Emotion and expertise: how listeners with formal music training use cues to perceive emotion

Aimee Battcock,Michael Schutz

doi:10.1007/s00426-020-01467-1

Abstract

Although studies of musical emotion often focus on the role of the composer and performer, the communicative process is also influenced by the listener’s musical background or experience. Given the equivocal nature of evidence regarding the effects of musical training, the role of listener expertise in conveyed musical emotion remains opaque. Here we examine emotional responses of musically trained listeners across two experiments using (1) eight measure excerpts, (2) musically resolved excerpts and compare them to responses collected from untrained listeners in Battcock and Schutz (2019). In each experiment 30 participants with six or more years of music training rated perceived emotion for 48 excerpts from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) using scales of valence and arousal. Models of listener ratings predict more variance in trained vs. untrained listeners across both experiments. More importantly however, we observe a shift in cue weights related to training. Using commonality analysis and Fischer Z score comparisons as well as margin of error calculations, we show that timing and mode affect untrained listeners equally, whereas mode plays a significantly stronger role than timing for trained listeners. This is not to say the emotional messages are less well recognized by untrained listeners—simply that training appears to shift the relative weight of cues used in making evaluations. These results clarify music training’s potential impact on the specific effects of cues in conveying musical emotion.

Highlights

The communication of musical emotion is both powerful and personal
Differences emerged in the predictive strengths of some cues for negatively valenced emotions, supporting the idea that musicians use cues differently to decode emotion compared to untrained listeners
This study extends our previous use of commonality analysis by applying bootstrap methods providing confidence intervals for the estimations of cue weights

Summary

Introduction

The communication of musical emotion is both powerful and personal. Audiences bring their individual histories to the listening experience (Ladinig and Schellenberg 2012; Taruffi et al 2017; Vuoskoski and Eerola 2011), responding differently to the same musical information due to differences in personality traits, experience and expertise or training. Psychological Research as the only predictor to explain for participants’ decoding accuracy These findings support the argument that musical training affords some perceptual benefits when assessing communicated emotion. Differences emerged in the predictive strengths of some cues for negatively valenced emotions, supporting the idea that musicians use cues differently to decode emotion compared to untrained listeners. Changes in mode and tempo affect how listeners with musical training rate perceived valence and arousal differently than those without training (Ramos et al 2011). The authors found only slight differences, where both groups exhibited high responsiveness to the experimental manipulations It is possible that with more years of musical training musicians would become increasingly more sensitive to these differences

Methods

Results

Conclusion