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Motion aftereffects (MAEs) are thought to result from the adaptation of both subcortical and cortical systems involved in the processing of visual motion. Recently, it has been reported that the implied motion of static images in combination with linguistic descriptions of motion is sufficient to elicit an MAE, although neither factor alone is thought to directly activate visual motion areas in the brain. Given that the monotonic change of musical pitch is widely recognized in music as a metaphor for vertical motion, we investigated whether prolonged exposure to ascending or descending musical scales can also produce a visual motion aftereffect. After listening to ascending or descending musical scales, participants made decisions about the direction of visual motion in random-dot kinematogram stimuli. Metaphoric motion in the musical stimuli did affect the visual direction judgments, in that repeated exposure to rising or falling musical scales shifted participants' sensitivity to visual motion in the opposite direction. The finding that music can induce an MAE suggests that the subjective interpretation of monotonic pitch change as motion may have a perceptual foundation.

In this study we sought to explore how experience with specific mental and somatic practices is associated with wisdom, using self-report measures of experience and wisdom. We administered standard surveys to measure wisdom and experience among four groups of practitioners of mental and somatic practices, namely, meditators, practitioners of the Alexander Technique, practitioners of the Feldenkrais Method, and classical ballet dancers. We additionally administered surveys of trait anxiety and empathy to all participants to explore possible mediating relationships of experience and wisdom by characteristics thought to be components of wisdom. Wisdom was higher on average among meditation practitioners, and lowest among ballet dancers, and this difference held when controlling for differences in age between practices, supporting the view that meditation is linked to wisdom and that ballet is not. However, we found that increased experience with meditation and ballet were both positively associated with wisdom, and that lowered trait anxiety mediated this positive association among meditation practitioners, and, non-significantly, among ballet dancers. These results suggest that not all practices that are purported to affect mental processing are related to wisdom to the same degree and different kinds of experience appear to relate to wisdom in different ways, suggesting different mechanisms that might underlie the development of wisdom with experience.

Film music has powerful aesthetic effects on the perception and understanding of screen content, but does it also influence viewers’ sense of connection with movie characters thereby creating antecedents for an experience of empathy? Participants viewed clips showing characters’ neutral or ambiguous reaction to an event, person, or object. Viewers rated character likability and their certainty about characters’ thoughts in three conditions: thriller music, melodrama music, and no music. The effect of music conditions differed significantly from the no music condition. Compared to melodramatic music, thriller music significantly lowered likability and certainty about characters’ thoughts. During subsequent cued recall of screen content, thriller music increased anger attributions and lowered sadness attributions, while melodramatic music increased love attributions and lowered fear attributions. The study provides evidence that film music can influence character likability and the certainty of knowing the character’s thoughts, which are antecedents of empathetic concern and emphatic accuracy. Thus film music may be regarded as modulating antecedents of empathic concern and empathic accuracy.

In a famous essay on Tolstoy’s view of history, entitled “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin began with a fragment of Greek poetry: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin rang a note of caution that the words of this fragment “may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense,” but he went on to suggest that they also may “yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general.” Berlin fleshed out this difference by proposing that the hedgehogs “relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.” The foxes, by contrast

Amid the high-stilted gentlemen and tragic ladies she succeeds only in being an episodic figure. Indeed, an irresistible glance has been cast toward her-over the abyss of the classes the dissolute grandee offers his hand to her, and she is perhaps too shy not to come with him at once to his castle. It is not far from here. But because the opera buffa does not allow the seduction of the innocent, who Masetto surely could not revenge as elegantly as the correct Ottavio his Donna Anna, Da Ponte thwarts the planned promiscuity where there is no exchange of equal parts. He restores the moral and social hierarchies and through the Stygian night he shines the lantern light of blissful nearness on her reconciliation with the one who lends his name to the blundering and the clumsy. In Mozart's orchestral postlude divided mankind seems to be reconciled. Such reconciliation takes place in the name of freedom. Zerlina's music sounds as if it would enter into the white and golden hall of the eighteenth century through the open casement window. She still sings arias, but their melodies are already songs: nature, her breeze breaking the spell of the ceremonial manner, remains surrounded by form, sheltered by a fading style. In Zerlina's image, the rhythm of rococo and revolution halts. She is no longer a shepherdess, but not yet a citoyenne. She belongs to the historical moment in between, and, in passing, she reflects a humanity, which would not be mutilated by feudal force but protected from bourgeois barbarity. Some poems of the young Goethe are of this kind. "And thus she steps before the mirror in all her cheerfulness"2 is a miniature portrait of Zerlina, and like Friederike she stands "on the boundary between country and city woman. Slender and light, she tripped along as she had nothing to carry and her neck seemed almost too delicate for the large fair braids on her dainty little head. Through cheerful blue eyes she looked very plainly around and her turned-up nose peered as freely into the air as if there could be no harm in the world; her straw hat hung on her arm and thus at the first glance, I had the delight of seeing

This essay examines the story of two stories, both by Richard Wagner: a story of Lohengrin, knight of the Holy Grail, and ofLohengrin, the opera. Lohengrin's story is well known: Elsa of Brabant, accused by her former suitor Friedrich of Telramund of having killed her brother and heir to the throne, prays for help from the unknown knight in her dreams, promising herself as wife in exchange for his assistance. Miraculously, the knight appears in a boat pulled by a swan and accepts her offer on condition that she never ask about his origin, name or nature. But political and personal intrigue spun by Friedrich and the gypsy woman Ortrud nourish doubts about the knight's magical existence, doubts that ultimately drive Elsa to ask the forbidden question during her wedding night. Lohengrin publicly discloses his identity and leaves Elsa, though not without returning her brother (whom Ortrud had transformed into the swan) to power.

The poetic trope and aesthetic category of "distance" is central to Novalis's and Jean Paul Richter's definition of the Romantic, as embodied in dying sound and distant music. In the "young poetic future" proposed by the composer and critic Robert Schumann in the 1830s, romantic distance figures prominently, exemplified by the relationship between the endings of Jean Paul's Flegeljahre and Schumann's Papillons, Op. 2. Distance also provides the key for a new understanding of the relationship between analysis and poetic criticism in Schumann's review of Schubert's Great C-Major Symphony; between texted and untexted music in his Piano Sonata, Op. 11; between music and landscape in Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6; and between the composer and his distant beloved in the Fantasie, Op. 17 and the Novelletten, Op. 21. The article presents new evidence of Schumann's reference to Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte and Clara Wieck's Romance variée, Op. 3 in the Fantasie, and to Clara's Valses romantiques, Op. 4 in Davidsbündlertänze.

This chapter explores the artistic representation and empirical study of audiovisual memory in cinema, with a specific focus on memory induced by music. The first section reviews how flashbacks have been used by directors to structure filmic narration and to visualize the recollection of characters. The second section examines how different types of visual memory are cued by music in movies. In cinematic representations of episodic memory, for example, characters may associate music with past events (as in the film Casablanca). Based on musical schemas formed by cultural conventions, musical underscoring relies on semantic and implicit memory to help audiences in the perception and understanding of screen content. The third section surveys empirical studies of musical memory effects in film and multimedia, showing how affective priming through musical underscoring affects the remembrance of film events, product recall in advertisement, the comprehension of the narrative, or character perception.