The famous melodies stimulus set

Abstract

Famous musical melodies, such as "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and "Hot Cross Buns," are frequently used in psychological research. Such melodies have been used to assess the degree of cognitive impairments in various neurological disorders, and to investigate differences between "naming" vs. "knowing." Despite their utility as an experimental stimulus, there is currently no standardized, openly available set of famous musical melodies based on a United States population, as prior work on the topic has primarily relied on creating stimuli in an ad hoc manner. Therefore, the goal of the present work was to create a set of famous musical melodies. Here, we describe the development of the Famous Melodies Stimulus Set, a set of 107 melodies. We provide normative data for the melodies on five dimensions: familiarity, age of acquisition, emotional valence, emotional arousal, and naming ability. Participants (N = 397) rated the melodies on these five variables, validating that most melodies were highly familiar and reliably named. While familiarity ratings were skewed, all other rating scales covered a relatively broad range, allowing for researchers to select melodies for future work based on particular attributes.

The taste & affect music database: Subjective rating norms for a new set of musical stimuli

“…A sample of 329 respondents (83.3% women; Mage = 28.12, SD = 12. Based on previous norming studies with auditory stimuli, a minimum of 50 evaluations per stimulus was considered adequate (Belfi & Kacirek, 2021;Imbir & Golab, 2017;Souza et al, 2020). The number of ratings per stimulus ranged from 68 to 97 (Mdn = 83) when considering the entire sample (55 to 69 for the online sample alone).…”

“…Examples include Belfi and Kacirek's (2021) Famous Melodies Stimulus Set (of highly popular, familiar, western songs, such as the "Star Wars theme", "Jingle Bells", or the "Happy birthday" tune), or Song et al's (2016) and Imbir and Golab's (2017) datasets, primarily composed of chart-topping western hits (e.g., "November Rain" by Guns N' Roses, "Ultraviolence" by Lana del Rey). The latter dataset also includes jazz and classical music.…”

“…The core affect is characterized as the fluctuations in organisms' neurophysiological and somatovisceral states in response to current events, varying in valence and arousal (Barrett, 2009(Barrett, , 2011. These two axes have been documented as essential across different dimensional models of affect (see Yik et al, 1999) and are relevant subjective descriptors in several databases of auditory stimuli, including natural and environmental sounds (Bradley & Lang, 2007;Fan et al, 2018;Hocking et al, 2013;Yang et al, 2018), vocalizations (Belin et al, 2008;Lassalle et al, 2019;Parsons et al, 2014), audio stories (Bertels et al, 2014), and music (Belfi & Kacirek, 2021;Imbir & Golab, 2017;Lepping et al, 2016;Song et al, 2016;Vieillard et al, 2008). In line with previous research (Ali & Peynircioǧǧlu, 2010;Schubert, 2007;Zentner et al, 2008), we differentiated perceived (P) and felt (F) affective dimensions such that participants were asked to rate valence and arousal dimensions in two ways.…”

Rating norms should be calculated from cumulative link mixed effects models

“…For the latter two purposes, the estimates are often made public for use by other researchers alongside dedicated publications. Examples include but are not limited to ratings on various dimensions, for stimuli as diverse as words (Brysbaert et al, 2014;Scott et al, 2019;Warriner et al, 2013), orthographic characters (Simpson et al, 2013), photographs of objects (Brodeur et al, 2014) or faces (Ma et al, 2015), and melodies (Belfi & Kacirek, 2021). Such norming studies are typically summarised via per-item statistics of means and standard deviations (SDs) of the ratings for each item.…”

Rating Norms Should be Calculated from Cumulative Link Mixed Effects Models

“…For the latter two purposes, the estimates are often made public for use by other researchers alongside dedicated publications. Examples include but are not limited to ratings on various dimensions, for stimuli as diverse as words (Brysbaert et al, 2014;Scott et al, 2019;Warriner et al, 2013), orthographic characters (Simpson et al, 2013), photographs of objects (Brodeur et al, 2014) or faces (Ma et al, 2015), and melodies (Belfi & Kacirek, 2020).…”