Wonderful to see our research being featured on the ABC's Weekend Breakfast. In a wonderful chat between @cerenayyildiz.bsky.social from the Sydney, Music, Mind, and Body Lab, and Fauziah Ibrahim & Tom Oriti from the ABC, they discussed how music can be good company. @sydney.edu.au

We then used Stable Diffusion to visualise the 4200 mental imagery reports we collected, and trained a topic model to generate normative representations of the imagined content. Even in these abstracted representation, the difference is quite noticeable:

The effect was quite strong, and was there regardless of whether listeners spoke the language of the lyrics, and it even showed when the music was purely instrumental.

We used Latent Dirichlet Allocation to investigate the themes imagined. We observed much increased loads of social and adventure themes during music listening. Whereas participants during the silence condition stuck much closer to the task instructions and other contextual introductions.

We asked 600 participants to listen to music and imagine journeys towards landmarks. Music compared to silence increases imagined vividness, emotional sentiment, as well as imagined distance and time travelled.

We had a great time in São Paulo! A massive thanks to all attendees, both in person and online, as well as the organisers of the #icmpc18 who made this such a rich experience. #musicscience

Fernando Castellar from the SMMBL shows how the use of music and mental imagery differs between athletes and coaches and as a function of competitive level. #icmpc18 #musicscience

In addition to her talk on the effect of rhythmic layering on mental imagery, @cerenayyildiz.bsky.social from the SMMBL also contributed a poster showing compelling interactions between musical micro variations and individual absorption tendencies on mental imagery #icmpc18 #musicscience

Fernando Castellar from the SMMBL presents new data on how music & mental imagery affect performance in a sporting task. He shows that even after a single, short mental imagery session, skill acquisition is already dramatically increased! #icmpc18 #musicscience

At #icmpc18 @adefathiawati.bsky.social from the SMMBL shares new data about the prevalence of Music Performance Anxiety, as well as deployed mitigation strategies amongst tertiary music student in Australia.

@ugurmkaya.bsky.social from the SMMBL shares at the #icmpc18 how expert vocalists can intentionally shape the mental imagery of listeners. In a mixed method design he collected 6 hours(!) of singing and interview recordings for each participating vocalists. #musicscience

At #ICMPC18, Gerard Breaden Madden shares some pretty convincing evidence why it is important to regularly clean your musical instruments...I'm probably going to have nightmares about the slide showing bacteria colonies grown from woodwind reeds... #musicscience

@miriamolsen.bsky.social of the SMMBL critically evaluates the efficacy of Biofeedback systems to support musicians' health: They are pretty effective!! #icmpc18 #musicscience

@cerenayyildiz.bsky.social from the SMMBL shares at #ICMPC18 the results of her latest study, showing how layering rhythms and instruments affects imagination! #MusicScience #MentalImagery

We are very much looking forward to the #ICMPC18. The program looks excellent.
Members of the SMMBL are also involved in 9 contributions this year, if any pique your interest, drop by! #MusicScience