Harmonic organisation conveys both universal and culture-specific cues for emotional expression in music

Abstract

Previous research conducted on the cross-cultural perception of music and its emotional content has established that emotions can be communicated across cultures at least on a rudimentary level. Here, we report a cross-cultural study with participants originating from two tribes in northwest Pakistan (Khow and Kalash) and the United Kingdom, with both groups being naïve to the music of the other respective culture. We explored how participants assessed emotional connotations of various Western and non-Western harmonisation styles, and whether cultural familiarity with a harmonic idiom such as major and minor mode would consistently relate to emotion communication. The results indicate that Western concepts of harmony are not relevant for participants unexposed to Western music when other emotional cues (tempo, pitch height, articulation, timbre) are kept relatively constant. At the same time, harmonic style alone has the ability to colour the emotional expression in music if it taps the appropriate cultural connotations. The preference for one harmonisation style over another, including the major-happy/minor-sad distinction, is influenced by culture. Finally, our findings suggest that although differences emerge across different harmonisation styles, acoustic roughness influences the expression of emotion in similar ways across cultures; preference for consonance however seems to be dependent on cultural familiarity.

Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries

“…Experimental efforts to compare aspects of music perception across cultures have revealed striking differences along with commonalities (17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29), but have in all previous cases been limited to comparisons of small numbers of societies. As a result, the existence of universal perceptual phenomena that might constrain music, as well as the extent of cross-cultural variation in perception, has remained unclear.…”

“…However, such analyses of musical corpora have largely relied on Western-trained researchers to annotate what they hear when listening to recordings from other cultures, with the unavoidable possibility that researchers' perceptual biases influence the results. Controlled comparisons of actual perception of music from participants in diverse societies have thus far been limited to comparisons between small numbers of societies (17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29), or participants on the internet who plausibly have extensive exposure to a similar distribution of music as that consumed by typical Western participants. In addition, experiments in Western non-musicians have in some cases failed to find evidence for discrete musical features (30,31).…”

Sweetness is in the ear of the beholder: chord preference across United Kingdom and Pakistani listeners

“…The current study is a part of a bigger project investigating the perception of music among these two remote Northwest Pakistani tribes-the aim of this paper is to investigate how single isolated chords (vertical harmony) are perceived as opposed to looking at background harmonizations in longer musical excerpts (horizontal harmony) across these two non-Western tribes and UK listeners. 37 The Kalash are a remote Indo-European/Aryan polytheistic community, and the Kho people (the tribe is referred to as Khow, and the people are referred to as Kho) are the native Muslim population of the region of Chitral (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province) in Northwest Pakistan. To investigate the research question, we have chosen four different chord types (see Table 1) that vary considerably in relation to their conventional affective connotations and the amount of consonance/dissonance contained in them: major, minor, and augmented triads, and the chromatic cluster, which is a cluster of adjacent pitch-classes (one semitone apart).…”

Sonic Seasoning and Other Multisensory Influences on the Coffee Drinking Experience

“…It has long been known that listening to music provides an effective means of communicating affect, and possibly also basic emotions (e.g., Konečni, 2008;Reybrouck and Eerola, 2017; though see Cespedes-Guevara and Eerola, 2018). The musical manipulation of our emotional state, then, provides another means by which what we hear can influence what we taste, and how much we enjoy the experience (though there may be some cultural differences to be aware of Athanasopoulos et al, 2021). For instance, illustrating the impact of induced emotion on taste, Noel and Dando (2015) conducted a study in which people had to rate a sweet-sour drink at the end of an ice hockey game.…”