Want to test your musical memory?

Test your musical memory! A beta version of #TuneTwins is now online at https://tunetwins.app.

Note: Some things may still not work perfectly here and there. Please let us know via the feedback button – it helps us a lot!

Big thanks to Jiaxin, Noah, Bas, Ashley, Berit and the Music Cognition Group at large ! 

Feel like a musical memory challenge?

[Blog by Jiaxin Li on TeleTunes]

Think about your favorite TV show. Can you hear the theme music already starting to play in your mind? Maybe it’s the epic sounding strings from Game of Thrones or the punchy synthesizer from Seinfeld? You’ve probably heard the music from that show so many times it’s now encrypted in your memory. As music cognition researchers, we are eager to find out what makes some TV tunes more memorable than the others.

The TeleTunes game is designed for exactly this reason. It is a game that allows us to study the catchiness of TV themes. Unlike the Christmas or Eurovision versions of our Hooked-on Music game series, this game invites you to test your memory with clips from the most iconic TV themes, curated from IMDB’s 100 most watched shows and The Rolling Stone’s esteemed “Greatest” TV show lists spanning the past 40 years. Your challenge? If you recognise a tune, quickly click the button, sing along in your mind and judge whether after a few seconds it continues in the right spot.

Through engaging in this game, you are contributing to music science, enriching our understanding of musical memory. By investigating the familiarity of these TV tunes, we are building a corpus consisting of well-known music. In the near future, we will use the results for yet another game – TuneTwins – continuing our quest to investigate questions like “what makes music memorable” or even “how do we as human beings remember music”.

We hope you will enjoy this game. Each game takes only a few minutes, and you can play it as many times as you like. Listen carefully! The fewer mistake you make, the more points you’ll earn! Finally, feel free to share the link with your friends and family and see who can get the highest score. The more you play, the more you contribute to science! 

TeleTunes can be found at: https://app.amsterdammusiclab.nl/teletunes.

Hoe komt het dat een liedje in je hoofd blijft hangen? (4/5) [Dutch]

De hele dag dat ene hitje in je hoofd: een oorwurm! Muziekproducenten kunnen het zich niet beter wensen. Wat maakt dat liedje nou zo makkelijk te onthouden? En hoe kan het dat je dat ene nummer zo snel herkent? een ceollege over de ingrediënten voor het maken van een ware muziekhit en waardoor luisteraars zo ‘Hooked on Music’ zijn…

Voor de andere lezingen zie hier.

Bronnen:

01:30 Gjergdingen & Perrott (2008)
02:30 Margulis (2014)
04:00 Burgoyne, Balen, Bountouridis, & Honing (2013).
08:00 http://www.hookedonmusic.org.uk/ ; http://hooked.humanities.uva.nl/
09:00 Salimpoor & Zatorre (2013)

Gjerdingen, R., & Perrott, D. (2008). Scanning the Dial: The Rapid Recognition of Music Genres Journal of New Music Research, 37 (2), 93-100 DOI: 10.1080/09298210802479268

Dunsby, J. (2014). On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. By Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis Music and Letters, 95 (3), 497-499 DOI: 10.1093/ml/gcu055

J.A. Burgoyne, D. Bountouridis, J. van Balen, & H. Honing (2013). Hooked: A Game for Discovering What Makes Music Catchy. Proceedings of the 14th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, 245-250. Curitiba, Brazil.

Salimpoor, V., van den Bosch, I., Kovacevic, N., McIntosh, A., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. (2013). Interactions Between the Nucleus Accumbens and Auditory Cortices Predict Music Reward Value Science, 340 (6129), 216-219 DOI: 10.1126/science.1231059

Synesthesia as an alternative explanation of a chimps' exceptional memory?

Have a look at this video. (N.B. it is played back at normal speed)



After the numbers 1 through 9 make a split-second appearance on a computer screen, the chimp, Ayumu, gets to work. His index finger moves quickly across the screen, tapping white squares where the numbers had appeared, in order. Ayumu’s talent caused a quite a stir when researchers first reported it (Matsuzawa, 2009).

In an upcoming Trends in Cognitive Sciences essay, Nicholas Humphrey floats a different explanation for Ayumu’s superlative performance: Ayumu might have a curious brain condition that allows him to see numbers in colors. A simple experiment could reveal whether Ayumu is synesthetic: Changing the white square to colored squares would throw him off if he was relying on colors to order the numbers. According to ScienceNews Matsuzawa, who declined to comment directly on Humphrey’s theory, has no plans to test this.

Nicholas Humphrey (2012). ‘This chimp will kick your ass at memory games – but how the hell does he do it?’ Trends in Cognitive Science DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2012.05.002

Tetsuro Matsuzawa (2009). Symbolic representation of number in chimpanzees Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 19 (1), 92-98 DOI: 10.1016/j.conb.2009.04.007

Waarom kan muziek zulke sterke herinneringen oproepen? [Dutch]

'Muziek raakt onze allerdiepste emoties en blijkt een spoor te trekken in de hersenen. Muziek is ook een drager van herinneringen. Hoe werkt dat? En waarom houdt de één van Bach en de ander van The Beatles?'

De Ncrv-tv zendt vandaag een aflevering uit over muziek, emotie en herinneringen. Zie de trailer. Voor de volledige aflevering, zie uitzending gemist. Zie tevens gerelateerd artikel in de Volkskrant bijlage van 13.12.2008 (met levendige reacties).