Summary. Quantification of time series that relate to physiological data is challenging for empirical music research. Up to now, most studies have focused on timedependent responses of individual subjects in controlled environments. However, little is known about time-dependent responses of between-subject interactions in an ecological context. This paper provides new findings on the statistical analysis of group synchronicity in response to musical stimuli. Different statistical techniques were applied to time-dependent data obtained from an experiment on embodied listening in individual and group settings. Analysis of inter group synchronicity are described. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Cross Correlation Function (CCF) were found to be valid methods to estimate group coherence of the resulting movements. It was found that synchronicity of movements between individuals (humanhuman interactions) increases significantly in the social context. Moreover, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) revealed that the type of music is the predominant factor in both the individual and the social context.

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Wepresentanempiricalandqualitativestudytestingmusicalempathicabilityinsubjectswith anautismspectrumdisorder(ASD).Fourexperimentsrequiringanincreasinglevelofempathy with music, from synchronization and attuning to emotional empathy, were carried out, using kinematicdevicesformeasuringembodiedlisteningresponsesandaverbalemotionattribution task. Results suggest that people with ASD have a corporeal understanding of the affective featuresofmusic,sincetheyareabletomirrorstructuralandevenaffectivefeaturesofthemusic into corporeal articulations. However, this corporeal understanding does not give them a straightforwardaccesstotheemotionalcontentofthemusic.ThesubjectswithASDseemedto relyondisembodiedcognitiveprocessestoattributeaffectstomusic. autism,music,musicalempathy,embodiment,affectattribution One of the main symptoms of autism spectrum disorders is a disturbance of social skills, more particularly a disturbance of the ability to share the feelings and emotions with other persons. KeywordsWhile this lack of empathy in autism subjects is evident in social contexts, it is less evident whetheritalsooccursinartisticcontexts.Thispaperaimsattestingtowhatextentsubjectswith autismcandevelopanempathicrelationshipwithmusicthroughlistening.Thefocusonmusicis of particular interest because music is known to be very rich in emotional content. Many (typically developing) people use music for consolation and they often engage in a kind of emotionalrelationshipwiththemusic (1,2,3) .Agoodexampleofthisengagementiswhenpeople listentosadmusic.Initspropercontext,listeningtosadmusicmayconsoleasubjectbecauseit allows the subject to find relief in the imitation of the musical emotion, as if the music is just another social agent with whom it is possible to share emotions (4) . The question is to what degreesubjectswithautismmayfindasimilarreliefinmusic,orinmoregeneralterms,towhat degreetheydifferinmusicalempathyfromacontrolgroupoftypicallydevelopingsubjects. AnumberofstudieshavebeenaddressingtheroleofmusicforpeoplewithASD,therebymainlyfocusing on the perception of musical structure. Several studies showed that ASD-subjects are superior to typically developing subjects when it comes to detailed processing of musical structures (5) . Research of Heaton et al. (6,7,8) , for example, showed that children with ASD outperform their matched controls on pitch discrimination, pitch categorization and pitch memory tasks. The results of Bonnel et al. (9) showed that subjects with ASD were superior to typicallydevelopingindividualsinthepitchdiscriminationandcategorizationtasks.Research on ASD and affect perception in music are much more rare. Musical affect has been addressedinastudybyHeatonetal. (10) .Inthisstudy,fourteenchildrenwithASDandAsperger syndrome were tested for their ability to identify the affective connotations of melodies in the major and minormusicalmode.They were required tomatch musical excerpts with schematic representations of happy and sad faces. The results showed that there were no differences betweentheclinicalgroup...

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