Choosing the Right Tune

Abstract

When designing a new study regarding how music can portray and elicit emotion, one of the most crucial design decisions involves choosing the best stimuli. Every researcher must find musical samples that are able to capture an emotional state, are appropriate lengths, and have minimal potential for biasing participants. Researchers have often utilized musical excerpts that have previously been used by other scholars, but the appropriate musical choices depend on the specific goals of the study in question and will likely change among various research designs. The intention of this paper is to examine how musical stimuli have been selected in a sample of 306 research articles dating from 1928 through 2018. Analyses are presented regarding the designated emotions, how the stimuli were selected, the durations of the stimuli, whether the stimuli are excerpts from a longer work, and whether the passages have been used in studies about perceived or induced emotion. The results suggest that the literature relies on nine emotional terms, focuses more on perceived emotion than on induced emotion, and contains mostly short musical stimuli. I suggest that some of the inconclusive results from previous reviews may be due to the inconsistent use of emotion terms throughout the music community.

An Interactive Approach to Emotional Expression Through Musical Cues

“…Furthermore, the stimuli were strategically composed to allow a flexible amount of manipulation whilst retaining a delicate balance between ecological validity and experimental control (Eerola et al, 2013; Gabrielsson & Lindström, 2010; Juslin & Lindström, 2010; Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008) that might not be achievable with commercial music. Experiment 1 provided participants’ ratings on nine emotion scales for all pieces to determine which emotion(s) were successfully conveyed, with sixteen pieces of the stimuli being successful representatives of their intended emotion (a selection of sadness, joy, calmness, anger, fear, power, and surprise pieces), adding knowledge to previous literature about emotions expressed through music other than the most common ones which are sadness, happiness, and anger (Warrenburg, 2020a). Thus, this newly composed musical stimuli set together with emotion ratings is in itself a new contribution to the field, being available and accessible to others in an online OSF repository for future use.…”

“…These emotions also cover a broad range on the emotion spectrum (Plutchik, 2001) and valence-arousal circumplex model (Russell, 1980). Furthermore, the composition of these musical pieces was an attempt to provide stimuli that represented other emotion terms apart from the most common ones which are sadness, happiness, and anger (Warrenburg, 2020a). To validate whether these 28 music compositions were able to convey their intended emotion, a rating study was carried out.…”

“…Another limitation highlighted in current literature is that the majority of previous studies utilised commercial recordings of existing music as stimuli, mostly classical and popular music (Eerola & Vuoskoski, 2013; Warrenburg, 2020a). When commercial music is utilised, it might create familiarity bias issues which cannot be controlled, as participants might have had prior exposure to the stimuli (Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008).…”

Dissecting the groove experience: The role of instrumentation, low-level audio features, and personal musical background.

“…The sparse understanding of how the stimulus quality, instrumentation, or composition of the stimuli might affect the experience of groove also points to the difficulties in explaining the mechanisms of how and why different versions of stimuli might have an impact on the groove experience. In other fields of music psychology research, for instance, in music and emotion, two reviews (Eerola & Vuoskoski, 2013; Warrenburg, 2020) have already pointed to certain biases regarding the influence of stimulus selection on the observed effects.…”

Chills in music: A systematic review

“…Empirical studies of music-evoked emotions most often feature stimuli pertaining to MECs (Warrenburg, 2020), such that a large quantity of music which can cause MECs has been documented in the academic literature on MECs. With the aim of facilitating more integrated research on MECs, we have compiled Chills in Music (ChiM), a dataset which contains, to our knowledge, all pieces of music which have been reported to elicit MECs in the literature reviewed in this article 2 .…”