Abstract
Music is an important medium of emotional communication for human beings. To what extent people’s understanding of musical emotion and feelings is dependent on the musical cultural experience has been an important scientific issue. Music has biological significance and it also has cultural meaning. The biological perspective views the relationship between music and emotion as one related to the existence and development of an individual adaptation mechanism, and the musical effect on the emotions has a cultural universality. The cultural view thinks that the foundation of the relationship between music and emotions is the cognitive structure underlying the action of the musical pattern, and music’s emotional effect has cultural specificity. At present, these two approaches have been shown to have parallel relationships, and research is focused on discussion of the functional weight and mechanism of the musical cultural experience under different conditions. This paper will comb the current research on the musical cultural experience mechanism theory as well as review and list the related experimental examples based on the musical emotional perception, emotional experience, and musical preference. Musical emotional perception refers to the capacities and abilities to recognize and identify the emotions in music. On the level of the musical emotional perception, related theories think that the effect of the musical culture experience mainly depends on the clues which are used to express emotions in musical works and performances. During the process of listening to the music that utilizes psychophysical cues, the effect of the musical culture experience is smaller while the effect is bigger when listening to music using culturally specific clues. The musical emotional experience focuses in particular on the emotions aroused by the music, which are usually inferred based on a combination of verbal self-reports, physiological responses, and emotional expressions. In terms of the musical emotional experience, the relevant theory thinks the dependence depth of the cultural experience mainly relies on the mood induced mechanism of the musical activation. The influence of the musical culture experience on the three types of mechanism in the brain stem reflexes, rhythmic entrainment, and emotional contagion is small, but in terms of the evaluative conditioning, visual imagery, episodic memory, musical expectancy, and aesthetic judgment, it plays an important role. Musical preference refers to more long-term affective evaluations of music. In consideration of musical preferences, the relevant theory thinks that the musical culture experience in the production of musical preference in general plays a very important role in the production conditions of musical preference due to “familiarity”, which is based on the characteristics of internal relevant music events. Future research needs to consider and promote the definition of the music cultural experience, musical clues selection, evaluation of the emotional effect, and so on, which can better reveal the function of the musical culture experience in relation to the musical emotional communication. Exploring the internal mechanism of how music affects people’s moods will help to shed light on the features of the advanced cognitive wisdom of humans. At the same time, it will have important clinical significance.
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