No abstract

STUDIES ADDRESSING EFFECTS OF MUSIC ON VIEWERS' perceptions of film have usually presented music simultaneously with a scene of interest. In the present study, 177 undergraduates viewed film excerpts with music presented before or after a scene featuring a single character. Whereas the film characters had emotionally neutral or subdued facial expressions, the music conveyed happiness, sadness, fear, or anger. Overall, participants tended to interpret characters' emotions in ways that were consistent with the particular emotion expressed in the music, offering evidence for both forward and backward affective priming effects. Our data confirm Boltz, Schulkind, and Kantra's (1991) findings on the role of music in foreshadowing. As far as we are aware, the effects of music on a prior scene have not been demonstrated in film music research. Our findings suggest that music does not have to be presented concurrently with onscreen images to influence viewers' interpretations of film content.

A B S T R AC T Sixty college students were asked to 'make any marks' to visually represent five short orchestral compositions, and to write essays to explain their graphic representations. Most musically trained participants provided abstract representations (symbols or lines), while most pictorial representations (images or pictures telling a story) were created by musically untrained participants. A content analysis of the essays revealed that trained participants focused on themes, repetition, mode, changes in pitch, instruments, interplay of different instruments, and sections of the composition. Untrained participants were more likely to focus on arousal of emotions or sensations, fleeting images, and to create stories to accompany the music. Four styles of representations emerged, depending on whether listeners attended primarily to global qualities, fluctuations in dimensions of sound, perceptually salient features, or underlying structure of compositions. K E Y W O R D S : listening maps, music, music listening, musically trained, musically untrained, visual representation Graphic representations are a topic of interest in several areas of music research. Among other questions, researchers are interested in how graphic representations of music created by children and adults shed light on the development of understanding of symbol systems (Sadek

This study examined the effects of repeated hearings on 74 participants’ responses to two types of musical compositions. Intact compositions consisted of short classical piano solos. Patchwork compositions were created by combining excerpts from three different musical works. The findings showed that listeners’ ratings of unity and liking for intact compositions were initially higher than those for patchwork compositions. With repeated hearings, however, ratings of patchwork compositions increased linearly while ratings of intact compositions showed a general downward trend. After four repeated hearings, ratings of patchwork compositions even exceeded those of the intact compositions. These trends across repeated hearings were contrary to what would be predicted if listeners were focusing on thematic relationships. Implications for Berlyne’s two-factor arousal theory and competing theories are discussed.

No abstract