It's not what you play, it's how you play it: Timbre affects perception of emotion in music

Abstract

Salient sensory experiences often have a strong emotional tone, but the neuropsychological relations between perceptual characteristics of sensory objects and the affective information they convey remain poorly defined. Here we addressed the relationship between sound identity and emotional information using music. In two experiments, we investigated whether perception of emotions is influenced by altering the musical instrument on which the music is played, independently of other musical features. In the first experiment, 40 novel melodies each representing one of four emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, or anger) were each recorded on four different instruments (an electronic synthesizer, a piano, a violin, and a trumpet), controlling for melody, tempo, and loudness between instruments. Healthy participants (23 young adults aged 18–30 years, 24 older adults aged 58–75 years) were asked to select which emotion they thought each musical stimulus represented in a four-alternative forced-choice task. Using a generalized linear mixed model we found a significant interaction between instrument and emotion judgement with a similar pattern in young and older adults (p < .0001 for each age group). The effect was not attributable to musical expertise. In the second experiment using the same melodies and experimental design, the interaction between timbre and perceived emotion was replicated (p < .05) in another group of young adults for novel synthetic timbres designed to incorporate timbral cues to particular emotions. Our findings show that timbre (instrument identity) independently affects the perception of emotions in music after controlling for other acoustic, cognitive, and performance factors.

The Effects of Bayan Tabla Timbre on Stimulus Discrimination and Perception of Music Emotion in a Dangdut Music Fans, Neutral, and Haters Group

“…These results indicate that the slower attack of bayan timbre (in M1) was still more potential to give effect higher on the perception of happy emotion than the faster attack of bayan timbre (in M3) ( Tables 3-5 and Figures 3-5). These results do not support the findings of Kotlyar and Morozov [2,15].…”

“…In addition, instrument timbre can also affect the perception of emotion because, according to Hailstone et al [2] timbre as an instrument of identity can affect the emotional perception of music (such as joy, sadness, fear, anger), where synthetic timbre with slow attack associated sadness, while fast attack linked angry or happy, but it should be noted that this effect was also controlled by acoustic, cognitive, and another behavioral factors. According to Padova et al [3] timbre can affect recognition memory and emotional response of the subject, but this effect was also controlled by genres (music types) and gender (female better than male) [2,3] findings still raises fundamental theoretical issues concerning the factors which control the response over the subjects of musical timbre between whether the factor of acoustic instruments (including attack-decay) or cognitive factors such as the preference of the genre. Interesting issue to be answered by testing the effects of bayan tabla timbre on stimulus discrimination and perception of music emotion in a dangdut music fans, neutral, and haters group (on the subject of men and women).…”

“…According to Fletcher and Rossing [6] the instrument consisting of a dayan tube and a bayan tube (which was bass). Assuming that the sound of 'nduut' bass that was more produced than bayan tabla then by controlling factors of the dangdut music preference and gender of the subject, the timbre effect tested on stimulus discrimination and the perception of musical emotion likes; strong-not strong [7] happyunhappy [2] fun-not fun and erotic-not erotic [5] in the context of the musical response test.…”

“You Can’t Play a Sad Song on the Banjo:” Acoustic Factors in the Judgment of Instrument Capacity to Convey Sadness

“…In contrast, instruments like the 'cello and the cor anglais are commonly regarded as better suited for conveying nominally sad affect. The effect of instrumentation on perceived affect is evident in experiments carried out by Hailstone et al (2009). Happy, sad, angry and fearful melodies were played on different instruments (piano, violin, trumpet and synthesizer).…”

The Emotional Characteristics of Bowed String Instruments with Different Pitch and Dynamics

“…The other categories are distinctly different from these four, but frequently occur in music expression markings. Other researchers have also used some of these (or related) emotional categories [55][56][57]. These emotional categories also provide easy comparison with the results in [24-30, 36, 37, 47, 58].…”