Emotional expression in music: contribution, linearity, and additivity of primary musical cues

Tuomas Eerola,Anders Friberg,Roberto Bresin

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00487

Abstract

The aim of this study is to manipulate musical cues systematically to determine the aspects of music that contribute to emotional expression, and whether these cues operate in additive or interactive fashion, and whether the cue levels can be characterized as linear or non-linear. An optimized factorial design was used with six primary musical cues (mode, tempo, dynamics, articulation, timbre, and register) across four different music examples. Listeners rated 200 musical examples according to four perceived emotional characters (happy, sad, peaceful, and scary). The results exhibited robust effects for all cues and the ranked importance of these was established by multiple regression. The most important cue was mode followed by tempo, register, dynamics, articulation, and timbre, although the ranking varied across the emotions. The second main result suggested that most cue levels contributed to the emotions in a linear fashion, explaining 77–89% of variance in ratings. Quadratic encoding of cues did lead to minor but significant increases of the models (0–8%). Finally, the interactions between the cues were non-existent suggesting that the cues operate mostly in an additive fashion, corroborating recent findings on emotional expression in music (Juslin and Lindström, 2010).

Highlights

One of the central reasons that music engages the listener so deeply is that it expresses emotion (Juslin and Laukka, 2004)
Many extra-musical factors are involved in the induction of emotions, the focus of this paper is on those properties inherent in the music itself which cause emotions to be perceived by the listener that are generally related to mechanism of emotional contagion (Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008)
The first regression analysis will address the contribution of cues to the emotions, the second one will address the linearity of the cue levels, and the third one will-seek to quantify the degree of interactions between the cues in the data, and compare the results with results obtained using models that are additive

Summary

Introduction

One of the central reasons that music engages the listener so deeply is that it expresses emotion (Juslin and Laukka, 2004). The way music arouses listeners’ emotions has been studied from many different perspectives. One such method involves the use of self-report measures, where listeners note the emotions that they either recognize or experience while listening to the music (Zentner and Eerola, 2010). Another method involves the use of physiological and neurological indicators of the emotions aroused when listening to music (recent overview of the field is given in Eerola and Vuoskoski, 2012). Many extra-musical factors are involved in the induction of emotions (e.g., the context, associations, and individual factors, see Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008), the focus of this paper is on those properties inherent in the music itself which cause emotions to be perceived by the listener that are generally related to mechanism of emotional contagion (Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008)

Methods

Results

Conclusion