Why Does Music Evoke Strong Emotions?

Although much is known about the brain mechanisms underlying music perception and cognition, there is much work to be done in understanding aesthetic responses to music: Why does music make us feel the way we do? Why does it make us feel anything? In the article under discussion, the authors suggest that the brain’s own endogenous opioids mediate musical emotion, using the hypothesis of naltrexone-induced musical anhedonia. They conclude that endogenous opioids are critical to experiencing both positive and negative emotions in music and that music uses the same reward pathways as food, drugs, and sexual pleasure. Their findings add to the growing body of evidence for the evolutionary biological substrates of music.

A Study on the Application of Music Education to Improve College Students’ Mental Health in the Context of 5G

This paper provides an in-depth study and analysis of music education to improve the mental health of college students in the context of 5G and for practical application. How to explore the ideas and methods of using music education to channel and resolve the psychological problems of this student group and then help them shape a healthy and upward psychological state, based on field research on the psychological and emotional health of contemporary higher education students, becomes an important issue that needs to be solved in front of most music educators. Musical emotions are not only related to the acoustic properties of music but also closely related to the age, gender, musical background, and social cognition of individuals. To explore the neural mechanisms by which musical rhythm affects emotional processing, it is necessary not only to achieve reasonable manipulation of rhythmic variables but also to effectively control for relevant additional variables, to clarify the relationship between rhythm and musical emotion from a theoretical perspective, and to provide operational guidance significance for bringing into play the mental health value of musical emotion. Discuss the commonalities and mutual assistance between the interactional music classroom and humanistic and positive psychology in terms of ideological connotations. Discuss the practical implications of humanistic psychology and its derivation of positive psychology in terms of self-actualization, student-centered view of education, associated integration and developmental educational values, psychological fluency experience, positive emotions, positive self, and positive motivation, which have common ideas with the philosophical theory of interaction, for the interactive music classroom. The characteristics and role of the music teacher in the interacting music classroom from a psychological perspective are described in terms of both teacher psychological construction and teaching attitudes. The enrichment of the ideas, psychological laws, and experiences in humanistic and positive psychology on the model of the interacting music classroom guided by the philosophical theory of interaction is discussed, divided into four subsections: suggestions for classroom goal setting, suggestions for teaching methods, teacher-student evaluation, and teaching fragment design, aimed at making teachers and students interact easily and happily and live soberly and creatively.

Music and Literature Synthesis in Paul Dukas's Aesthetics

Рассмотрев и систематизировав представления о синтезе искусства Поля Дюка, автор статьи приходит к выводу об их оригинальности: в постоянном диалоге с вагнеровской идеей совокупного произведения искусств французскому композитору удалось изложить новый подход к интеграции музыки и слова. Обладая изысканным и утонченным литературным стилем, Дюка выражает свои мысли довольно туманно и неопределенно. Чтобы описать взаимодействие различных видов искусства, он использует понятия, относящиеся к концептам идеи («поэтическая идея» и «музыкальная идея») и эмоции («поэтическая эмоция» и «музыкальная эмоция»). Конечным результатом синтеза становится «поэма», в которой музыка и слово комплементарны друг другу и функционируют по единым законам. Having studied and systematized Paul Dukas's concept of synthesis of arts, the author of the article comes to conclusion that it possesses authentic originality: in a constant dialogue with Wagner's idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, the French composer had the capacity of introducing a new approach towards music and literature fusion. Having established a rather sophisticated poetic style, Dukas expresses his thoughts in a vague and ambiguous way. To illustrate the interaction of various art forms, he resorts to using certain definitions that refer to the concepts of idea (“poetic idea” and “musical idea”) and emotion (“poetic emotion” and “musical emotion”). The endpoint of this interaction is poeme, which suggests that both elements are now subjected to universal laws and are complementary.

Spatial Connectivity and Temporal Dynamic Functional Network Connectivity of Musical Emotions Evoked by Dynamically Changing Tempo

Music tempo is closely connected to listeners’ musical emotion and multifunctional neural activities. Music with increasing tempo evokes higher emotional responses and music with decreasing tempo enhances relaxation. However, the neural substrate of emotion evoked by dynamically changing tempo is still unclear. To investigate the spatial connectivity and temporal dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) of musical emotion evoked by dynamically changing tempo, we collected dynamic emotional ratings and conducted group independent component analysis (ICA), sliding time window correlations, and k-means clustering to assess the FNC of emotion evoked by music with decreasing tempo (180–65 bpm) and increasing tempo (60–180 bpm). Music with decreasing tempo (with more stable dynamic valences) evoked higher valence than increasing tempo both with stronger independent components (ICs) in the default mode network (DMN) and sensorimotor network (SMN). The dFNC analysis showed that with time-decreasing FNC across the whole brain, emotion evoked by decreasing music was associated with strong spatial connectivity within the DMN and SMN. Meanwhile, it was associated with strong FNC between the DMN–frontoparietal network (FPN) and DMN–cingulate-opercular network (CON). The paired t-test showed that music with a decreasing tempo evokes stronger activation of ICs within DMN and SMN than that with an increasing tempo, which indicated that faster music is more likely to enhance listeners’ emotions with multifunctional brain activities even when the tempo is slowing down. With increasing FNC across the whole brain, music with an increasing tempo was associated with strong connectivity within FPN; time-decreasing connectivity was found within CON, SMN, VIS, and between CON and SMN, which explained its unstable valence during the dynamic valence rating. Overall, the FNC can help uncover the spatial and temporal neural substrates of musical emotions evoked by dynamically changing tempi.

Roma Music and Emotion

By combining long-term field research with hypotheses from the cognitive sciences, this book proposes a groundbreaking anthropological theory on the emotional power of music. It hig hlights a human tendency to engage in empathic relations through and with the musical artifacts, veritable “sonic agents” for which we can feel pity, compassion, or sympathy. The theory originates from a detailed ethnography of the musical life of a small Roma community of Transylvania (Romania), where Filippo Bonini Baraldi lived several years, seeking an answer to intriguing questions such as: Why do the Roma cry while playing music? What lies behind their ability to move their customers? What happens when instrumental music and wailing voices come together at funerals? Through the analysis of numerous weddings, funeral wakes, community celebrations, and intimate family gatherings, the author shows that music and weeping go hand in hand, revealing fundamental tensions between unity and division, life and death, the self and others—tensions that the Roma enhance, overemphasize, and perceive as central to their identity. In addition to improving our understanding of a community still shrouded in stereotypes, this book is an important contribution for research on musical emotion, which thus far has focused almost exclusively on western classical music.

What is musical empathy?

This chapter starts with a review of the definitions, meanings, and uses of the concept of empathy in the domains of ethnomusicology, interpersonal relationships, aesthetics, and embodied musical cognition. The following five issues are then addressed: (1) How does the notion of empathy impact the classic theories of musical emotion? (2) It is possible to define different types of musical empathy, depending on the nature of its referent? (3) Do different performance contexts foster different types of musical empathy? (4) What light do theories of empathy shed on the process of association between persons and tunes? (5) Is there any connection between an empathic disposition and the musical form of de jale (“sorrowful”) tunes?

The effects of emotionally congruent sad music listening in young adults high in rumination

There is debate as to whether sad music is harmful or helpful when used to regulate emotions. Listeners’ trait level of rumination may influence their responses to sad music during sadness. This study used an online community sample of young adults ( N = 386, 56% female, Mage = 21.89) in an induced sad state to understand the roles of listener rumination and the eight BRECVEMA musical emotion mechanisms (Brain Stem Reflex, Rhythmic Entrainment, Evaluative Conditioning, Contagion, Visual Imagery, Episodic Memory, Musical Expectancy, and Aesthetic Judgment) in determining changes in sadness during listening. Participants increased in sadness after listening to a self-nominated sad song. The increase in sadness observed was additionally moderated by rumination such that higher rumination predicted greater increases in sadness. People high in rumination were additionally more likely to experience musical entrainment, select a song with conditioned responses and associated memories, as well as experience emotional contagion while listening. Importantly, the effect of rumination was not significant when these BRECVEMA variables were added to the model. Results suggested that BRECVEMA mechanisms were more predictive of increases in sadness from pre- to post-listening than trait rumination levels. The findings suggest that attention should be given to individuals’ song choices and associated active BRECVEMA mechanisms in addition to their trait rumination.

Emotion and expertise: how listeners with formal music training use cues to perceive emotion

Although studies of musical emotion often focus on the role of the composer and performer, the communicative process is also influenced by the listener’s musical background or experience. Given the equivocal nature of evidence regarding the effects of musical training, the role of listener expertise in conveyed musical emotion remains opaque. Here we examine emotional responses of musically trained listeners across two experiments using (1) eight measure excerpts, (2) musically resolved excerpts and compare them to responses collected from untrained listeners in Battcock and Schutz (2019). In each experiment 30 participants with six or more years of music training rated perceived emotion for 48 excerpts from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) using scales of valence and arousal. Models of listener ratings predict more variance in trained vs. untrained listeners across both experiments. More importantly however, we observe a shift in cue weights related to training. Using commonality analysis and Fischer Z score comparisons as well as margin of error calculations, we show that timing and mode affect untrained listeners equally, whereas mode plays a significantly stronger role than timing for trained listeners. This is not to say the emotional messages are less well recognized by untrained listeners—simply that training appears to shift the relative weight of cues used in making evaluations. These results clarify music training’s potential impact on the specific effects of cues in conveying musical emotion.

Influence of Background Musical Emotions on Attention in Congenital Amusia

Congenital amusia in its most common form is a disorder characterized by a musical pitch processing deficit. Although pitch is involved in conveying emotion in music, the implications for pitch deficits on musical emotion judgements is still under debate. Relatedly, both limited and spared musical emotion recognition was reported in amusia in conditions where emotion cues were not determined by musical mode or dissonance. Additionally, assumed links between musical abilities and visuo-spatial attention processes need further investigation in congenital amusics. Hence, we here test to what extent musical emotions can influence attentional performance. Fifteen congenital amusic adults and fifteen healthy controls matched for age and education were assessed in three attentional conditions: executive control (distractor inhibition), alerting, and orienting (spatial shift) while music expressing either joy, tenderness, sadness, or tension was presented. Visual target detection was in the normal range for both accuracy and response times in the amusic relative to the control participants. Moreover, in both groups, music exposure produced facilitating effects on selective attention that appeared to be driven by the arousal dimension of musical emotional content, with faster correct target detection during joyful compared to sad music. These findings corroborate the idea that pitch processing deficits related to congenital amusia do not impede other cognitive domains, particularly visual attention. Furthermore, our study uncovers an intact influence of music and its emotional content on the attentional abilities of amusic individuals. The results highlight the domain-selectivity of the pitch disorder in congenital amusia, which largely spares the development of visual attention and affective systems.