Final Report Summary - PRE-MUS (Prosody experience enhancement with musical education)
The main objectives of PRE-MUS project were:
(1) to characterise perceptual prosodic abilities, performance on various levels of perceptual auditory linguistic and non-linguistic related tasks, and examine the associations between them;
(2) to characterise musical-education level and examine the interrelations between them and prosodic abilities;
(3) to develop pilot intervention training in musical education and auditory skills to enhance emotional prosody comprehension.
The project reached all its targets. We developed a battery of prosodic and auditory skills tests - vocal emotion recognition task (VERT) (objective 1). The musical education level was characterised by the advanced measures of music audiation (AMMA) (Gordon, 1989) as well as by a music emotion recognition task (MERT) which was created through a combination of two validated sets of music excerpts (objective 2). For the purpose of the third objective, pilot intervention training in musical education and auditory skills was developed to enhance emotional prosody comprehension. We tested the influence of short musical intervention compared to short visual art intervention on vocal emotion recognition. In a second experiment, we compared musicians, which had long-term music training, to non-musicians regarding their vocal emotion recognition.
The results from the pilot intervention revealed that short-term music intervention, focused on the ways music conveys emotions, improved significantly the vocal emotion recognition of the participants as opposed to the vocal emotion recognition of the art intervention group participants. In the second experiment, which examined the long-term music training effect, there were no significant differences between musicians and non-musicians in the vocal emotion recognition. Following the results of the PRE-MUS research we can suggest a model for short-term clinical intervention and a new rehabilitation therapy which can be employed in the case of the autistic spectrum disorder and schizophrenia patients as well as in the general population.
(1) to characterise perceptual prosodic abilities, performance on various levels of perceptual auditory linguistic and non-linguistic related tasks, and examine the associations between them;
(2) to characterise musical-education level and examine the interrelations between them and prosodic abilities;
(3) to develop pilot intervention training in musical education and auditory skills to enhance emotional prosody comprehension.
The project reached all its targets. We developed a battery of prosodic and auditory skills tests - vocal emotion recognition task (VERT) (objective 1). The musical education level was characterised by the advanced measures of music audiation (AMMA) (Gordon, 1989) as well as by a music emotion recognition task (MERT) which was created through a combination of two validated sets of music excerpts (objective 2). For the purpose of the third objective, pilot intervention training in musical education and auditory skills was developed to enhance emotional prosody comprehension. We tested the influence of short musical intervention compared to short visual art intervention on vocal emotion recognition. In a second experiment, we compared musicians, which had long-term music training, to non-musicians regarding their vocal emotion recognition.
The results from the pilot intervention revealed that short-term music intervention, focused on the ways music conveys emotions, improved significantly the vocal emotion recognition of the participants as opposed to the vocal emotion recognition of the art intervention group participants. In the second experiment, which examined the long-term music training effect, there were no significant differences between musicians and non-musicians in the vocal emotion recognition. Following the results of the PRE-MUS research we can suggest a model for short-term clinical intervention and a new rehabilitation therapy which can be employed in the case of the autistic spectrum disorder and schizophrenia patients as well as in the general population.