Emotional Responses to Music: What are they? How do they work? And are they relevant to aesthetic appreciation? (original) (raw)
Related papers
MUSIC AND EMOTION: AN EMPIRICAL CRITIQUE OF A KEY ISSUE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC
2007
The crux of much of the debate in the aesthetics of music has been the relationship of (instrumental) music and emotion, and specifically the issues of expression and induction of emotion by music. Kivy (e.g., 1989Kivy (e.g., , 1990Kivy (e.g., , 1999 has addressed these issues influentially, in part by means of the "emotivist" versus "cognitivist" dichotomy. A related topic has been the comparison of "musical emotions" to those that arise in the non-musical "real world." The aims of the paper are to show that some of the most important claims by the contemporary philosophers of music are empirically testable; to review some of the recent experimental work; and to demonstrate how such methodological and empirical advances can render certain aspects of the philosophical commentary obsolete. The paper concludes with the attempt to replace the concept of "musical emotions" by those of the measurable responses of "thrills/chills," "being moved" and "aesthetic awe" -all of these states being hierarchically related components in the Aesthetic Trinity theory (Konečni
2010
These two quotations reflect common attitudes about music. Tolstoy’s comment suggests that music conveys emotion, whereas Torke’s question implies that music influences listeners’ emotions. Section 5.2 of the present chapter includes a discussion of the various theoretical approaches that are used to explain affective responses to music. Few scholars dispute the claim that listeners recognize emotions in music. Some argue, however, that music does not elicit true emotions in the listener (e.g., Kivy 1980, 1990, 2001). For example, many years ago Meyer (1956) posited that affective responses to music consist of experiences of tension and relaxation (rather than actual emotions), which occur when listeners’ expectancies about what will happen next in a piece of music are violated or fulfilled, respectively. This position has been challenged in recent years with findings from studies using behavioral, physiological, and neurological measures, all of which indicate that listeners respon...
"Avant" Vol. IV, No. 3/2013, s. 175-196.
This paper discusses contemporary empirical approaches to the topic of music and emotions that are conducted at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and musicology. I show that within this interdisciplinary programme a number of general issues were posed that are not that distant from the questions asked by the classical authors such as Stravinsky and Hanslick. The main purpose of the paper is to show that there are three areas of cognitive and behavioural activity of the listener and the respective types of musical emotions: embodied emotions, cognitive emotions, as well as associative and contextual emotions.
These two quotations reflect common attitudes about music. Tolstoy’s comment suggests that music conveys emotion, whereas Torke’s question implies that music influences listeners’ emotions. Section 5.2 of the present chapter includes a discussion of the various theoretical approaches that are used to explain affective responses to music. Few scholars dispute the claim that listeners recognize emotions in music. Some argue, however, that music does not elicit true emotions in the listener (e.g., Kivy 1980, 1990, 2001). For example, many years ago Meyer (1956) posited that affective responses to music consist of experiences of tension and relaxation (rather than actual emotions), which occur when listeners’ expectancies about what will happen next in a piece of music are violated or fulfilled, respectively. This position has been challenged in recent years with findings from studies using behavioral, physiological, and neurological measures, all of which indicate that listeners respond affectively to music (e.g., Krumhansl 1997; Gagnon and Peretz 2003; Mitterschiffthaler et al. 2007; Witvliet and Vrana 2007). Nonetheless, the debate continues (e.g., Konečni 2008).
Frontiers in Psychology, 2018
Basic Emotion theory has had a tremendous influence on the affective sciences, including music psychology, where most researchers have assumed that music expressivity is constrained to a limited set of basic emotions. Several scholars suggested that these constrains to musical expressivity are explained by the existence of a shared acoustic code to the expression of emotions in music and speech prosody. In this article we advocate for a shift from this focus on basic emotions to a constructionist account. This approach proposes that the phenomenon of perception of emotions in music arises from the interaction of music's ability to express core affects and the influence of top-down and contextual information in the listener's mind. We start by reviewing the problems with the concept of Basic Emotions, and the inconsistent evidence that supports it. We also demonstrate how decades of developmental and cross-cultural research on music and emotional speech have failed to produce convincing findings to conclude that music expressivity is built upon a set of biologically predetermined basic emotions. We then examine the cue-emotion consistencies between music and speech, and show how they support a parsimonious explanation, where musical expressivity is grounded on two dimensions of core affect (arousal and valence). Next, we explain how the fact that listeners reliably identify basic emotions in music does not arise from the existence of categorical boundaries in the stimuli, but from processes that facilitate categorical perception, such as using stereotyped stimuli and close-ended response formats, psychological processes of construction of mental prototypes, and contextual information. Finally, we outline our proposal of a constructionist account of perception of emotions in music, and spell out the ways in which this approach is able to make solve past conflicting findings. We conclude by providing explicit pointers about the methodological choices that will be vital to move beyond the popular Basic Emotion paradigm and start untangling the emergence of emotional experiences with music in the actual contexts in which they occur.
Emotions expressed and aroused by music: Philosophical perspectives
Sometimes philosophy seems to psychologists to be psychologizing in a fashion that is uninformed and unrestrained by empirical data. (And sometimes psychology looks to philosophers like unskilled philosophizing!) As this is the only chapter by a philosopher, I begin with an introduction outlining the nature of academic philosophy.
Music and emotion (Chapter in "The Aesthetic Mind")
Music is experienced in many different contexts and its significance for human behavior is not always obvious. Music plays an important role in many social contexts such as weddings, funerals, and parties, but its appeal cannot be fully explained by such functions. Music affects us in ways that are personal and require psychological explanation: music energizes, surprises, soothes, delights, and otherwise shapes our emotional states. Research in cognition and neuroscience supports the idea that pleasure and emotions are key motivations for listening to music. Not only does music activate "pleasure centers" in the brain (Blood and Zatorre 2001), it can communicate and induce a range of powerful emotions ( Juslin and Sloboda 2001). This latter capacity-to communicate and induce emotional states-has been the subject of intense scientific investigation. Emotional interpretations and experiences of music are extremely common and play a significant role in our appraisals of music. Indeed, whenever emotions are evoked by stimuli, they are combined with appraisals of those stimuli occurring "on multiple levels of processing ranging from automatic and implicit to conscious conceptual or propositional evaluations" (Scherer 2005: 701). This pairing of emotion and evaluation occurs because, from a biological standpoint, stimuli that elicit emotional responses are (or were, at an earlier point in evolutionary history) relevant to the major concerns of the organism (Huron 2005).