The Voice of Angels?

The previous chapters outline a number of musical features that may be used to express emotions, such as happiness and tenderness, and show that these features have certain characteristics that constrain their use. This chapter explains why and how the features come to denote emotions in the first place. Such an account can help resolve the second paradox of music and emotion. Some authors regard musical expression as something ‘subjective’ and ‘ambiguous’, whereas others as something that involves a great degree of inter-individual agreement. Exploring how musical expression actually ‘works’ shows that there is some truth to each of these perspectives.

Breaking the Code

Having established that expression and perception of emotions are important phenomena in music, this chapter takes a closer look at how psychological processes actually work. A first step is to consider the musical features. Which are the relevant features? How do they co-vary with specific emotion categories and dimensions? How are they modulated by musical style, culture, and historical context? It is a recurring notion from Ancient Greece that there are systematic relationships between musical structure and expression of emotions. Modern studies, however, differ from previous treatises by using psychological experiments to uncover ‘causal relationships’ between musical features and perceived emotions. The chapter focuses on the five emotions most frequently studied thus far (sadness, happiness, anger, tenderness, and fear). It also considers how musical features correlate with broader emotion dimensions, such as tension, arousal, and valence.

Music as Expression

Chapter 6 demonstrated that there is some agreement among listeners about what emotion pieces of music express, and that music performers may communicate at least some emotions to listeners in a reliable manner. Yet such findings do not by themselves prove that this is how musicians or listeners conceive of music. This chapter addresses problems and objections surrounding the notion of music-as-expression-of-emotions. There are scholars who are strongly critical of this view on music. Issues concerning expression, communication, and emotion tend to invite controversy, and some authors go to extreme lengths to reject any link between music and emotion. One example of a critical voice can be found in an essay by philosopher Nick Zangwill (2004). He argues that, ‘it is not essential to music to possess emotion, arouse emotion, express emotion, or represent emotion. Music...has nothing to do with emotion’.

Empirical Studies

This chapter considers a second paradox in the study of music and emotion: Some scholars regard ‘expression’ as something vague and flexible — almost idiosyncratic. In contrast, other authors seem to view expression as something far more precise, something for which terms like agreement and accuracy seem appropriate. To resolve this paradox, one must look closer at what different scholars could possibly mean when they say that music is expressive of a specific emotion — or, more importantly, how they measure it. Even if we limit ourselves to the listener's side of the equation, and focus purely on perceived (as opposed to felt) emotion, there are still many different ways of approaching this phenomenon empirically.

What’s Special?

This chapter considers the notion of aesthetic attitude. It asks: how can we be sure that there is such a thing as an aesthetic attitude? Is there evidence that our perception of an event or object can change depending on the attitude we adopt towards it, or that there is a change in brain activity? Few music psychologists have adopted the position that aesthetic responses are distinct or that they involve an aesthetic attitude. Therefore, to investigate these notions in more detail, and to understand the kind of perceptual dimensions that may come into play, the chapter turns to a neighbouring field for guidance, i.e. philosophical aesthetics.

Traditional Approaches to Aesthetics

This chapter focuses on empirical aesthetics, which can be regarded as one of the oldest subfields in psychology. The most important contribution to the domain was made by the scholar Daniel Berlyne, who launched the ‘New Empirical Aesthetics’. In accordance with the prevailing ‘Zeitgeist’ of the 1960s, Berlyne focuses mainly on the notion of autonomic arousal as opposed to discrete emotions; he notes that art influences its perceivers mainly by manipulating their arousal. Berlyne further suggests that listeners' preferences are related to arousal in the form of an inverted U-shaped curve, sometimes referred to as the Wundt curve. The chapter then discusses what empirical aesthetics has contributed to the understanding of aesthetic responses to music.

Ring My Bell

This chapter considers the psychological mechanism known as evaluative conditioning. Evaluative conditioning is defined as a process whereby an emotion is evoked by a piece of music just because this stimulus has been paired, repeatedly, with other positive or negative stimuli, which are not necessarily logically connected to the music in any way. It is a special form of classic conditioning that involves the pairing of an initially neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) with an affectively valenced, unconditioned stimulus (US). After the pairing, the CS acquires the ability to arouse the same affective state as the US in the perceiver. The remainder of the chapter discusses the characteristics of evaluative conditioning, the emotions that conditioning might arouse, and the role of conditioning in everyday life.

Beyond Perception

This chapter sets out the aims and objectives of Part 3 of this book. It considers a fourth paradox regarding music and emotion: Music — an abstract form of art which appears removed from our concerns in everyday life — may arouse emotions — biologically evolved reactions related to human survival. Resolving this paradox may require abandoning some common conceptions about music and emotion, which have prevented a deeper understanding. The following questions are addressed: Does music really arouse emotions? If so, how do we know? Which emotions music arouses? Are these emotions different from other emotions? In which settings do emotions occur? Why and how does music arouse emotions? Why do ‘live’ concerts tend to arouse stronger emotions than recorded music? Why do different listeners react differently to the same piece of music? Are the emotions aroused by music in the same way across cultures?

Further Layers

This chapter first reviews the notions of intrinsic coding and associative coding. It then considers how these may be combined to produce musical expression of emotions, both basic and complex emotions. It suggests that there are some prototypical musical emotions frequently expressed in music, which are linked to the ‘functions’ of music in our evolutionary past. It proposes a list of seven ‘prototypical’ emotions which are expressed often in music: happiness (festive songs), sadness (mourning), love-tenderness (lullabies and tender love songs), anxiety (existential fears in life), nostalgia (social/cultural identity), anger (protest and war songs), spirituality-solemnity (religion), and sexual desire (mating).

Viewing Music Through a Brunswikian Lens

This chapter considers a third paradox regarding musical emotions. Emotions can generally be communicated accurately from a musician to a listener based on musical features, despite the fact that different circumstances offer very different features to the performer's and listener's disposal. It pays particular attention to Egon Brunswik's theory of visual perception, i.e. his so-called ‘lens model’, which sought to depict the relationship between an ‘organism’ and its ‘environment’, and, in particular, how visual impressions are ‘mediated’ by a number of imperfect ‘cues’ in the environment that the organism is utilizing to make ‘inferences’ about perceptual objects.