Listeners responded continuously at the world and North American premiere concerts of The Angel of Death by Roger Reynolds using one of two rating scales: familiarity or resemblance of musical materials within the piece and emotional force. Two versions of the piece were tested in each concert in different presentation orders. Functional data analysis revealed the influence of large-scale musical form and context on recognition processes and emotional reactions during ongoing listening. The instantaneous resemblance to materials already heard up to that point in the piece demonstrates strong relations to the sectional structure of the music and suggests different memory dynamics for different kinds of musical structures. Emotional force ratings revealed the impact of computer-processed sounds and a diminution in emotional force with repetition of materials. Response profiles and global preferences across the two versions are discussed in terms of the multifaceted temporal shape of musical experience. C REATORS in the temporal arts-music, cinema, dance-often devote a great deal of energy and imagination to the formal aspects of their works. Given that such forms can extend over several minutes, several tens
This study was designed to investigate how emotion category, characterized by distinct musical structures (happiness, sadness, threat) and expressiveness (mechanical, expressive) may influence overt and covert behavioral judgments and physiological responses in musically trained and untrained listeners. Mechanical and expressive versions of happy, sad and scary excerpts were presented while physiological measures were recorded. Participants rated the intensity of the emotion they felt. In addition, they monitored excerpts for the presence of brief breaths. Results showed that the emotion categories were rated higher in the expressive than in the mechanical versions and that this effect was larger in musicians. Moreover, expressive excerpts were found to increase skin conductance level more than the mechanical ones, independently of their arousal value, and to slow down response times in the breath detection task relative to the mechanical versions, suggesting enhanced capture of attention by expressiveness. Altogether, the results support the key role of the performer's expression in the listener's emotional response to music.
There is mounting evidence that aging is associated with the maintenance of positive affect and the decrease of negative affect to ensure emotion regulation goals. Previous empirical studies have primarily focused on a visual or autobiographical form of emotion communication. To date, little investigation has been done on musical emotions. The few studies that have addressed aging and emotions in music were mainly interested in emotion recognition, thus leaving unexplored the question of how aging may influence emotional responses to and memory for emotions conveyed by music. In the present study, eighteen older (60–84 years) and eighteen younger (19–24 years) listeners were asked to evaluate the strength of their experienced emotion on happy, peaceful, sad, and scary musical excerpts (Vieillard et al., 2008) while facial muscle activity was recorded. Participants then performed an incidental recognition task followed by a task in which they judged to what extent they experienced happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and fear when listening to music. Compared to younger adults, older adults (a) reported a stronger emotional reactivity for happiness than other emotion categories, (b) showed an increased zygomatic activity for scary stimuli, (c) were more likely to falsely recognize happy music, and (d) showed a decrease in their responsiveness to sad and scary music. These results are in line with previous findings and extend them to emotion experience and memory recognition, corroborating the view of age-related changes in emotional responses to music in a positive direction away from negativity.
Altogether, these data are consistent with the view that advancing age may result in the reduction of emotional complexity and a distortion of the emotional processing in a positive direction.
Free classification was used to explore similarity relations in contemporary musical materials. Thirty-four subsections from the five themes of The Angel of Death by Roger Reynolds were composed identically for piano (Expt. 1) and chamber orchestra (Expt. 2) in terms of pitch, rhythm, and dynamics. Listeners were asked to group together those judged to be musically similar and to describe the similarities between the subsections in each group. Listeners based their classifications on surface similarities related to tempo, rhythmic and melodic texture, pitch register, melodic contour, and articulation. They were to some extent also based on similarity of the mood evoked by the excerpts. This latter factor was more prominent in the verbalizations for the orchestral version. Instrumentation, timbre, and type of timbral change (smooth, disjunctive) also affected classifications in the orchestral version. Perceptual relations among thematic materials within the piece and the interaction of form-bearing dimensions in musical similarity perception are discussed.
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