Emotional Responses to Musical Intervals with Specific Acoustical Properties and the Effect of the Induced Emotions in Duration Perception

Abstract

Recent investigations on the emotional responses to music focus on the use of whole (or excerpts) music pieces (usually well- known) using physiological and/or subjective measurements of arousal and valence (e.g., Iwanaga & Moroki, 1999; Krumhansl, 1997; Rickard, 2004). Usually the musical stimuli are chosen intuitively from the experimenters so as to evoke specific basic emotions (e.g., happiness, fear). It is well established that factors like familiarity and musical preference of the participants affect emotional responses to the stimuli presented (Grewe et al., 2007). Additionally, the musical stimuli used previously contain a plethora of imponderable characteristics that are usually not taken in consideration. These factors may hamper the detection of the specific acoustic properties that can be categorized in terms of the emotion they induce. Our aim, therefore, is to create a set of musical stimuli with defined acoustical properties in order to test whether the variation in one or more of these properties affect participant measures of arousal and valence (both physiologically and subjectively). We expect to replicate findings from previous studies on the following: a) musical pieces in a major mode with fast tempo will be perceived as happy and slow pieces in a minor mode will be perceived as sad (Khalfa et al., 2002), b) 250ms of musical stimulation will be sufficient for the distinction between happy and sad music (Peretz et al., 1998), and c) consonance represents a measure of pleasantness (Koelsch et al., 2006; Sammler et al., 2007). Additionally, we will extend current knowledge by defining the modulation of specific parameters and the associated emotion induced. The creation and validation of the musical stimuli in our study will be done through a series of psychological and physiological experiments. Subsequently, we aim to test whether the emotions induced through the specific stimuli created will affect the perception of duration. This will allow for the comparison of these findings with those from previous timing studies that have used music and support the notion that arousal and/or valence alter the pulse rate of the internal clock (Droit-Volet et al., 2010).