Music Perception vo lu m e 29, issue 1, pp. 93-108. issn 0730-7829, electronic issn 1533-8312. © 2011 by the regents of the university of california all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photo copy or reproduce article content through the university of california press's rights a n d permissions w e b s i t e , h t t p ://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.We assume that evaluative processes in response to musical stimuli can occur spontaneously without explicit demand, and that these responses are important for the emergence of emotions evoked by music. Two versions of the affective priming paradigm served to study spontaneous evaluation of music. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task (LDT) and in Experiments 2 and 3, an evaluative decision task (EDT) was employed. A total of 20 original four-part, five-chord piano sequences with no specified harmonic resolution were used as primes. During the LDT, congruency in valence of prime-target pairs did not affect response times to the targets. However, for the EDT, significant effects of priming were obtained, indicating that spontaneous evaluations of primes must have occurred. No moderating influences of music expertise or any other person variable on spontaneous evaluation were observed. The diverging results of LDT and EDT point to the possibility that spontaneous evaluative processes are sensitive to context manipulations. Results are discussed with reference to harmonic and semantic priming studies.
We investigated cognitive "art schema" effects-as resulting from framing a situation as one of art reception-on the enjoyability of negative emotions by means of an elaborate disguised anger induction in the field. Because situations of both art reception and participation in lab experiments are typically safe and have a reduced bearing on personal relevance and goal conduciveness, the goal of this design was to prevent predicted effects of the art framing from being confounded with potentially convergent effects of the lab situation. For one group of participants, the anger-inducing treatment was framed as an aptitude test developed by a recruitment firm, for a second group the same treatment was framed as a theater performance. Self-reports of emotional states and blood pressure data showed evidence for the effectiveness of both the anger induction and the framing of the situation. The data expand previous findings that activating an art schema is instrumental for more positive responses to being involved in negative emotions in a threefold fashion: (a) through the higher ecological validity of the experimental design used, (b) through implementing an entire live theater performance instead of presenting single pictures or film clips only, and (c) through using anger as the target emotion.
The emergence of local expectations in listeners of music has been occasionally explained by assuming a sort of musical syntax or grammar. While sharing some superficial qualities, music and language structures are working differently: language syntax is organized in a hierarchical system, working only context-sensitively (the applicability of syntactical rules is influenced by the context), whereas musical structures, especially harmonic progressions, emerge mainly out of constructive, context-dependent processes (the context is able to establish completely new structural principles). Collected examples from musical literature of western tonal music across styles and epochs show five main principles of musical structure-building that distinguish musical models from syntactical rules: Constructivity, mappability, contextuality, individuality and contingence. The main influence of frame and context on musical expectations can be especially demonstrated by means of a harmonic progression frequently used in empirical studies as assumed syntactical violation: the neapolitan sixth chord succeeding the dominant. As a consequence, a re-interpretation of the empirical data should consider the specific context of the observed effects: they might be more a result of the introduction of the listener to a redundant stylistic model instead of the application of syntactical rules proper. According to the provided examples, structural expectations of listeners appear to be rather combinations of general familiarity to styles and composition principles, individual preferences and local framing. Based on these historical and systematic arguments, the structure of music seems to be flexible and integrative, and not bound to a syntax system.
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