Room 223
Guest Lecture: Manuel Englada Tort
Measuring responses to music: Methods, challenges, and alternative approaches
Audio Communication Group., Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
m.angladatort@campus.tu-berlin.de
In this talk, I present six studies that address different issues inherent in measuring responses to music. First, I introduce the concept of bounded rationality – i.e., the idea that as humans, we are limited by our mental capacity (e.g., cognitive biases, memory), knowledge, and the time available when making judgments and decisions -. Here, I present an experimental paradigm that may be useful to explore bounded rationality in music, namely, the repeated recording paradigm (Anglada-Tort & Müllensiefen, 2017). I then show the results of two experiments that suggest the existence of cognitive biases and heuristics in music listening situations (Anglada, Steffens, & Müllensiefen, 2018). Second, I discuss existing limitations in measurement techniques and methods in music research. As an example, I present the results of an ongoing study that measures response styles – i.e., participants’ tendency to respond to rating scales in certain ways regardless of the content of the item – in a large dataset comprising over 1 million music evaluations. Results indicate that response styles can bias data collected in listening tasks using rating scales. Third, I discuss alternative approaches to better study and measure responses to music. These include the use of best-worst scaling, implicit measurement techniques, field research, and naturalistic (and big) data. In this last section, I present two studies that measured responses to music using field research (Anglada-Tort, Thueringer, & Omigie, 2019) and naturalistic singles sales charts data (Anglada-Tort, Krause, & North, 2019).
References
Anglada-Tort, M., Krause, E. A., & North, A.C. (2019, accepted): “Popular music lyrics and musicians’ gender over time: A computational approach”, Psychology of Music, 29(1), 46-55. Manuscript accepted for publication.
Anglada-Tort, M., & Müllensiefen, D. (2017). The repeated recording illusion: The effects of extrinsic and individual difference factors on musical judgements. Music Perception, 35(1), 92-115. doi: 10.1525/mp.2017.35.1.94
Anglada-Tort, M., Steffens, J., & Müllensiefen, D. (2018). Names and titles matter: The impact of linguistic fluency and the affect heuristic on aesthetic and value judgements of music. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 13(3), 277-292. doi:10.1037/aca0000172
Anglada-Tort, M., Thueringer, H., & Omigie, D. (2019). The busking experiment: A field study measuring behavioural responses to street music performances. Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 29(1), 46-55. doi: 10.1037/pmu0000236