Listeners’ perceptual and emotional responses to tonal and atonal music

Helen Daynes

doi:10.1177/0305735610378182

Abstract

Research in music and emotion has largely focused on responses to tonal music on isolated occasions. This article presents a novel approach to the study of music and emotion that investigates the effects of familiarity on listeners’ responses to tonal and atonal music. A mixed-methods longitudinal design was adopted to enable access to the familiarization process. Nineteen student participants (10 musicians; nine non-musicians) embarked on the study. Participants used a range of quantitative and qualitative self-report mechanisms to record their emotional responses to music by Clementi, Schoenberg and Berio over a two-week familiarization period. Results suggested that with increased familiarity, participants showed greater understanding of the musical structure and increased awareness of details in the music, which impacted on the emotional triggers identified by participants. There was evidence for increasing anticipation of emotional events with familiarity. The musical language also showed profound effects: participants found it more difficult to identify the musical structure of the atonal pieces than the tonal pieces; emotional responses to the atonal pieces were lower than those for the tonal piece, and these effects were greatest for non-music students. The implications of these results are discussed.

Highlights

There is a growing body of research on music and emotion, including listeners’ emotional responses
The musical language showed profound effects: participants found it more difficult to identify the musical structure of the atonal pieces than the tonal pieces; emotional responses to the atonal pieces were lower than those for the tonal piece, and these effects were greatest for non-music students
Though this study reveals some confusion between perceived and induced emotional responses, their findings included a moderate positive correlation between familiarity and the liking of a piece, and suggested that familiarity affected the emotions perceived in the music by listeners

Summary

Introduction

There is a growing body of research on music and emotion, including listeners’ emotional responses (see Sloboda & Juslin, 2001). Though the causes of emotional responses to music may be complex and multi-faceted, ranging from associative features to iconic features or timbral effects (Juslin & Sloboda, 2001), and may depend as much on the way in which the sounds are perceived as the quality and nature of the sounds themselves (Lavy, 2001), this article focuses mainly on emotional triggers from within the musical structure. Listeners’ perceptions of structural features are likely to change systematically with familiarity; this focus allows for the attempt to examine differences in participants’ responses to tonal and atonal music. Emotional responses are based upon the music perceived by the listener, and relevant aspects of research in music perception and emotion are considered here, first in relation to the issue of familiarity, and second in terms of musical language (tonal/atonal music)

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion