Negative emotions are usually avoided in daily life yet often appreciated in artistic endeavors. The present study investigated emotional experiences induced by death metal music with extremely violent themes and examined whether enjoyment of this genre of music is associated with personality traits. Fans (N ϭ 48) and nonfans (N ϭ 97) listened to 60-s excerpts of death metal music and rated their emotional experiences. Compared with nonfans, fans experienced a wide range of positive emotions including power, joy, peace, and wonder. In contrast, nonfans reported uniformly negative experiences, including tension, anger, and fear. Fans and nonfans were also distinguished by personality traits, with fans lower in conscientiousness and agreeableness, and in their motivations for listening to music. Results suggest that individuals with certain personality traits and music-listening motivations are drawn toward aggressive music with violent themes, and their enthusiasm for this genre promotes a range of positive emotional responses to this music. Public Policy Relevance StatementMusic listening is a ubiquitous pastime for teenagers, but when that music contains themes of extreme violence, questions arise as to who listens to this music and why. Here, we show that fans of violent music differ from nonfans in personality, with lower conscientiousness and agreeableness. They also have different motivations for listening to music and contrasting emotional responses to violent music, with fans reporting feelings of power and joy, and nonfans reporting feelings of tension, fear, and anger.

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What is it like for a professional musician to perform music in front of a live audience? We use Strauss and Corbin’s (1998) Grounded Theory to conduct qualitative research with 10 professional musicians to investigate their experience of music performance. We find performance to extend temporally beyond time spent before an audience and to include performers’ rituals of separation from everyday life. Using the abridged version of the model emerging from this data that we present in this article, we investigate how professional musicians’ experience of music performance centers on forging ‘connection’ with an audience and the ways in which this process is facilitated by the pre- and post-performance routines in which musicians engage. We find musicians’ understandings and experiences of ‘connection’ during performance to differ greatly, being influenced by their positioning on two spectra that emerge in this study and indicate the extent to which, during performance, musicians: a) value attentiveness and/or attunement in an audience and b) are open to variability.

Expert skill in music performance involves an apparent paradox. On stage, expert musicians are required accurately to retrieve information that has been encoded over hours of practice. Yet they must also remain open to the demands of the ever-changing situational contingencies with which they are faced during performance. To further explore this apparent paradox and the way in which it is negotiated by expert musicians, this article profiles theories presented by Roger Chaffin, Hubert Dreyfus and Tony and Helga Noice. For Chaffin, expert skill in music performance relies solely upon overarching mental representations, while, for Dreyfus, such representations are needed only by novices, while experts rely on a more embodied form of coping. Between Chaffin and Dreyfus sit the Noices, who argue that both overarching cognitive structures and embodied processes underlie expert skill. We then present the Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes (AIR) approach--a differently nuanced model of expert skill aligned with the integrative spirit of the Noices' research. The AIR approach suggests that musicians negotiate the apparent paradox of expert skill via a mindedness that allows flexibility of attention during music performance. We offer data from recent doctoral research conducted by the first author of this article to demonstrate at a practical level the usefulness of the AIR approach when attempting to understand the complexities of expert skill in music performance.