Psychology
Psychology
Psychology
Psychology
How Emotions are Perceived from Music
How Emotions are Perceived from Music
How Emotions are Perceived from Music
How Emotions are Perceived from Music
Introduction
Humans have listened to music since the Paleolithic period, some 300,000 to 12,000 years ago (the exact timing is uncertain). Later in antiquity, music diversified, and people started creating complex compositions. From the gagaku music of imperial Japan to the Gregorian chants of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, music has continued to evolve to suit cultural needs. By the Renaissance, great patrons of music commissioned works from composers and singers. Beethoven, Mozart, and other classic greats created instrumental masterpieces. And in the 20th century, music experimentation was at an all-time high, as amplification and electronic synthesizers revolutionized music. Through this brief history of music, it’s clear how music evolved in step with human culture. What are the roots of our love for music? Is this because music makes us feel emotions? Or do we just perceive how music expresses feelings? And what parts of a musical composition evoke different emotional responses? Emotions research is ongoing as academics try to understand important topics like the nature of human emotions, emotion differentiation, and emotion genesis. Music researchers and philosophers are trying to answer similar questions through a musical lens. Absolute music may not bring about emotions, but lyrical music seems to either elicit feelings or the perception of feelings.
Can Music Evoke Emotions?
Most people will answer with a resounding yes when asked if music can evoke emotions. Everyone’s experienced listening to a song that has made them happy or sad. This seems like such a universal experience among humans. But music researchers and psychologists are still discussing whether music is perceived to express emotion or if the music actually conveys emotion itself. Philosophers are broken into two clear camps on this subject, emotivists, and cognitivists. Emotivists believe that music generates real emotional responses, while cognitivists believe music expresses emotions but does not generate emotions.
Philosopher of music Peter Kivy argues that absolute music does not cause emotions. The music itself is expressive but cannot arouse emotions within us because it lacks representational content. Absolute music is music without lyrics or storytelling. According to Kivy, emotion is ‘in the music, not the man.’
While Kivy’s contemporary Noel Carroll believes that the feeling of movement within music changes our moods but does not evoke emotions. He argues that moods are a better explanatory framework than emotions when discussing music. Traditional emotion theories maintain that emotions have to be directed towards a particular person, thing, or event. They are responses to stimuli by an emotion object. But music doesn’t fit into this theory because music is not an emotion object. How can humans feel emotions when listening to music, without an emotion object? Carroll says that’s where moods can work to better explain human reaction’s to music.
Following Carroll’s 2003 article Art and Mood: Preliminary Notes and Conjectures, Kivy responded to clarify that instrumental music, while arousing and moving, lacks the components to change affect. Remember affect is a person's basic sense of feeling, falling along two continuums, valence (unpleasant to pleasant) and arousal (low arousal to high arousal).
Emotions Felt or Perceived?
The theories of Kivy and Carroll may apply to absolute music, but when lyrics and narratives are added to musical composition, there’s a clear emotion-driven response indicated by research. Berkeley researchers mapped emotions evoked by music and found 13 primary emotions. The emotions are Amusement, joy, eroticism, beauty, relaxation, sadness, dreaminess, triumph, anxiety, scariness, annoyance, defiance, and feeling pumped up. Participants largely agreed on the general emotional characteristics of musical compositions, but there was a wide variance in the degree of arousal reported for the same musical piece. But what is the nature of this response? Do you actually feel emotions from music, or are you just perceiving what emotions the music is trying to convey?
Psychologist Alf Gabrielsson takes on the question of perceived and felt when listening to music. He recognizes that music elicits both feelings and perceived emotions. The distinction between why one person might feel an emotion listening to a specific song while another person will perceive the emotional expression is more nebulous. Research shows a wide variety and no universals across cultures in which emotions are felt when listening to the same music compositions. This is an area where more research is needed.
Gabrielsson attempts to classify which musical factors affect which emotional expression is perceived. Musical structure is an encompassing term that includes musical components like tempo, rhythm, harmony, pitch, volume, mode, repetition, and transposition. Here are a few examples of how different musical components affect the emotional expressions that are perceived.
Tempo
Gabrielsson found that tempo is the most decisive musical structure element for determining perceived emotional expression. Slower tempos are associated with peace, sadness, longing, tenderness, and even disgust. While faster tempos are associated with excitement, happiness, surprise, whimsicality, anger, and fear.
Mode (also known as key)
Major keys are linked to happiness and minor keys are linked to sadness. This musical component is not as absolute, so compositions in a minor key with an upbeat tempo can still be perceived as happy.
Timbre
Tones with lower harmonics are commonly associated with calm, pleasantness, happiness, and even sadness. But tones with higher harmonics are perceived as expressing anger, fear, or surprise.
Genesis of Emotions Through Music
Researchers Juslin and Västfjäll hold the emotivist opinion, believing that music does generate emotions. They recognized the lack of research target at learning how music actually induces emotions. They present six psychological mechanisms through which music can cause emotions in humans:
Brain Stem Reflexes – are automatic responses to music properties. For example: volume, tempo, dissonance
Evaluative Conditioning – mental associations of songs with experiences induce the same feelings those experiences originally brought out. For example, if your family makes you happy and you listen to a song when with them, this song can make you happy later when they’re not around, because of the association.
Emotional Contagion – the emotional expression of music that you can feel. For example, A deep timbre (tone color) might elicit feelings of sadness, while upbeat music with a bright tone might make you happy.
Visual Imagery – when music reminds you of a specific place causing you to visualize that place in your mind. For example, when you imagine a beautiful landscape because of a beautiful song.
Episodic Memory – when songs elicit a strong visceral memory. For example, a romantic song might remind you of a special date, while sad songs remind you of when a relationship ended
Musical Expectancy – when you recognize a common music structure and how interrupting that structure changes your feelings
Juslin and Vastfjall also explain that each of these mechanisms is associated with a survival brain function, specific brain regions, and different relative inductions speeds and degrees of volitional influence. Let’s look at episodic memory for example:
The brain function value of episodic memory is related to recollections of events and binding oneself to reality
Induces all possible emotions but nostalgia is the most common
The induction speed is low
Volitional influence is moderate
How Media & Communication Affect Emotion Perception
Communication and media studies have focused on how emotions are affected by media narratives and image-sound relationships. A new research approach aims to study how virtuality and presence in music predict and even enhance emotional media experiences. Virtual reality experiences increase the pleasantness and engagement of media experiences.
Before the 1900s, all musical experiences occurred in person, played by trained musicians in social events. Music production technology starting with the phonograph and radio and culminating in modern digital music, alters the musical experience. Researchers like Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin are interested in learning how remediation and new media modulate emotional responses to music.
Remediation is used to describe the process of changing a medium to be represented in another form. Musical objects are reshaped and gain new properties when making music using a new medium. Factors like the playback equipment's technical properties and the recording environment's acoustic properties affect musical qualities. These new musical qualities can change the perceived emotion by changing musical components like timbre and pitch.
The Entanglement of Emotions and Music
Music is entwined with emotional expression. Absolute music doesn’t offer any representational content to trigger a true emotional response, although it causes arousal. Lyrical music contains context that can translate to numerous emotional experiences. More research is needed to understand what factors affect whether the emotional expression is perceived or felt. Although tempo, volume, timbre, and other musical components are clearly part of the equation.
The genesis of emotions can be attributed to one of six psychological mechanisms, ranging from our natural brainstem reflexes to our memory and learned musical expectations. Each mechanism evokes emotion at different speeds and with varying levels of influence. Within the context of remediation, it’s interesting how new media forms affect how music is perceived on an emotional level. Teasing out the relation between different musical components and musical narratives and our responses is challenging, but humans will continue to endeavor to understand why emotions make us feel.
Introduction
Humans have listened to music since the Paleolithic period, some 300,000 to 12,000 years ago (the exact timing is uncertain). Later in antiquity, music diversified, and people started creating complex compositions. From the gagaku music of imperial Japan to the Gregorian chants of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, music has continued to evolve to suit cultural needs. By the Renaissance, great patrons of music commissioned works from composers and singers. Beethoven, Mozart, and other classic greats created instrumental masterpieces. And in the 20th century, music experimentation was at an all-time high, as amplification and electronic synthesizers revolutionized music. Through this brief history of music, it’s clear how music evolved in step with human culture. What are the roots of our love for music? Is this because music makes us feel emotions? Or do we just perceive how music expresses feelings? And what parts of a musical composition evoke different emotional responses? Emotions research is ongoing as academics try to understand important topics like the nature of human emotions, emotion differentiation, and emotion genesis. Music researchers and philosophers are trying to answer similar questions through a musical lens. Absolute music may not bring about emotions, but lyrical music seems to either elicit feelings or the perception of feelings.
Can Music Evoke Emotions?
Most people will answer with a resounding yes when asked if music can evoke emotions. Everyone’s experienced listening to a song that has made them happy or sad. This seems like such a universal experience among humans. But music researchers and psychologists are still discussing whether music is perceived to express emotion or if the music actually conveys emotion itself. Philosophers are broken into two clear camps on this subject, emotivists, and cognitivists. Emotivists believe that music generates real emotional responses, while cognitivists believe music expresses emotions but does not generate emotions.
Philosopher of music Peter Kivy argues that absolute music does not cause emotions. The music itself is expressive but cannot arouse emotions within us because it lacks representational content. Absolute music is music without lyrics or storytelling. According to Kivy, emotion is ‘in the music, not the man.’
While Kivy’s contemporary Noel Carroll believes that the feeling of movement within music changes our moods but does not evoke emotions. He argues that moods are a better explanatory framework than emotions when discussing music. Traditional emotion theories maintain that emotions have to be directed towards a particular person, thing, or event. They are responses to stimuli by an emotion object. But music doesn’t fit into this theory because music is not an emotion object. How can humans feel emotions when listening to music, without an emotion object? Carroll says that’s where moods can work to better explain human reaction’s to music.
Following Carroll’s 2003 article Art and Mood: Preliminary Notes and Conjectures, Kivy responded to clarify that instrumental music, while arousing and moving, lacks the components to change affect. Remember affect is a person's basic sense of feeling, falling along two continuums, valence (unpleasant to pleasant) and arousal (low arousal to high arousal).
Emotions Felt or Perceived?
The theories of Kivy and Carroll may apply to absolute music, but when lyrics and narratives are added to musical composition, there’s a clear emotion-driven response indicated by research. Berkeley researchers mapped emotions evoked by music and found 13 primary emotions. The emotions are Amusement, joy, eroticism, beauty, relaxation, sadness, dreaminess, triumph, anxiety, scariness, annoyance, defiance, and feeling pumped up. Participants largely agreed on the general emotional characteristics of musical compositions, but there was a wide variance in the degree of arousal reported for the same musical piece. But what is the nature of this response? Do you actually feel emotions from music, or are you just perceiving what emotions the music is trying to convey?
Psychologist Alf Gabrielsson takes on the question of perceived and felt when listening to music. He recognizes that music elicits both feelings and perceived emotions. The distinction between why one person might feel an emotion listening to a specific song while another person will perceive the emotional expression is more nebulous. Research shows a wide variety and no universals across cultures in which emotions are felt when listening to the same music compositions. This is an area where more research is needed.
Gabrielsson attempts to classify which musical factors affect which emotional expression is perceived. Musical structure is an encompassing term that includes musical components like tempo, rhythm, harmony, pitch, volume, mode, repetition, and transposition. Here are a few examples of how different musical components affect the emotional expressions that are perceived.
Tempo
Gabrielsson found that tempo is the most decisive musical structure element for determining perceived emotional expression. Slower tempos are associated with peace, sadness, longing, tenderness, and even disgust. While faster tempos are associated with excitement, happiness, surprise, whimsicality, anger, and fear.
Mode (also known as key)
Major keys are linked to happiness and minor keys are linked to sadness. This musical component is not as absolute, so compositions in a minor key with an upbeat tempo can still be perceived as happy.
Timbre
Tones with lower harmonics are commonly associated with calm, pleasantness, happiness, and even sadness. But tones with higher harmonics are perceived as expressing anger, fear, or surprise.
Genesis of Emotions Through Music
Researchers Juslin and Västfjäll hold the emotivist opinion, believing that music does generate emotions. They recognized the lack of research target at learning how music actually induces emotions. They present six psychological mechanisms through which music can cause emotions in humans:
Brain Stem Reflexes – are automatic responses to music properties. For example: volume, tempo, dissonance
Evaluative Conditioning – mental associations of songs with experiences induce the same feelings those experiences originally brought out. For example, if your family makes you happy and you listen to a song when with them, this song can make you happy later when they’re not around, because of the association.
Emotional Contagion – the emotional expression of music that you can feel. For example, A deep timbre (tone color) might elicit feelings of sadness, while upbeat music with a bright tone might make you happy.
Visual Imagery – when music reminds you of a specific place causing you to visualize that place in your mind. For example, when you imagine a beautiful landscape because of a beautiful song.
Episodic Memory – when songs elicit a strong visceral memory. For example, a romantic song might remind you of a special date, while sad songs remind you of when a relationship ended
Musical Expectancy – when you recognize a common music structure and how interrupting that structure changes your feelings
Juslin and Vastfjall also explain that each of these mechanisms is associated with a survival brain function, specific brain regions, and different relative inductions speeds and degrees of volitional influence. Let’s look at episodic memory for example:
The brain function value of episodic memory is related to recollections of events and binding oneself to reality
Induces all possible emotions but nostalgia is the most common
The induction speed is low
Volitional influence is moderate
How Media & Communication Affect Emotion Perception
Communication and media studies have focused on how emotions are affected by media narratives and image-sound relationships. A new research approach aims to study how virtuality and presence in music predict and even enhance emotional media experiences. Virtual reality experiences increase the pleasantness and engagement of media experiences.
Before the 1900s, all musical experiences occurred in person, played by trained musicians in social events. Music production technology starting with the phonograph and radio and culminating in modern digital music, alters the musical experience. Researchers like Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin are interested in learning how remediation and new media modulate emotional responses to music.
Remediation is used to describe the process of changing a medium to be represented in another form. Musical objects are reshaped and gain new properties when making music using a new medium. Factors like the playback equipment's technical properties and the recording environment's acoustic properties affect musical qualities. These new musical qualities can change the perceived emotion by changing musical components like timbre and pitch.
The Entanglement of Emotions and Music
Music is entwined with emotional expression. Absolute music doesn’t offer any representational content to trigger a true emotional response, although it causes arousal. Lyrical music contains context that can translate to numerous emotional experiences. More research is needed to understand what factors affect whether the emotional expression is perceived or felt. Although tempo, volume, timbre, and other musical components are clearly part of the equation.
The genesis of emotions can be attributed to one of six psychological mechanisms, ranging from our natural brainstem reflexes to our memory and learned musical expectations. Each mechanism evokes emotion at different speeds and with varying levels of influence. Within the context of remediation, it’s interesting how new media forms affect how music is perceived on an emotional level. Teasing out the relation between different musical components and musical narratives and our responses is challenging, but humans will continue to endeavor to understand why emotions make us feel.
Introduction
Humans have listened to music since the Paleolithic period, some 300,000 to 12,000 years ago (the exact timing is uncertain). Later in antiquity, music diversified, and people started creating complex compositions. From the gagaku music of imperial Japan to the Gregorian chants of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, music has continued to evolve to suit cultural needs. By the Renaissance, great patrons of music commissioned works from composers and singers. Beethoven, Mozart, and other classic greats created instrumental masterpieces. And in the 20th century, music experimentation was at an all-time high, as amplification and electronic synthesizers revolutionized music. Through this brief history of music, it’s clear how music evolved in step with human culture. What are the roots of our love for music? Is this because music makes us feel emotions? Or do we just perceive how music expresses feelings? And what parts of a musical composition evoke different emotional responses? Emotions research is ongoing as academics try to understand important topics like the nature of human emotions, emotion differentiation, and emotion genesis. Music researchers and philosophers are trying to answer similar questions through a musical lens. Absolute music may not bring about emotions, but lyrical music seems to either elicit feelings or the perception of feelings.
Can Music Evoke Emotions?
Most people will answer with a resounding yes when asked if music can evoke emotions. Everyone’s experienced listening to a song that has made them happy or sad. This seems like such a universal experience among humans. But music researchers and psychologists are still discussing whether music is perceived to express emotion or if the music actually conveys emotion itself. Philosophers are broken into two clear camps on this subject, emotivists, and cognitivists. Emotivists believe that music generates real emotional responses, while cognitivists believe music expresses emotions but does not generate emotions.
Philosopher of music Peter Kivy argues that absolute music does not cause emotions. The music itself is expressive but cannot arouse emotions within us because it lacks representational content. Absolute music is music without lyrics or storytelling. According to Kivy, emotion is ‘in the music, not the man.’
While Kivy’s contemporary Noel Carroll believes that the feeling of movement within music changes our moods but does not evoke emotions. He argues that moods are a better explanatory framework than emotions when discussing music. Traditional emotion theories maintain that emotions have to be directed towards a particular person, thing, or event. They are responses to stimuli by an emotion object. But music doesn’t fit into this theory because music is not an emotion object. How can humans feel emotions when listening to music, without an emotion object? Carroll says that’s where moods can work to better explain human reaction’s to music.
Following Carroll’s 2003 article Art and Mood: Preliminary Notes and Conjectures, Kivy responded to clarify that instrumental music, while arousing and moving, lacks the components to change affect. Remember affect is a person's basic sense of feeling, falling along two continuums, valence (unpleasant to pleasant) and arousal (low arousal to high arousal).
Emotions Felt or Perceived?
The theories of Kivy and Carroll may apply to absolute music, but when lyrics and narratives are added to musical composition, there’s a clear emotion-driven response indicated by research. Berkeley researchers mapped emotions evoked by music and found 13 primary emotions. The emotions are Amusement, joy, eroticism, beauty, relaxation, sadness, dreaminess, triumph, anxiety, scariness, annoyance, defiance, and feeling pumped up. Participants largely agreed on the general emotional characteristics of musical compositions, but there was a wide variance in the degree of arousal reported for the same musical piece. But what is the nature of this response? Do you actually feel emotions from music, or are you just perceiving what emotions the music is trying to convey?
Psychologist Alf Gabrielsson takes on the question of perceived and felt when listening to music. He recognizes that music elicits both feelings and perceived emotions. The distinction between why one person might feel an emotion listening to a specific song while another person will perceive the emotional expression is more nebulous. Research shows a wide variety and no universals across cultures in which emotions are felt when listening to the same music compositions. This is an area where more research is needed.
Gabrielsson attempts to classify which musical factors affect which emotional expression is perceived. Musical structure is an encompassing term that includes musical components like tempo, rhythm, harmony, pitch, volume, mode, repetition, and transposition. Here are a few examples of how different musical components affect the emotional expressions that are perceived.
Tempo
Gabrielsson found that tempo is the most decisive musical structure element for determining perceived emotional expression. Slower tempos are associated with peace, sadness, longing, tenderness, and even disgust. While faster tempos are associated with excitement, happiness, surprise, whimsicality, anger, and fear.
Mode (also known as key)
Major keys are linked to happiness and minor keys are linked to sadness. This musical component is not as absolute, so compositions in a minor key with an upbeat tempo can still be perceived as happy.
Timbre
Tones with lower harmonics are commonly associated with calm, pleasantness, happiness, and even sadness. But tones with higher harmonics are perceived as expressing anger, fear, or surprise.
Genesis of Emotions Through Music
Researchers Juslin and Västfjäll hold the emotivist opinion, believing that music does generate emotions. They recognized the lack of research target at learning how music actually induces emotions. They present six psychological mechanisms through which music can cause emotions in humans:
Brain Stem Reflexes – are automatic responses to music properties. For example: volume, tempo, dissonance
Evaluative Conditioning – mental associations of songs with experiences induce the same feelings those experiences originally brought out. For example, if your family makes you happy and you listen to a song when with them, this song can make you happy later when they’re not around, because of the association.
Emotional Contagion – the emotional expression of music that you can feel. For example, A deep timbre (tone color) might elicit feelings of sadness, while upbeat music with a bright tone might make you happy.
Visual Imagery – when music reminds you of a specific place causing you to visualize that place in your mind. For example, when you imagine a beautiful landscape because of a beautiful song.
Episodic Memory – when songs elicit a strong visceral memory. For example, a romantic song might remind you of a special date, while sad songs remind you of when a relationship ended
Musical Expectancy – when you recognize a common music structure and how interrupting that structure changes your feelings
Juslin and Vastfjall also explain that each of these mechanisms is associated with a survival brain function, specific brain regions, and different relative inductions speeds and degrees of volitional influence. Let’s look at episodic memory for example:
The brain function value of episodic memory is related to recollections of events and binding oneself to reality
Induces all possible emotions but nostalgia is the most common
The induction speed is low
Volitional influence is moderate
How Media & Communication Affect Emotion Perception
Communication and media studies have focused on how emotions are affected by media narratives and image-sound relationships. A new research approach aims to study how virtuality and presence in music predict and even enhance emotional media experiences. Virtual reality experiences increase the pleasantness and engagement of media experiences.
Before the 1900s, all musical experiences occurred in person, played by trained musicians in social events. Music production technology starting with the phonograph and radio and culminating in modern digital music, alters the musical experience. Researchers like Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin are interested in learning how remediation and new media modulate emotional responses to music.
Remediation is used to describe the process of changing a medium to be represented in another form. Musical objects are reshaped and gain new properties when making music using a new medium. Factors like the playback equipment's technical properties and the recording environment's acoustic properties affect musical qualities. These new musical qualities can change the perceived emotion by changing musical components like timbre and pitch.
The Entanglement of Emotions and Music
Music is entwined with emotional expression. Absolute music doesn’t offer any representational content to trigger a true emotional response, although it causes arousal. Lyrical music contains context that can translate to numerous emotional experiences. More research is needed to understand what factors affect whether the emotional expression is perceived or felt. Although tempo, volume, timbre, and other musical components are clearly part of the equation.
The genesis of emotions can be attributed to one of six psychological mechanisms, ranging from our natural brainstem reflexes to our memory and learned musical expectations. Each mechanism evokes emotion at different speeds and with varying levels of influence. Within the context of remediation, it’s interesting how new media forms affect how music is perceived on an emotional level. Teasing out the relation between different musical components and musical narratives and our responses is challenging, but humans will continue to endeavor to understand why emotions make us feel.
Introduction
Humans have listened to music since the Paleolithic period, some 300,000 to 12,000 years ago (the exact timing is uncertain). Later in antiquity, music diversified, and people started creating complex compositions. From the gagaku music of imperial Japan to the Gregorian chants of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, music has continued to evolve to suit cultural needs. By the Renaissance, great patrons of music commissioned works from composers and singers. Beethoven, Mozart, and other classic greats created instrumental masterpieces. And in the 20th century, music experimentation was at an all-time high, as amplification and electronic synthesizers revolutionized music. Through this brief history of music, it’s clear how music evolved in step with human culture. What are the roots of our love for music? Is this because music makes us feel emotions? Or do we just perceive how music expresses feelings? And what parts of a musical composition evoke different emotional responses? Emotions research is ongoing as academics try to understand important topics like the nature of human emotions, emotion differentiation, and emotion genesis. Music researchers and philosophers are trying to answer similar questions through a musical lens. Absolute music may not bring about emotions, but lyrical music seems to either elicit feelings or the perception of feelings.
Can Music Evoke Emotions?
Most people will answer with a resounding yes when asked if music can evoke emotions. Everyone’s experienced listening to a song that has made them happy or sad. This seems like such a universal experience among humans. But music researchers and psychologists are still discussing whether music is perceived to express emotion or if the music actually conveys emotion itself. Philosophers are broken into two clear camps on this subject, emotivists, and cognitivists. Emotivists believe that music generates real emotional responses, while cognitivists believe music expresses emotions but does not generate emotions.
Philosopher of music Peter Kivy argues that absolute music does not cause emotions. The music itself is expressive but cannot arouse emotions within us because it lacks representational content. Absolute music is music without lyrics or storytelling. According to Kivy, emotion is ‘in the music, not the man.’
While Kivy’s contemporary Noel Carroll believes that the feeling of movement within music changes our moods but does not evoke emotions. He argues that moods are a better explanatory framework than emotions when discussing music. Traditional emotion theories maintain that emotions have to be directed towards a particular person, thing, or event. They are responses to stimuli by an emotion object. But music doesn’t fit into this theory because music is not an emotion object. How can humans feel emotions when listening to music, without an emotion object? Carroll says that’s where moods can work to better explain human reaction’s to music.
Following Carroll’s 2003 article Art and Mood: Preliminary Notes and Conjectures, Kivy responded to clarify that instrumental music, while arousing and moving, lacks the components to change affect. Remember affect is a person's basic sense of feeling, falling along two continuums, valence (unpleasant to pleasant) and arousal (low arousal to high arousal).
Emotions Felt or Perceived?
The theories of Kivy and Carroll may apply to absolute music, but when lyrics and narratives are added to musical composition, there’s a clear emotion-driven response indicated by research. Berkeley researchers mapped emotions evoked by music and found 13 primary emotions. The emotions are Amusement, joy, eroticism, beauty, relaxation, sadness, dreaminess, triumph, anxiety, scariness, annoyance, defiance, and feeling pumped up. Participants largely agreed on the general emotional characteristics of musical compositions, but there was a wide variance in the degree of arousal reported for the same musical piece. But what is the nature of this response? Do you actually feel emotions from music, or are you just perceiving what emotions the music is trying to convey?
Psychologist Alf Gabrielsson takes on the question of perceived and felt when listening to music. He recognizes that music elicits both feelings and perceived emotions. The distinction between why one person might feel an emotion listening to a specific song while another person will perceive the emotional expression is more nebulous. Research shows a wide variety and no universals across cultures in which emotions are felt when listening to the same music compositions. This is an area where more research is needed.
Gabrielsson attempts to classify which musical factors affect which emotional expression is perceived. Musical structure is an encompassing term that includes musical components like tempo, rhythm, harmony, pitch, volume, mode, repetition, and transposition. Here are a few examples of how different musical components affect the emotional expressions that are perceived.
Tempo
Gabrielsson found that tempo is the most decisive musical structure element for determining perceived emotional expression. Slower tempos are associated with peace, sadness, longing, tenderness, and even disgust. While faster tempos are associated with excitement, happiness, surprise, whimsicality, anger, and fear.
Mode (also known as key)
Major keys are linked to happiness and minor keys are linked to sadness. This musical component is not as absolute, so compositions in a minor key with an upbeat tempo can still be perceived as happy.
Timbre
Tones with lower harmonics are commonly associated with calm, pleasantness, happiness, and even sadness. But tones with higher harmonics are perceived as expressing anger, fear, or surprise.
Genesis of Emotions Through Music
Researchers Juslin and Västfjäll hold the emotivist opinion, believing that music does generate emotions. They recognized the lack of research target at learning how music actually induces emotions. They present six psychological mechanisms through which music can cause emotions in humans:
Brain Stem Reflexes – are automatic responses to music properties. For example: volume, tempo, dissonance
Evaluative Conditioning – mental associations of songs with experiences induce the same feelings those experiences originally brought out. For example, if your family makes you happy and you listen to a song when with them, this song can make you happy later when they’re not around, because of the association.
Emotional Contagion – the emotional expression of music that you can feel. For example, A deep timbre (tone color) might elicit feelings of sadness, while upbeat music with a bright tone might make you happy.
Visual Imagery – when music reminds you of a specific place causing you to visualize that place in your mind. For example, when you imagine a beautiful landscape because of a beautiful song.
Episodic Memory – when songs elicit a strong visceral memory. For example, a romantic song might remind you of a special date, while sad songs remind you of when a relationship ended
Musical Expectancy – when you recognize a common music structure and how interrupting that structure changes your feelings
Juslin and Vastfjall also explain that each of these mechanisms is associated with a survival brain function, specific brain regions, and different relative inductions speeds and degrees of volitional influence. Let’s look at episodic memory for example:
The brain function value of episodic memory is related to recollections of events and binding oneself to reality
Induces all possible emotions but nostalgia is the most common
The induction speed is low
Volitional influence is moderate
How Media & Communication Affect Emotion Perception
Communication and media studies have focused on how emotions are affected by media narratives and image-sound relationships. A new research approach aims to study how virtuality and presence in music predict and even enhance emotional media experiences. Virtual reality experiences increase the pleasantness and engagement of media experiences.
Before the 1900s, all musical experiences occurred in person, played by trained musicians in social events. Music production technology starting with the phonograph and radio and culminating in modern digital music, alters the musical experience. Researchers like Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin are interested in learning how remediation and new media modulate emotional responses to music.
Remediation is used to describe the process of changing a medium to be represented in another form. Musical objects are reshaped and gain new properties when making music using a new medium. Factors like the playback equipment's technical properties and the recording environment's acoustic properties affect musical qualities. These new musical qualities can change the perceived emotion by changing musical components like timbre and pitch.
The Entanglement of Emotions and Music
Music is entwined with emotional expression. Absolute music doesn’t offer any representational content to trigger a true emotional response, although it causes arousal. Lyrical music contains context that can translate to numerous emotional experiences. More research is needed to understand what factors affect whether the emotional expression is perceived or felt. Although tempo, volume, timbre, and other musical components are clearly part of the equation.
The genesis of emotions can be attributed to one of six psychological mechanisms, ranging from our natural brainstem reflexes to our memory and learned musical expectations. Each mechanism evokes emotion at different speeds and with varying levels of influence. Within the context of remediation, it’s interesting how new media forms affect how music is perceived on an emotional level. Teasing out the relation between different musical components and musical narratives and our responses is challenging, but humans will continue to endeavor to understand why emotions make us feel.
The genesis of emotions can be attributed to one of six psychological mechanisms, ranging from our natural brainstem reflexes to our memory and learned musical expectations.
The genesis of emotions can be attributed to one of six psychological mechanisms, ranging from our natural brainstem reflexes to our memory and learned musical expectations.
The genesis of emotions can be attributed to one of six psychological mechanisms, ranging from our natural brainstem reflexes to our memory and learned musical expectations.
The genesis of emotions can be attributed to one of six psychological mechanisms, ranging from our natural brainstem reflexes to our memory and learned musical expectations.
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Music from the different perspective
Don't miss a beat - experience musical bits from the articles below.
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Psychology
Understanding the altered perception of music while on LSD sheds light on the broader relationship between psychedelics and sensory perception. It raises questions about the mind's ability to perceive reality, the flexibility of our sensory processing, and how deeply music is woven into the human experience.
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Psychology
Understanding the altered perception of music while on LSD sheds light on the broader relationship between psychedelics and sensory perception. It raises questions about the mind's ability to perceive reality, the flexibility of our sensory processing, and how deeply music is woven into the human experience.
Read
Psychology
Understanding the altered perception of music while on LSD sheds light on the broader relationship between psychedelics and sensory perception. It raises questions about the mind's ability to perceive reality, the flexibility of our sensory processing, and how deeply music is woven into the human experience.
Read
Metaphysics
Brain music is an intriguing intersection of neuroscience and auditory experience. It refers to a variety of phenomena where the human brain interacts with music, whether it be the neurological impacts of listening to music or the sonification of brain waves into audible frequencies.
Read
Metaphysics
Brain music is an intriguing intersection of neuroscience and auditory experience. It refers to a variety of phenomena where the human brain interacts with music, whether it be the neurological impacts of listening to music or the sonification of brain waves into audible frequencies.
Read
Metaphysics
Brain music is an intriguing intersection of neuroscience and auditory experience. It refers to a variety of phenomena where the human brain interacts with music, whether it be the neurological impacts of listening to music or the sonification of brain waves into audible frequencies.
Read
Metaphysics
When discussing sound healing, we often refer to specific frequencies that are believed to have particular benefits. For instance, the Solfeggio frequencies, a series of six tones that date back to early sacred music, are claimed to have properties ranging from repairing DNA to opening the heart chakra.
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Metaphysics
When discussing sound healing, we often refer to specific frequencies that are believed to have particular benefits. For instance, the Solfeggio frequencies, a series of six tones that date back to early sacred music, are claimed to have properties ranging from repairing DNA to opening the heart chakra.
Read
Metaphysics
When discussing sound healing, we often refer to specific frequencies that are believed to have particular benefits. For instance, the Solfeggio frequencies, a series of six tones that date back to early sacred music, are claimed to have properties ranging from repairing DNA to opening the heart chakra.
Read
Metaphysics
Solfeggio frequencies are ancient tones believed to have healing properties. This article delves into their history, from Gregorian Chants to modern rediscovery, examines their effects on emotional and physical well-being, and scrutinizes the scientific research behind these mysterious frequencies.
Read
Metaphysics
Solfeggio frequencies are ancient tones believed to have healing properties. This article delves into their history, from Gregorian Chants to modern rediscovery, examines their effects on emotional and physical well-being, and scrutinizes the scientific research behind these mysterious frequencies.
Read
Metaphysics
Solfeggio frequencies are ancient tones believed to have healing properties. This article delves into their history, from Gregorian Chants to modern rediscovery, examines their effects on emotional and physical well-being, and scrutinizes the scientific research behind these mysterious frequencies.
Read
Cutting-edge startup redefining sensory experiences. We create unparalleled technology for immersion in auditory landscapes.
Copyright ©2024 VA Visual Acoustic Technologies GmbH. All rights reserved.
Cutting-edge startup redefining sensory experiences. We create unparalleled technology for immersion in auditory landscapes.
Copyright ©2024 VA Visual Acoustic Technologies GmbH. All rights reserved.
Cutting-edge startup redefining sensory experiences. We create unparalleled technology for immersion in auditory landscapes.
Copyright ©2024 VA Visual Acoustic Technologies GmbH. All rights reserved.
Cutting-edge startup redefining sensory experiences. We create unparalleled technology for immersion in auditory landscapes.
Copyright ©2024 VA Visual Acoustic Technologies GmbH. All rights reserved.