Emotional expression in music: contribution, linearity, and additivity of primary musical cues

Abstract

The aim of this study is to manipulate musical cues systematically to determine the aspects of music that contribute to emotional expression, and whether these cues operate in additive or interactive fashion, and whether the cue levels can be characterized as linear or non-linear. An optimized factorial design was used with six primary musical cues (mode, tempo, dynamics, articulation, timbre, and register) across four different music examples. Listeners rated 200 musical examples according to four perceived emotional characters (happy, sad, peaceful, and scary). The results exhibited robust effects for all cues and the ranked importance of these was established by multiple regression. The most important cue was mode followed by tempo, register, dynamics, articulation, and timbre, although the ranking varied across the emotions. The second main result suggested that most cue levels contributed to the emotions in a linear fashion, explaining 77–89% of variance in ratings. Quadratic encoding of cues did lead to minor but significant increases of the models (0–8%). Finally, the interactions between the cues were non-existent suggesting that the cues operate mostly in an additive fashion, corroborating recent findings on emotional expression in music (Juslin and Lindström, 2010).

Music-induced changes in functional cerebral asymmetries

“…The current study revealed that Mozart's piano sonata in D major (K. 448) and Beethoven's Moonlight sonata differed in several basic musical and acoustic features such as dynamics, articulation event density, rhythm attack time, timbre centroid, tonal mode and rhythm tempo. This is in line with previous research identifying the primary musical cues that contribute to emotional expressions (e.g., Eerola et al, 2013;Gagnon and Peretz, 2003;Hunter et al, 2010;Gabrielsson and Lindström, 2010;Eerola et al, 2012). Furthermore, functional cerebral asymmetries have been reported for processing such features (Okamoto et al, 2007;Zatorre and Belin, 2001).…”

“…These emotions are conveyed via a combination of musical features, although the central ones are considered to be tempo, mode, and timbre (Schellenberg et al, 2000;Eerola et al, 2013). Music that sounds happy typically has fast tempo, is in major mode, has high number of events, utilises bright sounds and is performed in with fast note attacks.…”

An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music

“…For instance, sadness expressed by music is associated with a consistent set of affective cues [18], which may convey the emotion even across cultures [19] and to young children [20].…”

Creating Affective Visual Music

“…It also indicates that music and visual music have the potential to create more unanimity of affect than emotion. This is corroborated by research demonstrating that affective cues may convey expressing sadness across cultures (Laukka et al 2013), unfamiliar music can induce sadness via 'emotional contagion' a mechanism that relies on affective cues, but sad music can induce joyful emotion (Eerola et al 2017). …”

“…Eerola et al (2013, p.487) found that though music expressing sadness is often analogous to a human voice expressing sadness on an affective level, emotions induced by music may be different from those expressed by the music. Eerola, et al (2017) have interrogated the paradox of enjoying a negative emotion such as sadness in music from a stance of scientific realism. They found the enjoyment of sadness in music has a moderate link to psychological and interpersonal mechanisms underpinning the recognition of feeling.…”