Music%20and%20Emotion

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Music and Emotion

• Sloboda, J.A., Juslin, P.N. (2001).
  Psychological Perspectives on Music and Emotion.
  In P.N. Juslin J.A. Sloboda (Eds)(2001). Music
  and Emotion, OUP, Chapter 4

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• Why does music induce emotions to listeners?
• Are the emotions we experience in relation to
  music different from the experience in everyday
  life?
• Why are different pieces of music associated with
  different emotions?
• Are performers able to communicate specific
  emotions to listeners?
• Do emotional responses to music vary as a
  function of the cultural context?
• How do emotional responses to music affect the
  brain and body of listeners?

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Psychological perspective

• A psychological approach to music and emotion
  seeks an explanation for how and why we
  experience emotional reactions to music, and how
  and why we experience music as expressive of
  emotion.

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What is an emotion?

• "everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked
  to give a definition" (Fehr Russell, 1984,
  p.464)
• Emotion in both an everyday concept and a
  scientific construct.
• Involves both an implicit and an explicit body of
  knowledge.

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Implicit knowledge

• embodied in so-called 'folk theories' of emotion
• powerful sources that affect our behavior and
  thoughts in powerful ways
• some emotions feel good, some bad
• some people are more 'emotional' than others

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Explicit knowledge

• development of emotions
• physiological changes associated with emotions
• judgment of emotions from facial or vocal
  expressions
• three kinds of evidence
• self-report
• expressive behavior
• physiological measurement

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Definition

• Emotion is a complex set of interactions among
  subjective and objective factors, mediated by
  neural/hormonal systems, which can
• give rise to affective experiences such as
  feelings of arousal, pleasure/displeasure
• generate cognitive processes such as perceptually
  relevant effects, appraisals, labeling processes
• activate widespread physiological adjustments to
  the arousing conditions
• lead to behavior that is often, but not always,
  expressive, goal-directed, and adative

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The study of emotion in relation to music

• Two kinds of musical emotions (not wholly
  independent of each other)
• aesthetical value of music
• emotions induced or expressed by music, more or
  less apart from the aesthetical value of the
  music

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Problems for studying emotions in relation to
music

1. Emotional reactions are commonly understood in
   terms of their adaptive functions related to
   biological survival.
2. There is great variability between individuals,
   and across time within individuals.
3. Experiments that attempts to measure listeners'
   affective responses to music may impact so much
   on the listening process that the tasks destroys
   the very thing it is supposed to measure (problem
   of reactivity).

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Typical characteristics of emotions

• Emotions are functional despite their apparent
  non-instrumentality.
• Emotions have behavioral, physiological, and
  experimental components.
• Emotions have proximal elicitors.
• Emotions are intrinsically social.
• Emotions invoke action tendencies.
• Emotions change during the course of human
  development.

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Emotions are functional despite their apparent
non-instrumentality

• What functionality do emotions have?
• Are they useful to us, and if so how?
• The primary function of emotions is to guide
  behavior emotions evolved because they enabled
  successful interaction with the environment.
• But how does the idea of functionality apply in
  the case of music?

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1. The functional architecture of emotions should
   constrain our responses to music (e.g., selective
   pressures favoring our ability to employ acoustic
   cues in our environment to make useful inferences
   about the probable behaviors of other
   individuals).
2. Might serve as mood-optimizing function in
   people's lives non-instrumentality of other
   emotions

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Emotions have behavioral, physiological, and
experimental components

• Self-report musically untrained participants
  listened to different pieces of music wrote down
  responses results (content analysis)
• feeling of pleasure (96)
• perception of stable mood (86)
• feeling of oneness with the music (83)
• perception of spontaneous and transient emotional
  states (72)
• feeling of movement (65)

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• Expressive behavior People do cry when
  listening to some music
• Facial electromyography (EMG) subliminal facial
  expressions to expressive music
• Behavioral measures decision time, distance
  approximation, writing speed
• Physiological reactions cardiorespiratory
  differences

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Emotions have proximal elicitors

• Emotions are elicited. The eliciting event
  appears to fulfill a specific role they are not
  just stimuli. They appear to act through their
  significance, they meaning, their reward or
  aversive nature (Frijda, 1986, p.4)
• Is it necessary that the person should be able to
  know, consciously, what meanings mediate the
  emotion?

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Emotions are intrinsically social.

• Emotions are 'contagious'.

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Emotions invoke action tendencies

• Emotions change the probabilities associated with
  subsequent behavior (e.g., fear).
• Emotions are biologically embedded mechanisms
  that ensure that our psychological energies are
  directed to the meeting of primary needs , both
  physical and psychological.
• Emotions by themselves do not guarantee effective
  solutions to life's challenges solutions are
  developed by learning.

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• Emotional intelligence understanding the link
  between one's emotion and effective behavior.
• Novels, plays, operas, and films can provide
  opportunities to feel emotions with and for the
  protagonists, and explore consequences of
  different ways of action on these same emotions.
• True even in Western art culture passive and
  immobile 'respectful silence' of the audience has
  such paradigmatic status.

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• Pop concerts context and stimulus for exuberant
  and joyful bodily and vocal expressions among
  audience members
• Soothing music

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Emotions change during the course of human
development

• maturational changes of the nervous system
• changes in the stimulus conditions eliciting
  emotions
• changes in regulation and coping skills
• changes in the relationship between cognition and
  emotion
• changes in expressive behavior as a consequence
  of mother's communication style
• changes associated with cultural influence,
  including language

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• Individual differences in emotional responses to
  music within age cohorts have by and large not
  been systematically examined.
• However, see developmental.ppt facial expression,
  4 emotions
• Preferences for music change over the life span
  could partly reflect the fact that certain types
  of music resonate better with certain phases of
  life in terms of associated emotions. E.g., rock
  music with its focus on sexuality, anger, and
  rebellion may have a special appeal to
  adolescents.

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Intrinsic and extrinsic emotions

• In music there may be a partial decoupling
  between the mechanisms that determine intensity
  of affect and those that determine emotional
  content, the former being predominately
  determined by structural characteristics of the
  music (intrinsic emotion), the latter being
  determined more strongly by contextual factors,
  including memories, associations, and priorities
  of the person hearing the music (extrinsic
  emotion).

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Intrinsic emotion

• Structural characteristics that are associated
  with the elicitation of bodily and behavioral
  manifestations of emotions such as weeping and
  'thrills' or 'shivers', e.g.
• syncopation
• enharmonic changes
• melodic appoggiaturas
• other music-theoretical constructs which have in
  common their intimate relationship to the
  creation, maintenance, confirmation, or
  disruption of musical expectations.

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Appoggiatura

• A note, not normally part of a chord, which
  displaces a normal note of a chord. The
  appoggiatura resolves onto the displaced note
  whilst the chord is still sounding. If the
  appoggiatura is prepared, by the same note being
  present in the previous chord, then the
  appoggiatura is normally referred to as a
  suspension. Conversely, an appoggiatura may be
  referred to as an unprepared suspension. The
  appoggiatura usually (but not always) creates a
  dissonance with the normal notes of the chord.
  More than one appoggiatura may be deployed
  concurrently.

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• If musical expectation is really the key to
  emotional intensity, how is it that we can feel
  emotions to music we are highly familiar with?

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• Many of the violations of expectations may occur
  on a subconscious level.
• Even when the musical 'narrative' is familiar to
  us, we may still be able to enjoy it. We can
  appreciate the twists and turns (like re-watching
  a great movie).
• Iconic and associative sources of emotion, such
  as emotional contagion and memories, may remain
  much the same throughout repeated listening to
  the same piece of music.
• Familiarity with an object itself might increase
  our liking of that object up to a certain point.
• It is possible that some effects of music
  processing is executed by a processor, whose
  responses are 'hard-wired' in regard to certain
  perceptual primitives.

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Musical expectation emotions as a function of
monitoring match and mismatch

• Most compositional systems (e.g., tonal systems)
  provide a set of dimensions that establish
  psychological distance from 'home' or 'stability
  point'.
• Proximity or approach to this resting point
  involves reduction of tension.
• Distance can be measured on a number of
  dimensions such as rhythm and meter (strong
  beats are stable, weak beats and syncopations are
  unstable) and tonality (the tonic is stable,
  non-diatonic notes are unstable).

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Extrinsic emotion

• Iconic sources of emotion Iconic relationships
  come about through some resemblance between a
  musical structure and some event or agent
  carrying emotional 'tone'. For instance, loud and
  fast music shares features with events of high
  energy and so suggests a high energy emotion such
  as excitement.
• Associative sources of emotion Associative
  sources of emotion are those that are premised on
  arbitrary and contingent relationships between
  the music being experienced and a range of
  non-musical factors which also carry emotional
  messages of their own.

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Iconic sources of emotion
Throughout history, there has been a number of
different views on what music is able to express

• things and event
• human character
• political and social conditions

• emotion
• motion
• beauty
• Christian faith
• tension and release

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Findings from studies of emotional expression in
music

1. Listeners seem to find it natural to attach
   emotion labels to pieces of music.
2. Listeners are often consistent in their judgments
   and agree about the emotional expression of the
   music.
3. The veridicality of the judgments is rarely
   studies due to a lack of sufficient criteria of
   composers' intentions.
4. Iconic representation of emotions in music seems
   to operate on a broad level of emotion
   categories.
5. Listeners' judgments of emotion are influenced by
   such parameters as tempo, dynamics, rhythm,
   timbre, articulation, pitch, mode, tone attacks,
   and harmony.

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Associative sources of emotion

• Certain types of stimuli (e.g., music, smells,
  and tastes) seem to become associated in human
  memory with particular contexts or events in
  earlier life, and provide a trigger to recall
  these events (in particular, when events were
  occasions of strong emotion).
• Even when music does not directly trigger past
  experiences, many of the emotional processes are
  self-referring in some way (e.g., 'I should have
  recognized that', or 'This is not my type of
  music').

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Interaction between different sources of emotion

• Intrinsic emotion is locally focused, and
  extrinsic emotion is more globally
  context-dependent.
• Different sources of emotion may interact.