A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Perception of Emotion in Music: Psychophysical and Cultural Cues

Balkwill, Laura Lee; Thompson, William Forde

doi:10.2307/40285811

Cited by 514 publications

(540 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Music can reliably communicate recognizable emotions to listeners, even those listening to music from an unfamiliar tonal system (Balkwill and Thompson 1999). The coalition quality hypothesis provides a natural interpretation of the relationship between music and emotion.…”

Section: Emotionality: Signaling the Coalition's Strategic Stancementioning

confidence: 99%

Music and dance as a coalition signaling system

Hagen

Bryant

2003

Hum Nat

411

339

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Evidence suggests that humans might have neurological specializations for music processing, but a compelling adaptationist account of music and dance is lacking. The sexual selection hypothesis cannot easily account for the widespread performance of music and dance in groups (especially synchronized performances), and the social bonding hypothesis has severe theoretical difficulties. Humans are unique among the primates in their ability to form cooperative alliances between groups in the absence of consanguineal ties. We propose that this unique form of social organization is predicated on music and dance. Music and dance may have evolved as a coalition signaling system that could, among other things, credibly communicate coalition quality, thus permitting meaningful cooperative relationships between groups. This capability may have evolved from coordinated territorial defense signals that are common in many social species, including chimpanzees. We present a study in which manipulation of music synchrony significantly altered subjects' perceptions of music quality, and in which subjects' perceptions of music quality were correlated with their perceptions of coalition quality, supporting our hypothesis. Our hypothesis also has implications for the evolution of psychological mechanisms underlying cultural production in other domains such as food

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Section: Emotionality: Signaling the Coalition's Strategic Stancementioning

confidence: 99%

Music and dance as a coalition signaling system

Hagen

Bryant

2003

Hum Nat

411

339

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Like in facial expressions and in speech prosody, basic emotions can be universally recognized in music (Balkwill & Thompson, 1999;Fritz et al, 2009) and recognition can occur within less than a second (Peretz, Gagnon, & Bouchard, 1998). The identification of emotions in music is highly consistent across subjects (Bigand, Vieillard, Madurell, Marozeau, & Dacquet, 2005;Thompson, 2009) and it has been shown to correlate with emotional intelligence (Resnicow, Salovey, & Repp, 2004).…”

Section: Emotion Recognition In Music Changes Across the Adult Life Spanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion recognition in music changes across the adult life span

Lima

Castro

2011

Cognition & Emotion

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In comparison with other modalities, the recognition of emotion in music has received little attention. An unexplored question is whether and how emotion recognition in music changes as a function of aging. In the present study, healthy adults aged between 17 and 84 years (N = 114) judged the magnitude to which a set of musical excerpts (Vieillard et al., 2008) expressed happiness, peacefulness, sadness and fear/threat. The results revealed emotion specific age-related changes: advancing age was associated with a gradual decrease in responsiveness to sad and scary music from middle age onwards, whereas the recognition of happiness and peacefulness, both positive emotional qualities, remained stable from young adulthood to older age. Additionally, the number of years of music training was associated with more accurate categorization of the musical emotions examined here. We argue that these findings are consistent with two accounts on how aging might influence the recognition of emotions: motivational changes towards positivity and, to a lesser extent, selective neuropsychological decline.

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“…Foreign musical pieces are emotionally intelligible although listeners fail to understand the lyrics (Balkwill and Thompson, 1999). In marked contrast, if all of the phonemes of a speech act were replaced by a vowel such as /a/ while speech melody is retained, the utterance would become unintelligible (Patel, 2008).…”

Section: Perception Vs Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Song and speech: Examining the link between singing talent and speech imitation ability

Christiner¹,

Reiterer²

2013

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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In previous research on speech imitation, musicality, and an ability to sing were isolated as the strongest indicators of good pronunciation skills in foreign languages. We, therefore, wanted to take a closer look at the nature of the ability to sing, which shares a common ground with the ability to imitate speech. This study focuses on whether good singing performance predicts good speech imitation. Forty-one singers of different levels of proficiency were selected for the study and their ability to sing, to imitate speech, their musical talent and working memory were tested. Results indicated that singing performance is a better indicator of the ability to imitate speech than the playing of a musical instrument. A multiple regression revealed that 64% of the speech imitation score variance could be explained by working memory together with educational background and singing performance. A second multiple regression showed that 66% of the speech imitation variance of completely unintelligible and unfamiliar language stimuli (Hindi) could be explained by working memory together with a singer's sense of rhythm and quality of voice. This supports the idea that both vocal behaviors have a common grounding in terms of vocal and motor flexibility, ontogenetic and phylogenetic development, neural orchestration and auditory memory with singing fitting better into the category of "speech" on the productive level and "music" on the acoustic level. As a result, good singers benefit from vocal and motor flexibility, productively and cognitively, in three ways.(1) Motor flexibility and the ability to sing improve language and musical function. (2) Good singers retain a certain plasticity and are open to new and unusual sound combinations during adulthood both perceptually and productively. (3) The ability to sing improves the memory span of the auditory working memory.

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A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Perception of Emotion in Music: Psychophysical and Cultural Cues

Cited by 514 publications

References 44 publications

Music and dance as a coalition signaling system

Music and dance as a coalition signaling system

Emotion recognition in music changes across the adult life span

Song and speech: Examining the link between singing talent and speech imitation ability

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