Evaluation of the goodness of musical tempo

Abstract

Numerous studies on how the tempo of music influences the assessment of physiology and emotion have concluded that “the higher the tempo derived the higher assessment.” However, these were based on experiments that also contained factors other than the tempo. Because the evaluation indices in those papers were not unified and the experimental conditions were different, it was not possible to obtain a uniform knowledge on the relation between tempo and evaluation. In this article, we chose “goodness of tempo” as the evaluation index and examined the influence of tempo on evaluation by changing its speed. Three songs, with different tempi in their original version, were used as test pieces. The findings demonstrated that each music piece had different assessment functions. One showed a constant assessment function at any speed, the other had an assessment function with optimum speed, and the third generated a step function with a low rating at the low speed and a high rating at the high speed. As a result, the proposition “the higher the tempo, the higher the evaluation value” was proved incorrect. Furthermore, it was considered that factors other than tempo affect the goodness of tempo.