Dawn C. Rose

Parkinson's disease affects multiple aspects of movement, impacting significantly on everyday tasks. Music is used in interventions for people with Parkinson's, either to pace movements, or as an integral element of activities such as dance. This study explored self-reported vividness of two forms of imagery – motor imagery evoked by music and auditory (including musical) imagery – in people with Parkinson's, and whether and how they use these types of imagery in everyday life. Participants ( N = 199) completed: (i) vividness ratings of visual and kinesthetic music-evoked motor imagery, (ii) vividness ratings of auditory imagery, and (iii) ratings and open questions about their everyday use of these types of imagery. While most participants reported experiencing music-evoked motor imagery (with more vivid visual than kinesthetic motor imagery), <20% reported actively using music to support motor imagery in daily activities. In contrast, participants reported a broad range of contexts and uses for musical imagery (imagined music), from supporting movement (e.g., walking or exercise) to emotion regulation, and concentration. Correlational analyses associated vividness of music-evoked motor imagery with an urge to dance and musical training, while the use of musical imagery was associated with singing ability. A minority of participants reported not experiencing either motor or musical imagery, suggesting that interventions based on imagery may not be suitable for all. Nonetheless, even participants with more severe motor symptoms reported experiencing and using both types of imagery, indicating promise for their strategic use at different stages of Parkinson's. Therefore, musical and motor imagery have the potential to support rehabilitation strategies for Parkinson's, either separately or in combination.

This study presents an audio stimulus set of 40 drum patterns from Western popular music with empirical measurements of perceived complexity. The audio stimuli are meticulous reconstructions of drum patterns found in commercial recordings; they are based on careful transcriptions (carried out by professional musicians), drum stroke loudness information, and highly precise onset timing measurements. The 40 stimuli are a subset selected from a previously published larger corpus of reconstructed Western popular music drum patterns (Lucerne Groove Research Library). The patterns were selected according to two criteria: a) they only feature the bass drum, snare drum, and one or more cymbals, and b) they plausibly cover the complexity range of the corpus. Perceived stimulus complexity was measured in a listening experiment using a pairwise comparison design with 220 participants (4,400 trials). In each trial, participants were presented with two stimuli, and they stated which of the two sounded more complex to them. The comparison data then served to calculate complexity estimates using the Bradley–Terry probability model. The complexity estimates have an intuitive interpretation: they allow calculation of the probability that one pattern is considered more complex than another pattern in a pairwise comparison. To our knowledge, this is the first set of naturalistic music stimuli with meaningful perceived complexity estimates. The drum pattern stimuli and complexity measurements can be used for listening experiments in music psychology. The stimuli will further allow measures and models of drum pattern complexity to be assessed.