Creativity can be considered one of the key competencies for the twenty-first century. It provides us with the capacity to deal with the opportunities and challenges that are part of our complex and fast-changing world. The question as to what facilitates creative cognition—the ability to come up with creative ideas, problem solutions and products—is as old as the human sciences, and various means to enhance creative cognition have been studied. Despite earlier scientific studies demonstrating a beneficial effect of music on cognition, the effect of music listening on creative cognition has remained largely unexplored. The current study experimentally tests whether listening to specific types of music (four classical music excerpts systematically varying on valance and arousal), as compared to a silence control condition, facilitates divergent and convergent creativity. Creativity was higher for participants who listened to ‘happy music’ (i.e., classical music high on arousal and positive mood) while performing the divergent creativity task, than for participants who performed the task in silence. No effect of music was found for convergent creativity. In addition to the scientific contribution, the current findings may have important practical implications. Music listening can be easily integrated into daily life and may provide an innovative means to facilitate creative cognition in an efficient way in various scientific, educational and organizational settings when creative thinking is needed.

We consider nonlinear, uniformly elliptic equations with random, highly oscillating coefficients satisfying a finite range of dependence. We prove that homogenization and linearization commute in the sense that the linearized equation (linearized around an arbitrary solution) homogenizes to the linearization of the homogenized equation (linearized around the corresponding solution of the homogenized equation). We also obtain a quantitative estimate on the rate of this homogenization. These results lead to a better understanding of differences of solutions to the nonlinear equation. As a consequence, we obtain a large-scale C 0,1 -type estimate for differences of solutions and improve the regularity of the homogenized Lagrangian by showing that it has the same regularity as the original heterogeneous Lagrangian, up to C 2,1 .

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This paper describes the sound analysis software PsySound3, which was written by the authors. The software currently includes a range of general sound analysis techniques (e.g., spectrum, cepstrum, autocorrelation, Hilbert transform, sound level meter emulator), as well as implementations of psychoacoustical algorithms often associated with sound quality (e.g., loudness, sharpness, loudness fluctuation, roughness, pitch, binaural attributes). In some cases, PsySound3 makes available multiple models of the one auditory attribute-for example it implements dynamic and static loudness models using Erb-and Bark-based auditory filters. The program is extensible, and so has the potential to allow researchers to share their analysis models using a common interface. PsySound3 is written in Matlab, and will also be available as a stand-alone program. The software is freely available via www.psysound.org.