Lecture 6 Psychological approaches to music and the emotions

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Lecture 6Psychological approaches to music and
the emotions

• MUSI 3911Music, Emotion and Meaning

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Overview

• Theoretical Concerns
• Performance
• Listening
• A return to theory
• Emotion and meaning or emotion as meaning
• Summary

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Theoretical Concerns

• Emotion and cognition
• Emotion and arousal
• Emotion and expression
• Emotion and communication
• Feeling (subjective), behaviour (response) and
  reaction (physiological change)
• Structure and emotion (Gabrielsson and Lindstrom,
  2001 Sloboda, 1991)

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Performance

• Expressive timing and communication
• Juslin, Gabrielsson and others
• Certain playing styles produce certain
  descriptions (or do they)
• Agreement amongst performers
• Fast tempo angry vs. slow tempo for tender
• Multidimensional (OHP)
• Intentionality and communication
• Might be trainable (Juslin and Laukka, 2000)
• Unintended interpretations
• Discrete or continuous paradigms...

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Listening

• Wedin (1972)
• Rating scales
• Choice of adjectives
• Some degree of agreement
• Energy vs. relaxation loud or staccato vs.
  quiet or legato
• Problems (not continuous)
• Sloboda (1991), Waterman (1996), Schubert (2001)
• Continuous ratings
• Moments associated with emotion match particular
  musical structures
• E.g. suspensions
• Problems (multidimensional)

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A return to theory

• Dowling and Harwood (1986)
• Gaver and Mandler (1987)
• Intrinsic
• Extrinsic
• Expectation
• Preference
• Arousal
• Cognition

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Emotion and meaning or emotion as meaning

• How are meaning and emotion related?
• Meaning leads to emotion
• Emotion leads to meaning
• Emotion is one kind of meaning

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Summary

• Now much empirical data
• However
• Tends to focus either on discontinuous or
  uni-dimensional paradigms
• Better paradigms needed...