Research indicates that people value music primarily because of the emotions it evokes. Yet, the notion of musical emotions remains controversial, and researchers have so far been unable to offer a satisfactory account of such emotions. We argue that the study of musical emotions has suffered from a neglect of underlying mechanisms. Specifically, researchers have studied musical emotions without regard to how they were evoked, or have assumed that the emotions must be based on the "default" mechanism for emotion induction, a cognitive appraisal. Here, we present a novel theoretical framework featuring six additional mechanisms through which music listening may induce emotions: (1) brain stem reflexes, (2) evaluative conditioning, (3) emotional contagion, (4) visual imagery, (5) episodic memory, and (6) musical expectancy. We propose that these mechanisms differ regarding such characteristics as their information focus, ontogenetic development, key brain regions, cultural impact, induction speed, degree of volitional influence, modularity, and dependence on musical structure. By synthesizing theory and findings from different domains, we are able to provide the first set of hypotheses that can help researchers to distinguish among the mechanisms. We show that failure to control for the underlying mechanism may lead to inconsistent or non-interpretable findings. Thus, we argue that the new framework may guide future research and help to resolve previous disagreements in the field. We conclude that music evokes emotions through mechanisms that are not unique to music, and that the study of musical emotions could benefit the emotion field as a whole by providing novel paradigms for emotion induction.

/pdf/emotional-responses-to-music-the-need-to-consider-underlying-592kszluvl.pdf

Emotional responses to music: The need to consider underlying mechanisms

The problem of which cues, internal or external, permit a person to label and identify his own emotional state has been with us since the days that James (1890) first tendered his doctrine that \"the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion\" (p. 449). Since we are aware of a variety of feeling and emotion states, it should follow from James' proposition that the various emotions will be accompanied by a variety of differentiable bodily states. Following James' pronouncement, a formidable number of studies were undertaken in search of the physiological differentiators of the emotions. The results, in these early days, were almost uniformly negative. All of the emotional states experi-

"Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state": Erratum

Studies of the link between music and emotion have primarily focused on listeners' sensitivity to emotion in the music of their own culture. This sensitivity may reflect listeners' enculturation to the conventions of their culture's tonal system. However, it may also reflect responses to psychophysical dimensions of sound that are independent of musical experience. A model of listeners' perception of emotion in music is proposed in which emotion in music is communicated through a combination of universal and cultural cues. Listeners may rely on either of these cues, or both, to arrive at an understanding of musically expressed emotion. The current study addressed the hypotheses derived from this model using a cross-cultural approach. The following questions were investigated: Can people identify the intended emotion in music from an unfamiliar tonal system? If they can, is their sensitivity to intended emotions associated with perceived changes in psychophysical dimensions of music? Thirty Western listeners rated the degree of joy, sadness, anger, and peace in 12 Hindustani raga excerpts (field recordings obtained in North India). In accordance with the raga-rasa system, each excerpt was intended to convey one of the four moods or "rasas" that corresponded to the four emotions rated by listeners. Listeners also provided ratings of four psychophysical variables: tempo, rhythmic complexity, melodic complexity, and pitch range. Listeners were sensitive to the intended emotion in ragas when that emotion was joy, sadness, or anger. Judgments of emotion were significantly related to judgments of psychophysical dimensions, and, in some cases, to instrument timbre. The findings suggest that listeners are sensitive to musically expressed emotion in an unfamiliar tonal system, and that this sensitivity is facilitated by psychophysical cues.

http://rhythmcoglab.coursepress.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2014/10/A-Cross-Cultural-Investigation-of-the-Perception-of-Emotion-in-Music-Psychophysical-and-Cultural-Cues.pdf

A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Perception of Emotion in Music: Psychophysical and Cultural Cues

This study describes the utilization of acoustic cues in communication of emotions in music performance. Three professional guitarists were asked to perform 3 short melodies to communicate anger, sadness, happiness, and fear to listeners. The resulting performances were analyzed with respect to 5 acoustic cues and judged by 30 listeners on adjective scales. Multiple regression analysis was applied to the relationships between (a) the performer's intention and the cues and (b) the listeners' judgments and the cues. The analyses of performers and listeners were related using C. J. Hursch, K. R. Hammond, and J. L. Hursch's (1964) lens model equation. The results indicated that (a) performers were successful at communicating emotions to listeners, (b) performers' cue utilization was well matched to listeners' cue utilization, and (c) cue utilization was more consistent across different melodies than across different performers. Because of the redundancy of the cues, 2 performers could communicate equally well despite differences in cue utilization.

/pdf/cue-utilization-in-communication-of-emotion-in-music-1ngz9y9au5.pdf

Cue utilization in communication of emotion in music performance: relating performance to perception.

We examined effects of pitch and rhythm on the perceived emotional content of short melodies. We initially developed exemplars of melodies that were judged consistently to convey a single emotional category: happy, sad, or scary. We subsequently manipulated the pitch and rhythm parameters to derive three altered versions of each exemplar: a pitch-only version (pitch differences intact but all tones of equal duration), a rhythmonly version (durational differences intact but all tones of equal pitch), and a baseline version (all tones of equal duration and pitch). Listeners rated how well each exemplar and altered version conveyed its corresponding emotion. Effects of pitch and rhythm varied across melodies. In all cases, ratings were influenced more by differences in pitch than by differences in rhythm. Whenever rhythm affected ratings, it interacted with pitch.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40285907.pdf

Perceiving emotion in melody: Interactive effects of pitch and rhythm.

Hevner (1935, 1936) used a technique in which short, but complete pieces of music were presented to listeners in two forms, the original and another composed to be as alike as possible to the original except for the one attribute which was being studied. The listeners were asked to represent the meaning of the music by ticking adjective lists. In this way Hevner studied the effects of varying modality, rhythm, harmony and direction of the melodic line on the conveyed meaning of the pieces. Whereas reliable changes in meaning were observed for the first three attributes, this was not the case with the direction of the melodic line.

An Experimental Study of Deryck Cooke's Theory of Music and Meaning

Several studies have appeared in the last 15 years (Payne, 1961, 1965; Crickmore, 1968a and b, 1973; Swanwick, 1973, 1975) which show a considerable divergence in thinking about the idea of emotion in music. Payne and Crickmore both discuss a type of emotion which seems to have been first posited by the aesthetician Clive Bell (1914) and taken up since then, notably by the philosopher Susanne Langer (1942). Bell named the emotion \"the aesthetic emotion\" and distinguishes it, as does Langer, from the emotional content of the work of art. Langer holds that \"aesthetic emotion\" springs from the intellectual triumph of having escaped from the cognitive system of words and simple representation and achieving insight into literally \"unspeakable\" realities: it is therefore an essentially positive emotion. The emotional content of a work, on the other hand, is for Langer a more essentially pre-rational emotion sharing something of the life-rhythms of all growing, moving creatures. More recently Payne has come closest to this view. She also distinguishes between two emotions of music, one constituting the emotional subject matter of the music and the other (here Payne is rather different from Langer) involving itself more in how things are said rather than in what is said. Payne calls this latter emotion \"aesthetic emotion\". By this concept Payne means something more than just the results of appreciating form, but nevertheless for her, \"aesthetic emotion\" is intimately involved with the ideas of form; aesthetic emotion is more easily experienced in classical than in romantic music, for example.

Emotion and Music

In his comments on Gabriel (1978), Nettheim has pointed out that choosing moderate values for the components of a musical stimulus does not mean that their effect has been eliminated. He further suggests that as musical stimuli arc essentially multivariate, their study requires multivariate methods. The experiment reported by Gabriel involved subjects rating the perceived agreement between stimuli representing Cooke's Basic Terms and verbal descriptions. All of the verbal descriptions were provided by Cooke but some were allocated to the Basic Terms he intended and some were allocated randomly (with a constraint). As Nettheim points out, all experimental designs have their drawbacks and the experiment we are discussing may be thought of as having been conducted at a cross-section along the variables which were given a constant value. The essential point is that, if Cooke were correct in his belief concerning the role of Basic Terms, this should be apparent at the values chosen, especially perhaps because none of these were so eccentric as to be suspected of having an overwhelming influence. If the synthesised Basic Terms did express purity or simplicity as suggested by Nettheim they would do so equally for each presentation of each basic term and in general would not affect the comparisons of agreement ratings.

A Note on Comments by Nettheim and Cazden

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An Experimental Study of Deryck Cooke's Theory of Music and Meaning

Emotion and Music

A Note on Comments by Nettheim and Cazden