Abstract
The aim of this contribution is to broaden the concept of musical meaning from an abstract and emotionally neutral cognitive representation to an emotion-integrating description that is related to the evolutionary approach to music. Starting from the dispositional machinery for dealing with music as a temporal and sounding phenomenon, musical emotions are considered as adaptive responses to be aroused in human beings as the product of neural structures that are specialized for their processing. A theoretical and empirical background is provided in order to bring together the findings of music and emotion studies and the evolutionary approach to musical meaning. The theoretical grounding elaborates on the transition from referential to affective semantics, the distinction between expression and induction of emotions, and the tension between discrete-digital and analog-continuous processing of the sounds. The empirical background provides evidence from several findings such as infant-directed speech, referential emotive vocalizations and separation calls in lower mammals, the distinction between the acoustic and vehicle mode of sound perception, and the bodily and physiological reactions to the sounds. It is argued, finally, that early affective processing reflects the way emotions make our bodies feel, which in turn reflects on the emotions expressed and decoded. As such there is a dynamic tension between nature and nurture, which is reflected in the nature-nurture-nature cycle of musical sense-making.
Highlights
Music is a powerful tool for emotion induction and mood modulation by triggering ancient evolutionary systems in the human body
There is some consensus that emotion should be viewed as a compound of action tendency, bodily responses, and emotional experience with cognition being considered as part
We explored the evolutionary groundings of music-induced emotions
Summary
Music is a powerful tool for emotion induction and mood modulation by triggering ancient evolutionary systems in the human body. Induced emotions, considered at their lowest level, can be conceived partly as reactive behavior that points into the direction of automatic processing, involving a lot of biological regulation that engages evolutionary older and less developed structures of the brain. They may have originated as adaptive responses to acoustic input from threatening and nonthreatening sounds (Balkwill and Thompson, 1999) which can be considered as quasi-universal reactions to auditory stimuli in general and by extension to sounding music. The search for emotionspecific acoustic patterns with similar arousal, is still a subject of ongoing research (Banse and Scherer, 1996; Eerola et al, 2013)
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