“The Kind of Music That Makes My Skin Crawl”

Abstract

This chapter explores the affective aspects of aversive experiences relating to music listening. In music psychology research, there is a strong consensus that one of the most important reasons that people listen to music is to experience emotions, and that most music-evoked emotions are positively toned. Negative emotions, therefore, are often considered irrelevant in a musical context. However, although many people think music is fundamentally a positive and pleasurable phenomenon, it is also known to been purposely used for evoking unpleasant affective reactions, even for torture. Such accounts challenge the idea that music or music-induced experiences could be only positive or harmless at most. In this chapter, I will first discuss the rather poorly understood nature of negative emotions in musical context, then I will review some of the recent findings of empirical studies investigating disliked music and aversive musical experiences. Finally, I will consider the implications of current constructivist theories of emotions and affect for studying negative affective responses to music. I will conclude the chapter by discussing whether disgust could really be an appropriate concept to employ when aiming to understand unpleasant musical experiences.