-rated continuous measures of depressive symptoms, burnout symptoms and schizotypal symptoms. To correct for relatedness in the twin sample, we used the robust standard error estimator for clustered observations. We included sex as a covariate. Additionally, we ran the analyses corrected for level of education. As a sensitivity analysis, we estimated the effect of sport engagement on depressive, burnout and schizotypal symptoms using linear regression analyses.

Co-twin control analyses (within-pair analyses)

Within-pair analyses in identical twins were conducted to further explore the association between musical engagement and receiving a mental health diagnosis when controlling for genetic and shared environmental factors. As monozygotic (MZ) twins are genetically identical and share their family environment, studying identical twins excludes confounding in case a genetic predisposition or shared environmental influence affects both outcome (mental health problems), and exposure (music engagement). Therefore, if music engagement truly causes a lower/higher risk for receiving a mental health diagnosis, we would expect the MZ twin that plays music to have a lower/higher risk of psychiatric problems than his or her co-twin that does not play music. Conditional Cox regression models, with the strata statement to stratify by pair identifier, were fitted for the mental health diagnoses to estimate HRs with 95% confidence intervals. Notably, only complete identical twin pairs discordant for exposure (i.e., music engagement) and outcome (i.e., the psychiatric disorder diagnosis) contribute to the within-pair analyses. The conditional logistic regression estimates the effect of the difference between the two observations in the strata. Twins are regarded as discordant for the outcome when the time of the psychiatric diagnosis differs. Due to the low prevalence of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in the complete twin pairs, these phenotypes were excluded from the within-pair analyses.

Additionally, to explore further the effect of music engagement on the self-rated continuous measures of depressive symptoms, burnout symptoms and schizotypal symptoms, we conducted within-pair linear regression analyses using the xtreg fe statement to stratify by twin pair. In within-pair analyses in identical twins correcting for sex is not required as each twin is matched to his or her co-twin. To increase power, we also included data from same-sex dizygotic (DZ) twins (who share on average 50% of their genetic makeup and 100% of their family environment).

Descriptives

Information on mental health outcomes and musical engagement was available for 9,816 individuals [2,212 complete twin pairs (1,055 MZ, 661 dizygotic same-sex (DZ), 496 dizygotic opposite-sex (DOS) twins) and 5,392 individual twins]. Among these individuals, data on musical achievement were available for 6,295 individuals [1,208 complete twin pairs (627 MZ, 342 DZ, 239 DOS) and 3,879 individual twins]. Characteristics of the participants are reported in Table  2 .

Women were more likely to initiate playing an instrument than men (37.7% of men versus 20.5% of women), while roughly the same amount of men and women remained actively involved in music in adulthood (23.3% of men and 21.9% of women). More men (8.5%) than women (5%) played music professionally.

Although overall, there was an overall trend towards a somewhat elevated risk for psychiatric disease in those engaged with music, neither playing music nor having played music in the past (Fig.  1 ), nor professional musicianship (Fig.  2 ) was significantly associated with the risk for any of the psychiatric disorders. The analyses adjusted for level of education showed similar results (see Table  S1 for musical engagement and Table  S2 for musical achievement, in the supplementary material), with the exception that individuals who played an instrument had a significantly higher risk (39%) of being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder (HR 1.39, CI 1.01–1.92) compared to those who never played an instrument. In terms of covariates, we found females to have a higher risk for depression (92%), anxiety disorder (92%), and stress-related disorders (58%) (Table  S1 ). Additionally, individuals with higher levels of education had a significantly lower risk for psychiatric disorders, depression, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder (Table  S1 ).

Music engagement and registry-based mental health outcomes. Sex is included as covariate.

Music achievement and registry-based mental health outcomes. Sex is included as a covariate.

Self-reported mental health

Results of the regression analyses with self-reported mental health symptoms indicated that playing an instrument was significantly associated with more schizotypal symptoms and depressive and burnout symptoms in a work context (see left part of Table  3 ). Having played an instrument in the past did not significantly influence any of the self-rated mental health outcomes. Furthermore, even though professional and amateur musicians report more burnout and schizotypal symptoms than non-players, individuals who played music professionally did not experience significantly more depressive, burnout or schizotypal symptoms than individuals who play music on an amateur level (see right part of Table  3 ). When analyses were repeated adjusting for level of education (results not shown) all results remained the same.

Sensitivity sport analyses

Results of the sensitivity analyses on the registry-based mental health outcomes showed that individuals who actively played sports were less likely to develop any psychiatric disorder, as well as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder (see Fig.  S1 ). There was no sustained beneficial effect of past sports engagement after stopping with exercise. The analyses adjusted for level of education showed the same results.

Regression analyses on the self-reported mental health outcomes showed that individuals who actively play sports were significantly less likely to report depressive symptoms (β = −0.23, p < 0.001) and burnout symptoms (β = −0.20, p < 0.001), but not schizotypal symptoms (β = 0.00, p = 0.96). Past sport activities were unrelated to the self-reported mental health outcomes (p values range between 0.08 and 0.20). Including level of education in the analyses did not affect the results.

Co-twin control analyses

Results of the co-twin control analyses for both the registry-based and self-reported mental health measures are shown in Table  4 . None of the within-pair estimates were significant. However, overall, the effect sizes (HR or beta) moved closer to zero with increased controlling of shared liability.

We aimed to investigate the association between musical engagement in everyday life and mental health in a large cohort of Swedish twins. Although the findings were somewhat mixed, overall results suggest that individuals who actively play a musical instrument (but not necessarily professionally) may have a somewhat increased risk for mental health problems. However, when controlling for familial liability these associations became weaker and non-significant suggesting that the association is likely explained by underlying shared factors influencing both musicianship and mental health problems.

While analyses using registry-based mental health diagnoses showed no significant association between music playing or professional musical engagement and psychiatric diagnoses, the direction of the effect was trending towards a somewhat increased risk for psychiatric diagnoses for those actively engaged with music. Results from the self-reported mental health outcomes further supported this; individuals playing an instrument report more depressive, burnout and schizotypal symptoms. This is in contrast with previous epidemiological and clinical studies reporting positive effects of musical engagement on anxious and depressive symptoms 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 . Further, a recent study by Fancourt and Steptoe 35 found cultural engagement to decrease the development of depression in older ages. However, it appears likely that it is important to distinguish between general cultural engagement, i.e., visits to the theatre, concerts or opera, the cinema or an art gallery, exhibition or museum) and active playing of a musical instrument, which is the focus of the present study. Playing a musical instrument is much more narrowly defined behavior and involves many (cognitive and physical) processes different from engaging in cultural musical activities or listening to music. On the other hand, our findings are in line with results from the survey among British professional musicians 1 and with previous findings of associations between creativity and mental health problems, i.e., that people engaging in creative activities tend to experience more psychiatric problems 4 . It is important to note that the previous epidemiological studies on mental health, the British musicians study, but also our continuous mental health outcomes, were based on self-report. An explanation could be that results of self-report reflect a different attitude towards mental health among more creative individuals, with higher acceptance and awareness of mental health problems, possibly resulting in over-reporting in the field.

Further, there is evidence that the association between creativity and psychiatric disorders can be largely attributed to underlying shared genetic factors 24 , 36 . This is in line with present results of our co-twin control analyses, which showed that the association between musicianship and mental health was attenuated when controlling for genetic and shared environmental confounding (although all analyses were non-significant). This suggests that the observed associations would partly be explained by a shared underlying etiology, (i.e., genetic or family environmental factors which affect both, individuals differences in music playing and mental health) and not by a causal effect of playing music. The within-pair results, however, should be interpreted with caution as only discordant twin pairs contribute to the co-twin control analyses, which reduced the power to find significant associations.

We found significant differences between professional or amateur musicians and non-players in self-rated health outcomes, which are in line with our findings on playing music in general. However, in neither self-rated nor registry-based data, we observed any significant differences in mental health problems between professional musicians compared to amateur musicians. This is in contrast to findings from the study of Bonde, et al . 21 in which active professional musicians reported higher numbers of overall health problems than active amateur musicians, while active amateur musicians reported significantly better self-reported health than non-musicians did. Whilst this was also a large population-based sample, this study analyzed general health instead of mental health, which likely contributes to the difference in findings.

The discrepancy in findings between registry-based mental health diagnoses and self-reported mental health could be due to an influence of rater and recall biases captured in the self-reported mental health outcomes, as discussed above. However, another explanation could be less power in the analyses with the registry-based mental health diagnoses to detect an existing effect. The power of a method to analyze survival time data depends partly on the number of psychiatric diagnoses rather than on the total sample size. In the present sample, observed post-hoc power for the survival analyses to detect a HR of 0.8 for music engagement is 88% for the incidence of a psychiatric disorder, 67% for depression, 61% for anxiety, 7% for schizophrenia, 18% for bipolar and 45% for stress disorder, reflecting the different incident rates of the disorders. As the self-reported mental health problems were measured on a continuous scale, these analyses have higher power (i.e., no cut-off score needs to be reached to obtain a full diagnosis). Nevertheless, our sensitivity analyses in the registry-based outcomes on the effect of sport did show a significant protective effect of sport against the risk of receiving a diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder, depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder in this sample, suggesting that an association can be found with the present distribution of the data if existent. Therefore, we conclude that a lack of power is not a likely explanation for our null findings in the registry-based health outcomes, and that if there truly were an effect, it would be very small.

There are some limitations of this study in addition to the ones we already touched upon. We analyzed data on psychiatric diagnoses obtained from the Swedish nationwide in-patient and outpatient registers. However, the outpatient register only reached full coverage in 2001 and it is therefore possible that some individuals were not classified with a psychiatric disorder, although they did experience mental health problems before 2001. The same holds for individuals with mental health problems who did not visit a doctor. In addition, the dichotomous rather than dimensional nature of psychiatric diagnoses excludes large parts of the continuous variation among individuals in psychiatric problems. The continuous symptom scales increase the power to detect an effect of engagement in music or sports, but may be somewhat biased. Furthermore, our study explored potential effects of active musical engagement (i.e., making music) in everyday life and therefore our findings do not allow for any conclusions about the potential effect of (personalized) musical interventions on mental health problems. Lastly, as mentioned earlier, the sample of discordant twin pairs contributing to the co-twin control analyses was small, resulting in low power to detect effects.

To our knowledge, the present population-based study is the only genetically informative large-scale study to investigate associations between active engagement in music (both as a leisure activity and professionally) and registry-based as well as self-reported mental health outcomes. Rather than a protective effect of music engagement in everyday life as often suggested, our findings suggest that individuals actively engaged in music playing, but not only professional musicians, may have a somewhat elevated risk for mental health problems. This association may at least partly be due to shared underlying etiology and it is unlikely that it reflects a causal effect of playing music.

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Acknowledgements

The present work was supported by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation (MAW 2018.0017), and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (M11-0451:1). We acknowledge The Swedish Twin Registry for access to data. The Swedish Twin Registry is managed by the Karolinska Institutet and receives funding through the Swedish Research Council under the grant no 2017-00641. Open access funding provided by Karolinska Institute.

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Fredrik Ullén and Miriam A. Mosing jointly supervised this work.

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Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Solnavägen 9, SE-171 77, Stockholm, Sweden

Laura W. Wesseldijk, Fredrik Ullén & Miriam A. Mosing

Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, Meibergdreef 5, 1105 AZ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• Laura W. Wesseldijk

Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, Nobels v 12A, 171 77, Stockholm, Sweden

• Miriam A. Mosing

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F.U., M.M. and L.W. developed the study design. L.W. performed the data analysis and interpretation under the supervision of F.U., M.M. L.W. and M.M. drafted the manuscript, and F.U. provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

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Wesseldijk, L.W., Ullén, F. & Mosing, M.A. The effects of playing music on mental health outcomes. Sci Rep 9 , 12606 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49099-9

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“Don’t Stop the Music,” Please: The Relationship between Music Use at Work, Satisfaction, and Performance

Associated data.

The data presented in this study are not publicly available due to the Italian privacy law. The data are available on request from the corresponding author.

Although there are several studies in the literature that have examined how different types of music affect performance or other organisational outcomes, knowledge about how music affects individuals in the workplace is still limited, especially in terms of perceived music use. This study aims to examine the effects of three different uses of music—namely, emotional, cognitive, and background music—on individual perceptions of job satisfaction and performance. A sample of 244 workers from different backgrounds was included in the study. We tested a full structural equation model. The results show that (1) emotional use has a positive relationship to performance, both directly and indirectly through mediating job satisfaction; (2) cognitive use has no significant effect on satisfaction and performance (even indirectly); and (3) background use has a negative relationship to job satisfaction and no relationship to performance. This work suggests that listening to music during work activities could be a positive organisational practice. Future studies could further investigate the role of music listening as a resource, taking into account other personal and contextual characteristics.

1. Introduction

Research on the effects of listening to music at work is relatively underdeveloped, though its roots can be traced back to the beginning of the last century, especially in relation to industrial music [ 1 , 2 ]. The industrial perspective viewed music as a “fair” motivational tool to enhance performance. To cite one of the most famous examples, the BBC created a radio program called Music While You Work , which was broadcast daily in British factories from 1940 to 1967 to increase worker productivity [ 3 ]. Although performance was the focus of these early studies, the results were often inconclusive: Uhrbrock [ 4 ] pointed out in his review that music was likely to produce only a temporary increase in performance in inexperienced workers who had simpler tasks to perform. On the other hand, Fox [ 5 ] argued that music was a means of maintaining workers’ attention in the face of the inevitable lapse in alertness caused by repetitive work; that is, music does not increase productivity per se, but instead maintains baseline levels. It can be argued that such a view of work performance falls short, given that even the earliest studies found that music boosted morale and that workers were generally opposed to removing music once it was introduced [ 6 ]. Workers may not have actually worked harder, faster, or better, but they felt better, and as is generally recognized in the literature, subjective well-being is a protective factor against negative workplace outcomes [ 7 ].

Today, much of work has shifted from factories to offices and from repetitive, simple tasks to more complex, cognitive tasks that often include customer service. In addition, technological advances—especially in the last twenty years—have led to a shift in the accessibility of music. This development is not new. In the first decade of the 21st century, it was already noted that music can no longer be considered a commodity, but was instead an easily accessible resource [ 8 ]. In recent years, the accessibility and consumption of music has even increased, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Today, autonomy in choosing and controlling music during work activities is unprecedented: people are freer to choose when they listen to music, what genre they listen to, and, perhaps more importantly, they have a greater degree of control over the function they believe music has for them. More generally, mood and performance can be influenced by the various experiences that occur when listening to music. This influence may be the direct result of an emotional experience or an aesthetic perception, i.e., an understanding of the musical elements [ 9 ]. This already poses an additional challenge when attempting to study the effects of music, as the intention behind the choice of listening may alter the desired outcomes. As Thorsén [ 10 , 11 , 12 ] found, workers in Volvo factories wanted to listen to music primarily for two reasons: to focus more on work tasks and to escape from work. This suggests that music has different functions at work and its effect should be considered to be context-dependent [ 13 ], i.e., music can serve multiple functions in different situations, such as promoting concentration or during a break. Moreover, music use is also influenced by personality [ 14 ].

Given the sudden increase in remote work, now followed by a gradual return to in-person work, and the relative lack of research in recent years on workers’ subjective experiences of music in the workplace, this study provides a preliminary examination of the effects of differential use of music on perceived organisational outcomes.

1.1. Music and Job Performance

There are few studies that have examined the effects of music on work performance, and they have controversial results. In this context, we focus on task performance, i.e., activities that are directly related to the creation of a product or service or to the functions required to perform these activities, such that both the performance of one’s work role and the effectiveness of the organisation depend on task performance [ 15 ]. Shi, Huang, and Chiang [ 16 ] found that background music with lyrics has a negative effect on concentration and attention, while Haake [ 13 ] found that music can also support more complex cognitive and creative processes, although these can be affected by excessive levels of arousal from music. On this topic, Huang and Shi [ 17 ] found that background music negatively affected attentional performance when listeners strongly liked or disliked the music. Padmasiri and Dhammika [ 18 ] focused on workers in industry and found that listening to relaxing music lowered performance. A possible explanation for these competing results can be found by extending activation theory [ 19 ].

Music can increase worker activation, which leads to increased performance. However, this relationship is not linear, and it has been found to be moderated not only by other variables but also to depend on the task. If more cognitive resources cannot be allocated to the task, a further increase in resources for cognitive processes will not lead to an increase in performance [ 6 ]. On the other hand, music does not usually produce excessive levels of arousal [ 20 ]. It can be argued that this is especially true for music played during work, so the relationship between listening to music and activation can be considered to be linear. This also explains the opposite effect: relaxing music lowers activation, so listening to music during work is counterproductive. However, being able to freely choose preferred music, rather than having to take a test or be exposed to imposed music, may have a different effect. Lesiuk found that the positive affect and quality of work is higher when listening to music [ 21 ]. In addition, the author found that people who could listen to their preferred music whenever they wanted reported lower stress and improved mood, as well as better cognitive performance scores in situations with high cognitive demands [ 22 ].

Given these findings, it appears that there are several factors to consider when examining the effects of music on performance, but the degree of autonomy over when and how music is listened to may play an important role in whether music can have positive organisational effects.

1.2. Music, Positive Affect, and Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction is a well-studied variable in organisational research and is considered an important indicator of well-being. While there are a variety of definitions in the literature, job satisfaction can be summarized as a collection of positive or negative feelings and beliefs about one’s current job that depend on a worker’s assessment of the extent to which their work experiences match expectations, especially in terms of values, needs, success, and rewards [ 23 ].

The effect of music on mood and emotion is a key aspect to consider when examining its use in the workplace. While there is limited research on the effects of music on satisfaction, it is reasonable to assume that listening to music can increase workplace satisfaction either directly or through other positive effects, most notably its ability to influence people’s emotions and overall well-being. This has been shown in other contexts: a recent study using an intelligent music-recommendation system to provide gym-goers with background music tailored to their physical exertion found that users of the system enjoyed their activities more [ 24 ]. Although job satisfaction does not end with mere enjoyment of the activity, the study reinforces the notion that there may be more effective types of music depending on arousal levels, even though the study only examined physical exertion during a particular gym activity and did not consider the emotional aspects of the participants.

Oldham and colleagues [ 25 ] found that music can influence the workers’ moods, which in turn affects their work outcomes. It should be noted that, in this work, both the experimental and control groups consisted of individuals who chose to listen to music at work. Other research has indicated that workers usually prefer to be able to listen to music because it makes work more enjoyable and increases satisfaction and creativity [ 21 , 22 ]. Another work has indicated that music at work evokes positive emotions as well as inspiration, concentration, and stress reduction [ 13 ]. Recent studies have indicated that listening to music can influence well-being through mood regulation [ 26 ] and its promoting effect on socialization [ 27 ]. In another study, short, live concerts at work were found to increase worker satisfaction by providing a moment of respite and/or socialization and strengthening the sense of belonging during the initial period of COVID-19 pandemic [ 28 ]. The ability to listen to preferred music at work also implies a degree of freedom and autonomy, which could further enhance individual well-being. Listening to music may also serve as a strategy for cognitive control of auditory space [ 29 ], which can be used to block unwanted distractions or, more generally, replace unpleasant activations with desirable ones.

1.3. The Use of Music

The work of Chamorro-Premuzic and Furnham [ 14 ] defines three different uses of music in everyday life. The first is emotional use, which can evoke positive or negative moods, change the emotional state itself, or evoke pleasure in experiencing an emotion that is not necessarily positive. The second is cognitive/rational use, which is the extent to which people listen to music for intellectual purposes and enjoy the more technical aspects; this may be related to the aesthetic perception described earlier. The final category is background use, which refers to the extent to which people listen to and enjoy music while performing other tasks without being distracted. Although the questionnaire is not specifically tailored to the work context, the respective uses of music have been shown to correlate with individual characteristics such as intelligence, personality traits, and emotional intelligence [ 14 , 30 ].

As Halliday [ 31 ] noted, the everyday use of music can be seen as an indirect indicator of individual differences, which are most important when studying organisational outcomes. In their study, the authors found that the three types of music use were associated with a variety of organisational outcomes including satisfaction, work engagement, and innovation. Although the authors proposed a final model in which the three uses are combined into one variable, it can be argued that they should have different effects on different outcomes because they relate to different underlying processes.

In particular, emotional use should be consistent with the positive effects of music on mood. It should be noted that this use refers to the process of achieving a particular emotion, whether positive or negative. As Lesiuk [ 21 ] notes, even sadness can produce satisfaction when it is the target of emotional regulation while, more generally, mild positive activation can improve cognition and thus performance. We therefore argue that positive activation stemming from the emotional use of music will lead to increased job satisfaction. Using music as a means of emotional regulation may also lead to a sense of having more resources at one’s disposal, which may prove effective in enhancing perceptions of performance in two different contexts: during breaks, which can provide a moment to recover and manage one’s emotions, so as to return to work refreshed; and during performance itself, buffering boredom or other negative activation caused by work tasks. Furthermore, we argue that the emotional use of music also has an indirect effect on performance by increasing satisfaction, as job satisfaction has been shown to be positively related to performance [ 32 , 33 , 34 ].

Emotional use of music has a positive relationship to job satisfaction.

Emotional use of music has a positive relationship to performance.

Emotional use of music has an indirect, positive relationship to performance through the mediation of job satisfaction.

As for the cognitive use of music, we expect it to have a positive effect on satisfaction as well; the opportunity to listen to intellectually fulfilling music should also be considered a positive activation, consistent with aesthetic perception [ 9 ], leading to a sense of satisfaction. On the other hand, we hypothesize that cognitive engagement is unrelated to performance. On one hand, focusing on musical structure and composition could reduce cognitive resources dedicated to work tasks. On the other hand, increased activation has the effect of limiting attention, which could have a positive effect on performance, depending on the task. However, we argue that the general population is less familiar with musical subtleties, and we expect this use to be less frequent and more likely to occur during moments of pause and social interactions than directly during work tasks. Instead, we propose that cognitive use has an indirect effect on performance by increasing job satisfaction.

Cognitive use of music has a positive relationship to job satisfaction.

Cognitive use of music has no direct relationship to performance.

Cognitive use of music has an indirect, positive relationship to performance through the mediation of job satisfaction.

Finally, concerning background use of music, we hypothesize that there is no relationship with satisfaction or performance. Music as mere background music should not be sufficient to cause significant activation, since background use implies low distractibility. Therefore, we do not expect it to have a significant effect on organisational variables.

Background use of music has no direct relationship to job satisfaction.

Background use of music has no direct relationship to performance.

Background use of music has no indirect relationship to performance through the mediation of job satisfaction.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. procedure.

This exploratory work aimed to investigate the effects of three different music uses, as defined by Chamorro-Premuzic and Furnham [ 14 ], on the perception of job satisfaction and performance.

Data collection took place between March and May 2022 via an online questionnaire hosted on Google Forms. The research invitation was disseminated on social networks such as LinkedIn, and it was addressed to the general population of workers, whether or not they listened to music during their jobs. Professional musicians and, more generally, people for whom music is a job content were excluded from the sampling procedure. The cover letter emphasized the anonymous and voluntary nature of the participation and provided instructions for filling the questionnaire. We collected informed consent from every participant, including consent for publishing the aggregated data. Participants could opt out of the research without repercussions. Following data collection, the preliminary results were shared on LinkedIn as a moment of restitution for participants. The research was carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki [ 35 ], Italian regulations on data protection and privacy (Law 196/2003), and the GDPR [ 36 ].

2.2. Participants

A total of 444 workers participated in the research. We eliminated 20 cases, of which two did not consent to participate, seven did not consent to the use of their data for research purposes, and eleven did not consent to the use of their data in publications. Therefore, a total of 424 participants completed the questionnaire. Slightly more than half of the sample (57.7%) reported listening to music while working, 26.5% reported not listening to music because they could not, and the remaining participants (15.8%) stated that they did not want to listen to music. For the purposes of this study, only the 244 participants who listen to music while working are considered.

The sample was fairly balanced in terms of gender, with a slight prevalence of women (50.6%). The age of the respondents ranged from 18 to 67 years, with a mean age of 36.13 (SD = 11.91). More than half of the respondents were employed in the service sector, with 34.6% dealing directly with public clients and 26.4% in offices. The following more common sectors were industry or construction (18.6%), education and training (8.2%), health care (6.9%), and arts and entertainment (5.2%). The majority worked in the private sector (80.8%) with a permanent contract (47.7%), although 22.1% reported being freelance. Most were salaried employees (47.9%) with a full-time arrangement (75.7%). Participants worked an average of 4.06 days per week in attendance (SD = 1.97) and 1.45 days remotely (SD = 1.99). The average length of service was 9.52 years (SD = 10.34). Table 1 details the demographic and occupational characteristics of the sample.

Demographic and professional characteristics of the sample.

Music was mainly listened to with headphones (37.9%) or played in an open-space office (34.2%).

2.3. Data Analysis

We conducted descriptive and correlational analyses using IBM SPSS, version 27 [ 37 ]. We then tested a full structural equation model adopting MPLUS 8 [ 38 ].

2.4. Measures

Job satisfaction was measured using five items from the job satisfaction scale of the COPSOQ II [ 39 ]. Respondents rated their level of satisfaction regarding various aspects of one’s own job, such as relationships, physical conditions, and prospects, on a Likert scale from 1 (“Very unsatisfied”) to 5 (“Very satisfied”). Cronbach’s alpha was 0.87.

Job performance was assessed with four items [ 40 ]. Respondents were asked to rate how effective they felt lately in some aspects of their job performance on a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (“Not at all”) to 5 (“Very much”). An example question was: “How effective were you in performing without mistakes?” Cronbach’s alpha was 0.88.

Music uses were constructed using fifteen items from Chamorro-Premuzic and Furnham [ 14 ]. Participants rated their agreement on how they use music on a 5-point Likert scale, from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 5 (“Strongly agree”). The scale had three underlying factors: the emotional use of music (items 1 to 5), rational/cognitive use of music (items 6 to 10) and background use of music (items 11 to 15). We assessed the reliability of each factor; one item from emotional use and one from background use were eliminated to increase reliability. The final Cronbach’s alphas were 0.78 for emotional use, 0.74 for cognitive use, and 0.72 for background use.

Table 2 reports the means, standard deviations, and correlations of the study variables. Concerning the three uses, emotional use has the highest mean score, followed closely by background use, and cognitive use is decidedly less frequent; all uses are positively and significantly correlated with each other. Age is negatively correlated with all variables except cognitive use and performance, while being a man has a positive correlation with cognitive use and a negative with background use. Satisfaction and performance are positively correlated with both emotional and cognitive use of music, but not with background use.

Means, standard deviations, correlation, and reliability coefficients.

* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Reliability coefficients are reported in the diagonal in bold italic.

A full structural equation model was tested with the three uses of music as independent variables; following the study by Chamorro-Premuzic and colleagues [ 30 ], we let the three uses correlate with age and gender as controls instead of exogenous variables. The model fitted to the data well ( Table 3 ) with maximum-likelihood method (ML). The following goodness-of-fit criteria were considered: the χ 2 goodness-of-fit statistic; the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA); the Comparative Fit Index (CFI); the Tucker–Lewis Index (TLI); and the Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR). Values >0.90/0.95 for the CFI and TLI indicate a good fit of the model, while values <0.05/0.08 of the RMSEA indicate an acceptable fit and <0.05/0.08 of the SRMR [ 41 ].

Fit indices of the three models tested.

The full model with standardized path coefficient is reported in Figure 1 . First, results showed that emotional use was directly positively related to both job satisfaction and performance, with which it also had a positive indirect relationship. Hypotheses 1a, 1b, and 1c were confirmed. Moreover, job satisfaction was positively related to performance. Second, cognitive use showed non-significant relationships to job satisfaction and performance, both directly and indirectly with the latter, thus disconfirming hypotheses 2a and 2c and confirming hypothesis 2b. Lastly, background use demonstrated a direct negative relationship to job satisfaction (disconfirming hypothesis 3a). The direct relationship to performance was not significant (confirming hypothesis 3b), while the indirect one was negative (disconfirming hypothesis 3c). Regarding the controls, age had a significant and negative relationship to all three uses, while gender had a negative relationship only to background use and a positive relationship to cognitive use.

Model (ML estimation; standardized path coefficients; N = 235) controlling for age and gender (1 = Male). Non-significant relationships were not reported in the figure. * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01. *** p < 0.001 for all factor loadings.

Table 4 summarizes the indirect effects.

Indirect effects of the model.

4. Discussion

This study explores the issue of listening to music while working, considering its uses and perceived effects, and provides a starting point for further investigation. Following the three uses of music described in the literature [ 14 ], it was interesting to observe how these different ways of listening to music may influence some important outcomes at work.

The emotional use of music seems to be the only one that has both direct and indirect positive effects on job satisfaction and performance. These results suggest that enjoying the emotions evoked by music might enhance the perception of satisfaction with one’s work, which also fosters a better perception of accomplishment of tasks required at work. Cognitive use, which was more common among men than women in our sample, is surprisingly not significantly related to job satisfaction. This could be related to the low scores for this type of music use in our sample. In addition, this paper intentionally excluded professional musicians, a group that values this type of music use more and therefore engages with it more frequently.

Because the cognitive use of music could be considered an additional requirement at work, listening to music that focuses on its structural aspects could distract from the pursuit of more important work-related tasks and counteract the possible positive activation from appreciating the structure rather than the content of the music. Another possible explanation is that the pleasant activation of cognitive use of music, which evokes a positive emotion, might be confounded with emotional use, which is far more common in this sample. Or, to put it another way, while cognitive use may imply a positive arousal that is inextricably linked to understanding the complexity of the music, the opposite cannot be said for emotional use. Finally, regarding background use, it seems to have only negative effects in our sample, both directly on job satisfaction and indirectly on performance. Given the high correlations with emotional use, it seems that background use in this sample involves some aspect of emotional regulation in music listening. Furthermore, because this study cannot imply causal relationships due to its cross-sectional design, it could be that the more dissatisfied people are with their work, the more they use music as a background; the same could be the case when performance decreases, which in turn leads to less satisfaction.

In terms of age, it appears that older people report lower use of music across the three uses. A relationship already found for background use that can be explained by the fact that younger people may be more responsive and have higher music consumption, which incidentally is also related to the three uses of music and age [ 30 ]. Finally, men seem to be more engaged in the cognitive use of music than women, whereas the opposite is true for background use.

4.1. Limitations

This study is not exempt from some limitations. First, due to the cross-sectional design, it is not possible to define causal effects between variables [ 42 ]; it will be necessary to proceed with longitudinal studies to overcome this limitation. Second, although the sample consisted of individuals who listen to music at work, unlike that of Chamorro-Premuzic and Furnham [ 14 ], it appeared to be inhomogeneous, especially regarding age and type of job. In addition, other important variables involved in workplace dynamics (e.g., resources or demands) might better explain the role of workplace music-listening in workers’ well-being.

4.2. Future Research

Based on these initial findings, future research could further investigate the role of music-listening in the workplace. Following the Job Demand–Resources theory [ 43 ], music listening could be perceived as a resource in the workplace, as our results suggest that the emotional nature of enjoying music improves job satisfaction and performance. However, this role could be more nuanced when considering these relationships in different work contexts (e.g., service sector or factory) and with different levels of autonomy. Future research should also explore the possibility of a bidirectional relationship between music use and organisational outcomes.

5. Conclusions

The role of music listening in today’s workplace is still unclear. Given the ease of access to multimedia content, the ability to isolate from outside noise and chatter, and the opportunity to enjoy music, especially in environments with high work autonomy, understanding the benefits of listening to music in the workplace could improve the work experience of workers, especially those who use music for emotional regulation. This understanding could also contribute to a shift in thinking such that music is not only used as a one-time intervention to calm anxiety [ 44 ], but could be a work practice that is more widely accepted and shared by management.

From a management perspective, it would be interesting to examine employee preferences for listening to music in the workplace, both in terms of listening modality and genre, and their impact on organisational outcomes. Indeed, meeting music-listening preferences could be another environmental characteristic of some workplaces that enhances employee autonomy, which, according to self-determination theory [ 45 ], could be a motivational boost and thus improve both well-being (i.e., job satisfaction) and job performance. The results suggest that simply listening to music in the background does not harm productivity per se, but it may not have a positive effect on job satisfaction, which is an important variable for performance. Rather than mandating listening to music in the workplace, management should work with employees to implement personalized interventions.

Lastly, considering situations in which listening to music at work is not possible, it would be noteworthy to deepen the reasons for why this is the case. Sometimes it is obviously related to the nature of the job itself, which may not allow one to isolate oneself and listen to music (e.g., in customer service), but in many occupations and workplaces where the work characteristics would allow this practice it is nevertheless not always performed. Thus, it may be that there are some obstacles or resistance from supervisors that cement the view that listening to music at work is counterproductive.

However, if further in-depth studies tailored to the work context confirm some of the findings, listening to music could be considered a “small” (but smart) support in building a personalized and enjoyable work situation for people at work. Therefore, it is crucial for research in this area to achieve appropriate dissemination with special reference to employers and HR functions.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Giorgio Cavallo, Valeria Pappalardo and Gianmaria Pompilio for their contribution to data collection.

Funding Statement

This research received no external funding.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, D.S., A.C., C.G.C., and C.G.; methodology, D.S. and A.C.; formal analysis, D.S. and A.C.; investigation, D.S., A.C., and C.G.; data curation, D.S., A.C., and C.G.; writing—original draft preparation, D.S. and A.C.; writing—review and editing, D.S., A.C., and C.G..; visualization, D.S. and A.C.; supervision, C.G.C. and C.G.; project administration, C.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Informed Consent Statement

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Capturing differences in perception and aesthetic judgment of live or medially presented music: development of a self-report instrument.

• 1 Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, Institute of Musicology and Music Education, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Giessen, Germany
• 2 Berliner Hochschule für Technik, Berlin, Germany
• 3 Department of Music, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, Germany

Nowadays there are multiple ways to perceive music, from attending concerts (live) to listening to recorded music through headphones (medial). In between there are many mixed modes, such as playback performances. In empirical music research, this plurality of performance forms has so far found little recognition. Until now no measuring instrument has existed that could adequately capture the differences in perception and aesthetic judgment. The purpose of our empirical investigation was to capture all dimensions relevant to such an assessment. Using 3D-simulations and dynamic binaural synthesis, various live and medial situations were simulated. A qualitative survey was conducted at the Department of Audio Communication of the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin). With the help of the repertory grid technique, a data pool of approximately 400 attribute pairs was created and individual rating data were collected. Our first study served to create a semantic differential. In a second study, this semantic differential was evaluated. The development of the semantic differential was carried out by first using a mixed-method approach to qualitative analysis according to grounded theory. Thereafter, a principal component analysis reduced the attribute pairs to 67 items in four components. The semantic differential consists of items concerning acoustic, visual and audio-visual interaction as well as items with an overarching assessment of the stimuli. The evaluation study, comprising 45 participants (23 male and 22 female, M  = 42.56 years, SD  = 17.16) who rated 12 stimuli each, reduced the items to 61 and resulted in 18 subscales and nine single items. Because the survey used simulations, the social component may be underrepresented. Nevertheless, the questionnaire we created enables the evaluation of music performances (especially for classical concerts) in a new scope, thus opening many opportunities for further research. For example, in a live concert context, we observed not only that seating position influences the judgment of sound quality but also that visual elements influence immersion and felt affect. In the future, the differential could be reviewed for a larger stimulus pool, extended or used modularly for different research questions.

1 Introduction

Listening to music is one of the ways humans like to spend their free time ( Schäfer and Sedlmeier, 2018 ). Before Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 – thus making it possible to reproduce music for the first time – attending a live performance was the only way to listen to music ( Rocholl, 1976 ; Elste, 1992 ). Nowadays opportunities to perceive music are manifold. Listening to music has even become that easy, that in everyday life, music listening is mostly accompanied by another activity ( Greb et al., 2018 ). However, studies which address the different performance forms in which people deliberately listen to music are rare ( Wald-Fuhrmann et al., 2021 ). An accurate categorization of the presentation mode is additionally complicated by the growing plurality of performance forms. A recording may be listened to via headphones or mobile devices, an old radio set or a modern surround-system (aural). During music listening, people might also watch moving images such as in a music video or a television show (audio-visual) with the images showing details of the musicians’ performance (documentary) or visual material unrelated to the performance as such (structural, expression related, narrative or associative; see Bullerjahn and Hantschel, 2018 ). A live performance can take place without any technical support (unplugged); the musicians might use microphones (amplified); or the whole acoustic part of a performance might even be a reproduction of an audio file while the artists pretend to perform live with all typical facial expressions, gestures and postures (playback). Hence, the gradations are various and a breakdown of all relevant differences in music perception, experience and aesthetic judgment is so far missing ( Lindau, 2010 ). We aim to close this gap with our studies and provide an instrument for future research on that topic. With an explorative approach, we want to discover and classify as many assessment dimensions as possible, but still we had to set priorities in order to not get to many variables. Hence, in the presented studies there is a great variety of different auditory simulations but fewer variations of visual situations. Depending on the kind of music used in future studies there may be some items omitted (e.g., stimuli without visual component) or have to be extended by other factors (e.g., because of narration due to text or music video). We want to provide a basis for all the future research that hopefully will follow in this area.

As early as 2001, Finnäs stated in a review of empirical research that most studies insufficiently report and evaluate the presentation modes, or merely refer to them in terms of contrasting pairs, such as “live vs. medial” or “aural vs. audio-visual.” Although in recent years it has become more common for musical research to report the presentation mode more properly, the other criticized aspects have not substantially changed in the past 20 years.

We occasionally find comparisons between live and medial music in the field of consumer research. Rondán-Cataluña and Martín-Ruiz (2010) examined the development of the income generated by CDs and sales of concert tickets and contrasted it with customers’ perceptions about concerts and CDs. Mortimer et al. (2012) dealt with the endangered profitability of recorded music due to filesharing and examined whether this affects live concerts. Both studies were unable to find any negative effect on income from concerts, but did find decreasing prices for recorded music. Paradoxically, “consumer satisfaction, price fairness perception, willingness to pay, customer value, and product/service quality are significantly more highly ranked in concert attendees than in CD buyers” ( Rondán-Cataluña and Martín-Ruiz, 2010 , p. 1410).

Roose and Vander Stichele (2010) examined the composition of groups of people who prefer listening to live music (“public”) or recordings (“private”). It turned out that music consumption was in principle positively related to all indicators of cultural capital (with strongest effects for high-brow genres), but cultural capital was more important for attending live concerts of any given music genre than for listening to recordings at home. Somewhat unexpectedly, they did not find any effect of income. Coutinho and Scherer (2017) compared emotions induced by the same performance of three German Lieder (art songs) in varied listening contexts. Listeners of a Lieder recital in a church showed extremely consistent emotional responses and reported significantly more feelings of wonder, while listeners of an audio-visual recording in a university lecture hall reported significantly more boredom. Brown and Krause (2020) found that while digital files provide their users with control over their own music and the listening place and time, live music is preferred because of its authenticity, social aspects and its ability to stir strong feelings.

Brown and Knox (2017) identified that the experience of presence in a unique event with like-minded people and the uncertainty as to whether the performances will be either as anticipated, novel or disappointing were primary motivations behind live music attendance (see also Pitts, 2014 ). Swarbrick et al. (2019) used motion capture of head movements given that these often reflect emotions as well as the affiliated social engagement experienced among people moving together to music. They compared the movement responses of audiences attending a live concert with the rock artist present to audiences listening to a concert with the artist absent but with the same songs played from a recorded, but not yet released album. During the live concert, head movements were faster and more entrained than during the album-playback concert and they were fastest and most entrained for self-reported fans of the artist. The results indicate that live music leads to a greater engagement for listeners than recorded music, and this is especially so in the case of admiration for the artist, demonstrating the creation of a unique bond between fan and performer while controlling for the effects of togetherness in an audience.

There also exists some research about the medical or educational use of live music in contrast to aurally presented medial music. Thus, Flink (1990) determined a slightly higher will of patients to participate actively and spontaneously in a music therapy session if music was presented live; and Shoda et al. (2016) discovered a greater entrainment of the heartbeats of an audience with the musical rhythm and greater relaxation at a live performance than when listening to recordings.

Research comparing medial music with and without a visual component is more common. Even though there are most likely even more studies about this topic by now (e.g., Vuoskoski et al., 2014 , 2016 ; Coutinho and Scherer, 2017 ; Li et al., 2021 ), there are good overview articles by Platz and Kopiez (2012) , which features a meta-analysis of 15 aggregated studies on audio-visual music perception, and Finnäs (2001) , which presents a systematic review of now dated empirical research in which listening to the same music was compared under different conditions of presentation (live, audio-visual, aural). The main findings of these examinations are that visual appearance has an important influence in the communication of meaning and therefore on the judgment of music. Platz and Kopiez (2012) detected an average medium effect size of 0.51 standard deviations (Cohen’s d ; 95% CI [0.42, 0.59]) for the visual component. The judgment of the music depends on the visual material. Sometimes the music was rated as more likable without the visual component, sometimes it was the other way round. In particular, performance quality is substantially perceived and judged by the way of performer movements, even in the absence of any auditory information pointing to a substantial effect of performers’ movements and gestures ( Griffiths and Reay, 2018 ). Furthermore, averaged electrodermal activity– representing felt arousal of listeners – was significantly higher in an audio-visual presentation of Igor Stravinsky’s second piece for solo clarinet, as compared with audio-only and visual-only presentations ( Chapados and Levitin, 2008 ). This suggests that an audio-visual presentation possesses an “emergent property” of its own created by the bimodal interaction.

One of the few studies comparing different types of aural presentation modes ( Lipscomb and Kerins, 2004 ) examined the influence of two-channel stereo vs. 5.1 surround sound in the cinematic and music listening experience. The results reveal that presentation mode was a negligible factor in music listening compared with viewing a movie with synchronized music. It appeared that especially, participants with higher levels of visual training were influenced by the presentation mode in their verbal responses.

What these previous studies all share is that they emphasize very few presentation modes and focus only on selected perceptual differences. The aim of this study, then, was to identify all relevant perceptual differences and solidify them in the form of a semantic differential. This includes acoustic as well as visual perception. Despite this, the semantic differential should also capture dimensions that can either influence or result from perception and experience such as aesthetic judgment. In future, then, the relationship of these different factors can be examined using the same questionnaire. In preparation for this study, Lindau (2010) published the results of an online-survey study in which participants could freely attempt to predict the difference dimension of live or medially presented music. Tonal aspects were mentioned most often (including localization, dynamic range, loudness, acoustic and timbre). The other categories were emotionality, perfection, sociality, the senses (including visuality), repeatability, ubiquity, immediacy, control and attention. To survey the differences in the perception, experience and aesthetic judgment in this study, a method was chosen by which the participants could compare different simulations of live or medial presentation forms and thereby develop a vocabulary for describing their differences. To create this semantic differential, two studies were conducted. The first study served the creation of the semantic differential and the second served the evaluation and finalization. It is the continuation of a project that was started at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin; Horn et al., 2015 ). The production of the stimuli and the data collection took place solely at the TU Berlin. When it came to the analysis, the research institutions in Giessen and Frankfurt/Main took over.

2 Study 1: Creation of the questionnaire

2.1 materials and methods, 2.1.1 participants.

Starting point of the data collection was the personal construct theory of George Alexander Kelly (1991) , which says that people use personal constructs of opposing poles to explain how they see the world. The repertory grid technique is a qualitative method for detecting these personal constructs and can thus be used for participant numbers as low as one ( Kelly, 1991 ; Rosenberger and Freitag, 2009 ). For this study, not only the view of one person, but also a large database with attributes describing all kinds of differences in the perception, experience and aesthetic evaluation of live or medially presented music was to be generated. Therefore, participants were chosen who dealt intensively with music either professionally or privately. This allowed us to assume that the sample consisted of differentiating listeners. Due to the diversity of their accesses to music (for example, passionate visitor of concerts, sound engineer or music theorist) the listeners generated a diverse vocabulary.

The sample comprised multiple strata with regard to age (young adults, middle-aged and elderly people), gender (female and male) and musical background (professional musicians, professional sound engineering background and private music or media enthusiastic) so that a total number of 3 × 2 × 3 = 18 subjects between 20 and 66 years of age participated (9f, 9 m, M  = 42.56 years, SD = 17.16). For the purpose of this study and the envisaged methods, this was an appropriate number of participants. With a sufficient number of stimuli, some similar or identical attributes are already assigned from participant two onwards, so that with 18 people it is highly likely that all important differences have been named and it is also possible to recognize what the most common differences are. The thus stratified participants were assigned randomly to three conditions: aural, audio-visual I and audio-visual II. Table 1 shows the distribution of participants per condition.

Table 1 . Participants in each condition: number ( n ), mean ( M ) with standard deviation (SD) and gender.

2.1.2 Simulation environment and stimuli

For the elicitation of the differences in perception, experience and judgment, a simulation environment was created which could – due to binaural synthesis – dynamically simulate both live and medial perception situations. For this study it would not have been expedient to use an actual live concert as it was necessary to have full control over the acoustic parameters (e.g., without interfering noises of other listeners or the musicians themselves). Furthermore, the participants had to be able to watch the stimuli repeatedly and switch between different listening situations. With this kind of acoustic simulation, it has been shown that listeners cannot differentiate between real or simulated sources of sound ( Moldrzyk et al., 2005 ; Maempel, 2008 ).

The visual simulation was created by stereoscope video recordings presented on a big screen as 3D videos. Different perception situations were imitated, from listening to music through a loudspeaker to a live concert performance. Different acoustic and different visual perception situations were simulated, but the focus was on acoustic factors. Detailed descriptions of the simulation environment and the production of the stimuli can be found in Horn (2013) , Horn et al. (2015) , and Lindau (2014) .

Stimuli were produced for two different pieces of music. One stimulus was the first movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s String Quartet No. 1 in G major (KV 80), which was recorded by the Reinhold Quartett and presented by the Berliner 3plus1 Quartett in playback. The other stimulus was the Tango “Chantey “by Thomas Zaufke, with the same string quartets as well as voice recorded and presented by Yamil Borges. These music pieces were chosen for different reasons. As there were no existing available stimuli which were free of reverb and of high quality, the stimuli had to be newly produced for the study. The number of instruments involved was to be technically, organizationally and financially acceptable. Furthermore, sheet music had to be available for the instrumentation, and the same group of performers (plus voice for the second piece) need to be able to perform with as much stylistic variation as possible. Lastly, one of the music pieces was to be only instrumental and the other was to have a vocal component in order to vary the stimuli as widely as possible.

In the condition “aural,” the participants did not see anything at all but just listened to the acoustic simulations of the different presentation modes. The groups with the conditions “audio-visual I” and “audio-visual II” all listened to the same acoustic simulations and watched the corresponding visual 3D-simulations of live performances and medial presentations, but the latter were either the 3D-simulations of a TV screen with documentary videos of the musicians performing in a concert (audio-visual I) or the 3D-simulations of one or more loudspeakers (audio-visual II) ( cf. Figure 1 ). The documentary videos showed the performers in a sequence of different shot sizes.

Figure 1 . The three different audio-visual presentation modes “live,” “TV screen with documentary video” and “loudspeaker” in the simulation environment.

In total, the participants watched and listened to 28 different stimuli, divided into 14 different acoustic simulations per piece of music: one simulation from a seat in front at a live concert, one simulation from a seat in the rear, once each with and without motion-tracked binaural (MTB) background noise of a concert hall; one mono-simulation, three stereo-simulations from the studio and two more stereo-earphone-simulations; two surround recordings from the studio and at least two recordings with wave field synthesis (WFS). So there were four live simulations and ten media simulations per piece of music. With the large number of stimuli, it should be ensured that even small differences between different recording techniques can be detected. The frequency characteristics correspond to merchantable setups of a sound engineer. Recordings which were free of reverb were produced using microphones of the company Neumann (e.g., Neumann KM140) and subsequently used to produce the live and media stimuli with the help of a binaural measuring robot ( cf. Figure 2 ). The sound pressure level for the media stimuli was set up by an expert-based manufacturing process, as the volume of media stimuli could be chosen individually by the listeners. All stimuli had a length of approximately 1 min and 16 s. A more detailed list of the audio-visual presentation modes can be found in Table 2 .

Figure 2 . The binaural measuring robot ( Horn, 2013 , p. 26).

Table 2 . Audio-visual presentation modes with different combinations of simulated listening situation and implemented audio-recording technology.

2.1.3 Procedure

The study took place in a room that was constructed for sound production, which is why an extremely low level of background noise can be assumed. All participants were tested in single sessions. The participants were placed in the simulation environment and they additionally had a computer on which they could autonomously rate the stimuli. The stimuli were presented in groups of three (so called triads) and rated by the participants using the repertory grid technique. Participants could switch between the three stimuli at will. In the condition “aural,” participants heard audio only, while in the conditions audio-visual I & II, participants both heard the audio and watched the associated 3D-simulation. They had to mention the contrast of one stimulus compared to the other two and subsequently supplement the contrast with an opposite pole so that the attribute pair was completed. The participants could fill in their answers in the text field provided for this purpose on the computer.

A total number of 18 triads was presented to each participant. Each triad could be repeated ad libitum and any number of contrasting attributes per triad could be created.

Finally, the participants rated all 28 stimuli with their own constructs (= the contrasting attribute pairs) on seven-level scales. In this way, 18 single grids were created with 12–30 constructs per person. On the whole, there was a total number of 376 attribute pairs (cf. Supplementary material ). In addition, the investigator documented when the participants gave comments to their constructs.

2.2 Results

For the analysis, a mixed-methods design was chosen due to the mixture of qualitative and quantitative data. While the rating can be used for structural models, the inter-individual summary of the attributes from the different people can only take place on a qualitative basis.

The analysis was divided into three steps. In the first step all constructs were categorized with the grounded theory methodology to receive a first overview concerning the dimension of the different presentation forms and, meanwhile, create a basis for the following steps. According to the grounded theory, the constructs were coded in several runs beginning very close to the text. Afterwards the constructs were grouped little by little until only a few categories remained ( Strauss, 1994 ). Four categories were identified: acoustic, visual, the interaction of acoustic and visual and general assessment. The acoustic category formed the largest group.

In the second step the single grids were used for explorative factor analyses – more detailed principal component analysis (PCA) with oblique rotations. This helped to structure the data and find redundancies. The PCAs were performed based on the categories from step one. In this way, attributes which were clearly separated in terms of content (like acoustic and visual) were not analyzed together, which would have led to misleading results. The number of factors was determined by the Kaiser-Guttman criterion. This method tends to identify more factors than the other criteria, which was suitable for that step of the analysis. For all factors there was also calculated the reliability value Cronbach’s Alpha for different factor compositions. In this step, no attributes were removed, as the aim was to discover intersubjective relationships and not the factor structures of individuals.

The results of the PCAs served as a basis of interpretation for the qualitative summary in an intersubjective questionnaire. The single grids were also consulted for this step. In the summary, redundant attribute pairs of different participants were to be eliminated, with the most common formulations remaining intact. The summary took place following the qualitative content analysis of Philipp Mayring (2015) . Theoretical foundations were included, mostly in order to secure intersubjective understanding. For example, trivial (like to hear and see: musicians perform in a room – to hear and see: recording comes from loudspeaker ); undifferentiated (like concert situation [spatial] – typical CD-recording , which mixed an attribute that is formulated fuzzy with a purely acoustic description); or attributes that were potentially hard to understand, eliminated or revised. It was often impossible to clearly assign such items in the PCAs in advance. Formulations used by many participants were retained, as were items which were not named often but that addressed aspects that did not occur with other participants. The remaining items were to include all addressed aspects, form clear opposites, be understandable and be applicable for a wide range of different stimuli.

The thus-formed semantic differential consists of 33 acoustic attributes, 12 visual attributes, six attributes of the interaction of acoustic and visual and 17 attributes of general assessment ( cf. Table 3 ).

Table 3 . The preliminary semantic differential.

2.3 Discussion

The semantic differential now consists of 68 items, leaned on the common parlance of the participants. This is a quiet long differential that would benefit of an examination and improvement of the structure. As no-one used the complete differential so far it is useful to evaluate it with a new sample. The participants of the first stratified sample were at least music enthusiast, so the new participants should be of varying musical expertise.

Further application areas and limitations are discussed in an overarching discussion at the end of this research report.

3 Study 2: Evaluation of the questionnaire

The second study served for the evaluation and finalization of the semantic differential. The aim was to eliminate items which are not understandable for the participants or redundant, to identify subscales and to revise the questionnaire according to the findings. In addition, the questionnaire was checked for any correlations between the understanding of the questionnaire and the musical experience of the participants.

3.1 Materials and methods

3.1.1 participants.

As the evaluation of the semantic differential was mainly quantitative, for this study a larger number of participants was needed. Due to the large amount of time required for the procedure in individual sessions with 17 repeatedly watched stimuli each (including four for familiarization and one twice), only a sample size of at least 30 was targeted, although a much larger sample size would certainly have been desirable. The participants were recruited from the participant database of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. Inclusion criteria were: German mother tongue, majority age, ability to see three-dimensionally and intact hearing abilities (self-reported). The participants also ought not to have participated in the first study. The participants were compensated with 5€ per half an hour.

In total, 57 people filled out the questionnaire. After the data was checked for reliability based on a stimulus, which occurred two times, a total number of 45 participants remained. Due to diverse reasons (e.g., malfunction of the internet connection, conflict of appointments) some test subjects could not rate all stimuli, so one person rated eight, one person rated nine, one person rated 11 and two rated 12 stimuli (out of 13).

The remaining participants had a mean age of M  = 38 years ( SD  = 16.14) ranging from 19 to 72 years. The number of men and women was nearly equal: 23 men participated ( M  = 42.57 years, SD  = 15.79) and 22 women ( M  = 33.23 years, SD  = 15.42). Out of 45 subjects, two had an intermediate school leaving certificate (“Mittlere Reife”), 21 a general matriculation standard or subject-related entrance qualification, six a bachelor degree, and 16 a university degree (e.g., diploma, master’s or state examination). Thus, the education was on a high level. To check for musical experience, the participants were asked to fill in the Goldsmith Sophistication Index (GOLD-MSI). This allowed us to determine whether the experience of the listeners had any influence on the estimation of the stimuli and the understanding of the attributes. The GOLD-MSI consists of 38 items on which the participants rate their musical experience via self-report in response to different statements concerning their interest in or connection with music. The GOLD-MSI is divided in the subscales “Active Engagement,” “Perceptual Abilities,” “Musical Training,” “Singing Abilities” and “Sophisticated Emotional Engagement with Music.” For this study, only the first three subscales were used (25 items). The average score of the GOLD-MSI was M  = 113.22 ( SD  = 18.65) and therefore a little higher than the score Schaal et al. (2014) identified for a German sample ( n  = 641, M  = 101.68).

3.1.2 Stimuli

Twelve of the stimuli, which had already been used in the first study, served as stimuli for Study 2 (shortened to a length of 34–37 s). They were meant to cover a spectrum of different presentation modes that was as broad as possible. In contrast to the first study, the participants were not divided into different groups. All participants received the same 3D simulations which showed either loudspeakers or a TV screen presenting a documentary video of a concert or the 3D simulation of a live performance ( cf. Figure 1 ). The acoustic simulations were varied, as in Study 1. To check for reliability, one stimulus was used twice. Table 4 shows a brief description of the chosen stimuli.

Table 4 . Overview of the selected stimuli used in Study 2.

3.1.3 Procedure

Before the survey began, the procedure was tested in a few preliminary tests.

The survey took place at the recording studio of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt/Main, which is a room-in-room construction, so again there was hardly any background noise. The stimuli were presented on a 75-inch 3D TV and the sound was played through Beyerdynamic DT 990 pro headphones. 1 As no motion-tracking system was in place, it was not possible to move the audio sources synchronously with the head movements; but hardly any head movements could be observed. Each participant was centered alone in a darkened room, but could be seen via a webcam by the investigator and was able to communicate through an intercom system. The duration of the survey was about 2 h. The participants had the option to take intermittent breaks, but only very few people made use of it.

The participants were instructed to sit down and make themselves comfortable in order to ensure a relaxed concert and media simulation. Furthermore, they were provided brief instructions in the handling of not only the tablet, which was used to fill in the questionnaire, but the 3D-TV and the intercom system as well. The mouse for controlling the TV was placed on either the left or the right side depending on the wishes of the participant.

Before the start of the actual study, four demonstration videos were presented to give an idea of the scope of the differences between the stimuli and to practice using the equipment. Then the stimuli were presented in a random order. Each stimulus was to be watched repeatedly and rated on a seven-level scale. As an additional option, the participants could also respond with “I cannot answer.” The items were randomized but remained sorted in the categories.

In addition to rating the stimuli, the participants also filled in the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index ( Schaal et al., 2014 ). Subsequently, some socio-demographic data was to be filled in as well.

3.1.4 Design and analysis

The dataset for the evaluation consisted of 45 participants which delivered 13 judgments each (12 different stimuli + one duplicate for reliability check; within-subjects design with 13 repetitions of measurement). To analyze item difficulty, discriminatory power and scale reliability for each item, a value over all repetitions was aggregated. Furthermore, some variables for live and mediated stimuli were aggregated (cf. Supplementary material ).

The significance level was set at α = 0.05.

3.2 Results

3.2.1 item analyses.

Item variance, missing values and item difficulty : Initially, the means, standard deviation, variance and number of missing values (“I cannot answer”) was identified for all items via descriptive statistics. For all items, the whole scale was exploited. Items with 10 % or more missing values were checked concerning reasons induced by the stimuli (e.g., difficulties in identifying a “main voice” in the string quartet by Mozart) or clues to problems of comprehension (such as for “low depth staggering – high depth staggering” with 98 missing values out of 573, but no obvious pattern concerning certain stimuli). The difficulty of all items was between 0.37 and 0.72, which is on an acceptable level.

3.2.2 Group comparisons

For each item an analysis of variance (ANOVA) for repeated measurements was performed in order to establish which items were useful for differentiating between different presentation modes. As it is not relevant for the aims of this study to detect the differences, no post-hoc tests were conducted at this point. Four items did not reach the significance level.

Slim panorama – wide panorama missed a significant result with F (12, 312) = 1.468 and p  = 0.173. The check for missing values indicated that there might be problems in understanding, as there were 67 missing values.

The construct sound from the top – sound from the bottom did not reach the significance level [ F (6.680, 167.003) = 1.610, p  = 0.139]. Problems in understanding were nevertheless unlikely as the similar item sound from the left – sound from the right did not cause any problems.

The item lows dominate – highs dominate just barely missed the significance level with F (7.237, 246.047) = 1.871 und p  = 0.072. For the musically more experienced participants, the significance level was reached with F (12, 192) = 2.070 und p  = 0.021.

The last item that missed a significant result in the group comparisons was one seems to hear more musicians than there actually are – one can hear the exact number of musicians . With F (5.673, 204.235) = 1.050 und p  = 0.393, it was clearly above the significance level, but it still could have been caused by the stimuli. Effects such as the overdub technique are much more common in the production of popular music ( Maempel et al., 2008 ).

3.2.3 Musical experience and Age

Overall, there were only three items that correlated with the musical experience: the attribute pairs instruments can be poorly localized – instruments can be well localized with r  = 0.344 and p  = 0.021, one seems to hear more musicians than there actually are – one can hear the exact number of musicians with r  = 0.373 and p  = 0.012 and private – public with r  = −0.357 and p  = 0.016. It is not surprising that people with increasing musical sophistication did rate the instruments as easily localizable and also claimed to hear the exact number of musicians due to their greater experience in listening to different music pieces. The greater feeling of private music listening could be attributed to the absence of an audience in the live-stimuli, which might have attracted more attention from people who are used to attending live performances. Age and musical experience do not correlate. There were several items that correlated with age. Interestingly there does not seem to be any influence of the hearing ability but the elderly people seem to have rated a little more negative than the younger participants. All items that reached significant correlations are shown in Table 5 .

Table 5 . Significant Item correlations with age, Item-name, Spearman‘s Rho (ρ) and p -value.

3.2.4 Scale development

For the development of the subscales, the findings of the PCAs of the first study were used and supplemented with theoretical foundations, discriminatory power and Cronbach’s Alpha. Figurative representations of the ratings of the stimuli served as additional interpretation aid. For example, it can be seen, that the item thin sound – full sound is a much better fit for the subscale sound quality ( mono – stereo/surround and sounds like a portable radio – good sound ) than for the subscale room size ( dry – reverberant and small room – large room ). This is particularly clear for stimulus “Zaufke. Live – rear seating” ( cf. Figures 3A , B ).

Figure 3 . (A) Mean ratings ( M ) of the Mozart stimuli for items of the created subscales sound quality and room size over all stimuli. (B) Mean ratings ( M ) of the Zaufke stimuli for items of the created subscales sound quality and room size over all stimuli.

The formulations of some items were adjusted. For example, the formulation small shot size 2 – big shot size was changed into improved sight due to shot size – hindered sight due to shot size in order to achieve less trivial results. As can be seen in Figure 4 , the item only divided the stimuli into “front seating,” “rear seating” and “TV.”

Figure 4 . Arithmetic mean ( M ) of the rating for the item s mall shot size – big shot size.

Some items were not assigned to a subscale but kept as single items.

3.2.5 The semantic differential – Giessen Music Mediation Inventory (GMMI)

The analysis terminated in the semantic differential with 60 items consisting of 18 subscales and nine single items shown in Table 6 .

Table 6 . The Giessen Music Mediation Inventory (GMMI) with Cronbach’s Alpha and discriminatory power for the categories acoustic , visual , interaction of acoustic and visual and general assessment .

3.2.6 Comparison of different presentation modes

In the follow-up to the creation of the GMMI, some of subscales were examined with regard to the differences between the presentation modes “live,” “TV screen with documentary video” and “loudspeaker.” Here, the results of the ANOVAs over the subscales vitality , hearing transparency , naturalness , fit of sound and picture , emotional stimulation and immersion will be presented. Figure 5 shows these ratings, while Table 7 shows the results of the performed ANOVAs.

Figure 5 . Arithmetic mean ( M ) with standard error of the rating for six selected subscales, comparing three 3D simulations types (live, TV screen with documentary video and loudspeaker).

Table 7 . ANOVA results for the audio-visual presentation modes “live,” “TV screen with documentary video” and “loudspeaker”: number ( n ), ANOVA results, p -value and effect size Cohen’s ƒ.

All of the subscales reached the significance level, so post-hoc tests with Bonferroni-Holm correction were used to find the relevant differences. For vitality , the post-hoc tests show a difference between “loudspeaker” and “TV screen with documentary video” ( p  < 0.001) as well as between “TV screen with documentary video” and “live” ( p  < 0.001), but no difference between “loudspeaker” and “live” ( p  = 0.714). This indicates an influence of picture dramaturgy on the vitality rating.

For hearing transparency , the presentation mode “live” reached the lowest value; hearing transparency was also significant between “live” and “loudspeaker” ( p  = 0.035) and “live” and “TV screen with documentary video” ( p  = 0.035), but not between the two medial presentations ( p  = 0.647). It is quite astonishing that a live presentation impairs instrumental localization and sound transparency and that sight does not make a difference.

The subscales naturalness , fit of sound and picture , emotional stimulation and immersion all reached the lowest values for the stimuli in the “loudspeaker”-presentation mode. They reached significant (or at least almost significant) values between “loudspeaker” and “TV screen with documentary video” ( p naturalness  = 0.052, p fit of sound and picture  < 0.001, p emotional stimulation  < 0.001 and p immersion  < 0.001) and between “loudspeaker” and “live” ( p naturalness  = 0.013, p fit of sound and picture  < 0.001, p emotional stimulation  < 0.001 and p immersion  < 0.001), but not between “TV screen with documentary video” and “live”—which is interesting as it indicates that a presentation’s being live or medial is less relevant than if it involves an visual performance of the musicians or not.

4 Discussion

Our two studies applied stimuli that comprised not real, but rather simulated performances in various live and medially presented listening situations. This was necessary to ensure that all stimuli were based on the same sound recordings of the two pieces of music and the same video footage. Only in this way could differences in perception, experience and aesthetic judgment be attributed solely to various presentation modes. In Study 1, we captured all dimensions relevant for assessing differences of these different presentation modes. A qualitative survey was therefore conducted and evaluated using a mixed-methods approach. In Study 2, the dimensions of perception, experience and aesthetic judgment were evaluated using a different sample, but including a selection of previously used stimuli. All items were examined by means of an item analysis, descriptive statistics and analyses of variance with regard to their understandability and their power to distinguish between different stimuli. If discrepancies occurred, these too were analyzed, and the items in question were either revised or eliminated. For the sample, prior musical experience had very little influence on the ratings. This is a desirable result as the aim of this study was to create a questionnaire that could be used independently of deeper understanding of the subject matter. If the fit was sufficient, the items were summarized in thematic scales. Items that could not be assigned to a scale were checked for their relevance and either eliminated or retained as single items. In only a few cases did the formulations have to be adjusted afterwards when it seemed meaningful to create a more specific item. In total, only a small number of items had to be eliminated or changed. This is a satisfactory result as it confirms the results of the first study.

Nevertheless, another evaluation of the GMMI would be desirable. As both studies used the same stimuli, a study with new stimuli and perhaps actual live performances as compared with medial presentations, would be ideal. By now, the GMMI is limited to the German language as the vocabulary was explicitly designed for German linguistic customs.

With 60 items, the GMMI is a rather long semantic differential. It should therefore be kept in mind that the questionnaire consists of four categories, so a modular use is conceivable, too. Depending on the research aim or the presented stimuli, not all items will always fit. If for example only aural presentation modes are to be examined, items for the categories “visual” and “interaction between acoustic and visual” cannot be answered reasonably.

There are also some limitations resulting from the original choice of stimuli. At the beginning, the decision was made to exclude moving images in the form of music videos with a narrative or abstract concept that might have added another level of meaning beyond the mere presentation of musicians. For this kind of music video, which is more common in the pop music market, an evaluation category is missing.

Taking into account the natural frequency range of the selected pieces of music, it made sense not to use an additional subwoofer in this study. However, this could become relevant for stimuli comprising other musical genres that are usually accompanied by more physical experiences due to deep bass vibrations (e.g., in rock music).

Furthermore, the social component is nearly missing, as this would have led to a large number of hardly controllable confounding variables. As in particular, the social component of music listening has proved to be a large area of research (e.g., Roose and Vander Stichele, 2010 ; Brown and Knox, 2017 ; Swarbrick et al., 2019 or Brown and Krause, 2020 ), this limitation seems bearable. At the same time, the absence of social variables such as a visible audience is a strength of this study, too, as only in this way was it possible to really capture perceptual differences unbiased by these visual components. Under these circumstances it is all the more remarkable that our second study provides evidence that listeners feel significantly higher emotional stimulation and immersion when performing musicians are presented visually – whether live or on TV – as compared with by loudspeaker alone. This corresponds with the idea of an emergent property created by the interaction between the two sensory modalities conveyed in musical performances and perceived by audience members ( Chapados and Levitin, 2008 ).

Hearing ability, which features in the second study, was only checked by self-report. As some participants were of older age it is rather unlikely that there were no hearing constraints at all. Nonetheless, even the elderly people passed the reliability check, and by including a broader age range a more realistic image of music listeners could be created – especially for classical music, where the audience consists of many different groups of people ( Gembris and Menze, 2021 ). However, subsequent studies might include a brief hearing test.

With an average duration of 2 h, the second study was quite long, so that it cannot be excluded that some participants had signs of fatigue and declining concentration. The long duration was necessary to cover a broad range of different live and media perception situations so that no possible differences were lost in the semantic differential. An attempt was made to compensate this by randomizing the stimuli. A shorter duration would be desirable for future studies.

For future research, the GMMI can be used, for example, to examine the influence of the visual on the acoustic judgment and vice versa, simply by varying a single parameter. Progress in the field of virtual reality will probably lead to live simulations that become increasingly better. Here, the GMMI could be used to compare a simulation with a live performance. This could also be an interesting topic for the field of consumer research. Rondán-Cataluña and Martín-Ruiz (2010) as well as Mortimer et al. (2012) did not find any negative effects of the prevalence of aural media products on the consumption of live concerts. Taking into account the virtual reality concerts with ABBA-Avatars performing their new album and old hits, which began in 2022 ( Woolley and Collins, 2019 ; Hughes, 2020 ), it would be possible to study whether live simulations or audio-visual media products have the potential to compete with live concerts.

As we saw in our comparison of different presentation modes, there was no clear ranking between “loudspeaker,” “TV screen with documentary video” and “live.” Especially between the simulations of medial presentations with moving pictures and the live concert simulations, there were often only small differences that did not reach the significance level. It seems likely that other studies, such as that of Shoda et al. (2016) , who examined live music in contrast to aurally presented music, would have led to different results if they had included audio-visually presented music.

5 Conclusion

What our two studies have achieved is the wide-ranging acquisition of assessment dimensions and the 27 subscales, which document a so far unprecedented number of differences in the perception, experience and aesthetic judgment of live or medially presented music. More research is nonetheless needed to build up a more nuanced picture of the ways in which listeners evaluate pieces of music depending on presentation mode.

The research area of medially presented music with and without a visual component could be extended with the use of different recording technology and quality. For example, a study that led to the result that the visual component had a positive influence could be replied with different acoustic qualities. An audio-visual stimulus combined with sound of low quality can be contrasted to an only acoustic stimulus with high quality sound. The GMMI can be used to identify all expected as well as unexpected parameters that are influenced by these variations.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/ Supplementary material , further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Ethics statement

Ethical approval was not required for the studies involving humans because the study was conducted in full accordance with the Ethical Guidelines of the German Association of Psychologists (DGPs) and the German Association of Psychologists (BDP) as well as the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct of the American Psychological Association (APA). These guidelines suggest that for the type of research reported here, a formal ethics approval is not necessary. The present study only used completely anonymous questionnaires. All data of the MPI participant database was stored separately from the survey data. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author contributions

LM: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. CB: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. AL: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. MW-F: Project administration, Resources, Writing – review & editing.

The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Acknowledgments

We would like to send many thanks to Hans-Joachim Maempel, Stefan Weinzierl and Michael Horn who started this project with Alexander Lindau at the Department of Audio Communication at the Technical University of Berlin including the simulation environment with stimuli production and data collection for Study 1. A special thanks also goes to our native speakers Andreas Gallegos and William Martin for additional proofreading.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1339168/full#supplementary-material

1. ^ The frequency response of the headphones was electronically compensated within a frequency range of 50–20,000 Hz. The use of an additional subwoofer was omitted with regard to the lowest frequencies of the selected musical pieces.

2. ^ Other possible translations for the German word “Bildausschnitt” are “picture section,” “image detail” or “section of the image” meaning what part of a scenery can be seen. The German term is not limited to a cinematic context.

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Keywords: music perception, aesthetic judgment, live music, recorded music, audio-visual, 3D simulation, repertory grid technique, semantic differential

Citation: Meinel LS, Bullerjahn C, Lindau A and Wald-Fuhrmann M (2024) Capturing differences in perception and aesthetic judgment of live or medially presented music: development of a self-report instrument. Front. Psychol . 15:1339168. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1339168

Received: 21 November 2023; Accepted: 06 March 2024; Published: 02 April 2024.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2024 Meinel, Bullerjahn, Lindau and Wald-Fuhrmann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Claudia Bullerjahn, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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• Should music education be mandatory in schools?
• Is autotune ruining the quality of music?
• Are music awards shows still relevant in today’s industry?
• Should music lyrics be censored for explicit content?
• Is it fair that some musicians earn more money than others?
• Is classical music still relevant in modern society?
• Should music festivals have age restrictions for attendees?
• Is it fair for musicians to be judged on their personal lives?
• Is the current state of the music industry sustainable?
• Should musicians be held accountable for the messages in their lyrics?
• Is the role of the record label still important in the age of digital music?
• Should musicians be able to express their political views in their music?
• Does the use of music in movies and TV shows enhance or detract from the storytelling?

Interesting Music Research Topics

• The impact of music on athletic performance
• The use of music in advertising and consumer behavior
• The role of music in enhancing cognitive abilities
• The effects of music on stress reduction and relaxation
• The cultural significance of music in indigenous communities
• The influence of music on fashion and style trends
• The evolution of protest music and its impact on society
• The effects of music on Alzheimer’s disease
• The intersection of music and technology in the music industry
• The effects of music on emotional intelligence and empathy
• The cultural significance of hip hop music in the African diaspora
• The influence of music on human behavior and decision-making
• The effects of music on physical performance and exercise
• The role of music in promoting social and political activism

Research Paper Topics On Music

• The effects of music on the brain and mental health
• The impact of streaming on the music industry
• The history and evolution of rap music
• The cultural significance of traditional folk music
• The use of music in video games to enhance the gaming experience
• The role of music in religious and spiritual practices
• The effects of music on memory and learning
• The development of rock and roll in America
• The intersection of music and politics in the 21st century
• The cultural significance of country music in the South
• The use of music in autism therapy
• The impact of social media on music promotion and marketing
• The influence of music on the LGBTQ+ community
• The effects of music on social behavior and interaction

Argumentative Essay Topics About Music

• Does music have a negative effect on behavior?
• Is streaming music harming the music industry?
• Can music censorship be justified in certain cases?
• Is cultural appropriation a problem in the music industry?
• Should musicians be held accountable for controversial lyrics?
• Is autotune a helpful tool or a crutch for musicians?
• Should music education be a required part of the curriculum?
• Is the use of explicit lyrics in music harmful?
• Should music festivals be required to have safety measures?
• Does the use of profanity in music undermine its artistic value?
• Can music be used to promote political messages effectively?
• Should musicians be allowed to profit from tragedies?

Current Music Topics To Write About In 2023

• The rise of TikTok and its impact on music promotion
• The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on UK music
• The use of virtual concerts and live streaming during COVID-19
• The influence of social media on music consumption and trends
• The emergence of new genres and sub-genres in popular music
• Talk about cancel culture in music
• The debate over the use of explicit lyrics in music
• The impact of climate change on music festivals and events
• The use of artificial intelligence in music production and composition
• The influence of music on political and social movements
• The rise of female and non-binary artists in the music industry
• The effects of globalization on the diversity of music around the world
• The role of nostalgia in the popularity of music from past decades

Musical Topics About Famous Musicians

• The life and legacy of Beethoven
• The impact of Elvis Presley on rock and roll
• The career and contributions of Bob Dylan
• The influence of Michael Jackson on pop music
• The musical evolution of Madonna over time
• The enduring appeal of the Rolling Stones
• The career of Prince and his impact on music
• The contributions of David Bowie to pop culture
• The iconic sound of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar
• The impact of Whitney Houston on the music industry
• The life and career of Freddie Mercury of Queen
• The artistry and impact of Joni Mitchell
• The groundbreaking work of Stevie Wonder in R&B
• The musical legacy of the Beatles and their influence on pop music

Music Research Paper Topics For College

• The cultural significance of the accordion in folk music
• The use of sampling in hip-hop and electronic music production
• The evolution of the drum kit in popular music
• The significance of Taylor Swift in contemporary country-pop music
• The effects of drug abuse in the music industry
• The role of music in shaping political movements and protests
• The impact of streaming services on the music industry and artists’ income
• The significance of the Burning Man festival in music and culture
• The emergence and growth of Afrobeat music globally
• The role of musical collaboration in the creation of new music genres
• The use of autotune and other vocal processing tools in pop music
• The effects of social and political issues on rap music lyrics
• The significance of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in pop culture
• The impact of music on emotional regulation and mental health

Our Controversial Music Topics

• The controversy of the “cancel culture” in US music
• The impact of music piracy on the industry and artists
• The ethical concerns of music sampling without permission
• The controversy surrounding lip-syncing during live performances
• The debate over the authenticity of auto-tune in music
• The controversy surrounding the use of profanity in music
• The debate over the cultural appropriation of music styles
• The controversy surrounding music festivals and their impact on local communities
• The debate over the role of music in promoting violence and aggression
• The controversy surrounding the ownership of an artist’s discography
• The ethical concerns of musicians profiting from songs about tragedies and disasters

Captivating Music Thesis Topics

• The role of music in promoting social justice
• The impact of music streaming on album sales
• The significance of lyrics in contemporary pop music
• The evolution of heavy metal music over time
• The influence of gospel music on rock and roll
• The effects of music education on cognitive development
• The cultural significance of hip-hop music in America
• The role of music in promoting environmental awareness and activism
• The impact of music festivals on local economies
• The evolution of country music and its impact on popular music
• The use of music in advertising and marketing strategies

Classical Music Topic Ideas

• The influence of Baroque music on classical music
• The history and evolution of the symphony orchestra
• The career and legacy of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• The significance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
• The evolution of opera as an art form
• The role of women composers in classical music history
• The impact of the Romantic era on classical music
• The use of program music to tell a story through music
• The significance of the concerto in classical music
• The influence of Johann Sebastian Bach on classical music
• The contributions of Antonio Vivaldi to the concerto form
• The use of counterpoint in classical music composition
• The role of chamber music in classical music history
• The significance of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah in classical music

Interesting Music Topics For High School

• The history and evolution of the piano as a musical instrument
• The significance of Beethoven in classical music
• The impact of Elvis Presley on US music
• The emergence and growth of the hip-hop music genre
• The role of music festivals in contemporary music culture
• The effects of technology on music production and performance
• The influence of social media on music promotion and distribution
• The effects of music on mental health and well-being
• The role of music in popular culture and media
• The impact of musical soundtracks on movies and TV shows
• The use of music therapy for individuals with autism spectrum disorder
• The significance of the Coachella Music Festival in modern music culture
• The cultural significance of the ukulele in Hawaiian culture

Awesome Music Research Questions For 2023

• Should musicians be required to use their platform to promote social justice causes?
• Is music piracy a victimless crime or does it harm the industry?
• Should music venues be required to provide safe spaces for concertgoers?
• Is the Grammy Awards selection process biased towards mainstream artists?
• Should music streaming services pay musicians higher royalties?
• Is it appropriate for music to be used in political campaign advertisements?
• Should music journalists be required to disclose their personal biases in reviews?
• Is it ethical for musicians to profit from songs about tragedies and disasters?
• Should music education be funded equally across all schools and districts?
• Is it fair for record labels to own the rights to an artist’s entire discography?
• Should music festivals have more diverse and inclusive lineups?
• Should musicians be allowed to use drugs and alcohol as part of their creative process?

Fantastic Music Topics For Research

• The evolution of the electric guitar in rock music
• The cultural significance of the sitar in Indian music
• The impact of synthesizers on contemporary music production
• The use of technology in the creation and performance of music
• The influence of Beyoncé on modern pop music
• The significance of Kendrick Lamar in contemporary rap music
• The effects of misogyny and sexism in the rap music industry
• The emergence and growth of K-pop music globally
• The significance of Coachella Music Festival in the music industry
• The history and evolution of the Woodstock Music Festival
• The impact of music festivals on tourism and local economies
• The role of music festivals in shaping music trends and culture
• The effects of music piracy on the music industry
• The impact of social media on the promotion and distribution of music
• The role of music in the Black Lives Matter movement

Catchy Music Related Research Topics

• Is hip-hop culture beneficial or harmful to society?
• Is it ethical to sample music without permission?
• Should music streaming services censor explicit content?
• Is auto-tune a valid musical technique or a crutch?
• Does the music industry unfairly exploit young artists?
• Should radio stations be required to play a certain percentage of local music?
• Is the practice of lip-syncing during live performances acceptable?
• Is music education undervalued and underfunded in schools?
• Does the use of profanity in music contribute to a decline in society?
• Should music venues be held accountable for the safety of concertgoers?

Informative Speech Topics About Music

• The history and evolution of jazz music
• The cultural significance of classical music in Europe
• The origins and development of blues music in America
• The influence of Latin American music on American popular music
• The impact of technology on music production and distribution
• The role of music in expressing emotions and feelings
• The effects of music therapy on mental health and wellbeing
• The cultural significance of traditional music in Africa
• The use of music in films and television to create mood and atmosphere
• The influence of the Beatles on popular music and culture
• The evolution of electronic dance music (EDM)
• The role of music in promoting cultural diversity and unity
• The impact of social media on the music industry and fan culture

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Digital Commons @ USF > College of The Arts > School of Music > Music Education > Theses and Dissertations

Music Education Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2015 2015.

Origins of Music Programs in Liberal Arts Institutions: The Story of Three Florida Catholic Universities , Cynthia S. Selph

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

A Philosophical Inquiry on the Valuation and Selection of Musical Materials for Culturally Diverse Learners in Global Environments , Jonathan Bassett

Upper Elementary Boys’ Participation During Group Singing Activities in Single-sex and Coeducational Classes , Zadda M. Bazzy

An Examination of the Influence of Band Director Teaching Style and Personality on Ratings at Concert and Marching Band Events , Timothy J. Groulx

Empowered for Practice: The Relationship Among Perceived Autonomy Support, Competence, and Task Persistence of Undergraduate Applied Music Students , Julie F. Troum

Theses/Dissertations from 2009 2009

An Exploratory Study of the Use of Imagery by Vocal Professionals: Applications of a Sport Psychology Framework , Patricia Louise Bowes

Theses/Dissertations from 2008 2008

Perceptions of Effective Teaching and Pre-Service Preparation for Urban Elementary General Music Classrooms: A Study of Teachers of Different Cultural Backgrounds in Various Cultural Settings , Lisa J. Lehmberg

Theses/Dissertations from 2006 2006

Teaching strategies of successful college trombone professors for undergradute students , Matthew T. Buckmaster

The influence of performance background on instrumentalists' ability to discriminate and label cornet and trumpet timbre , Gary Compton

Theses/Dissertations from 2005 2005

The Effect of Conducting Gesture on Expressive-Interpretive Performance of College Music Majors , Ronald Wayne Gallops

Effect of Age on 11- to 18-Year-Olds’ Discrimination of Nuances in Instrumental and Speech Phrase Interpretations , Andrew Sioberg

Theses/Dissertations from 2003 2003

Choral Music Education: A Survey of Research 1996-2002 , Amber Turcott

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