Making the Unfamiliar Familiar: The Effect of Exposure on Ratings of Unfamiliar Musical Chords

Abstract

Affective responses to music have been shown to be influenced by the psychoacoustic features of the acoustic signal, learned associations between musical features and emotions, and familiarity with a musical system through exposure. The present article reports two experiments investigating whether short-term exposure has an effect on valence and consonance ratings of unfamiliar musical chords from the Bohlen-Pierce system, which are not based on a traditional Western musical scale. In a pre- and post-test design, exposure to positive, negative and neutral chord types was manipulated to test for an effect of exposure on liking. In this paradigm, short-term (“mere”) exposure to unfamiliar chords produced an increase only in valence ratings for negative chords. In neither experiment did it produce an increase in valence or pleasantness ratings for other chord types. Contrast effects for some chord types were found in both experiments, suggesting that a chord’s affect (i.e., affective response to the chord) might be emphasised when the chord is preceded by a stimulus with a contrasting affect. The results confirmed those of a previous study showing that psychoacoustic features play an important role in the perception of music. The findings are discussed in light of their psychological and musical implications.

Investigating orthographic versus auditory cross-situational word learning with online and lab-based research

“…The analyses were conducted in the statistical program R (R Core Team, 2014) with the brms package (using Stan) (Bürkner, 2017(Bürkner, , 2018 R Core Team, 2014). Similar approaches have been used previously in Escudero et al, (2020) and Smit et al, (2019;2020;2020a). A comprehensive overview of the methods is described in Smit et al, (2019) and Escudero et al, (2020).…”

“…This prior was chosen with respect to the number of independent variables and their interaction in the model compared to the number of observations per participant (24). The use of weakly informative priors and the assessment of evidence from posteriors distributions instead of single-point maximum likelihoods makes Bayesian regression models resistant to overfitting Smit et al, 2020a).…”

“…In contrast with null-hypothesis significant testing (NHST), we here assess the evidence for a hypothesis by using evidence ratios (probability ratios or odds) which quantify the likelihood of the tested hypothesis against its alternative (Escudero et al, 2020;Smit et al, 2019;2020;2020a). Following Smit et al, (2019;2020;2020a,), and Escudero et al, (2020), we also use the guidelines that were proposed by Jeffreys (1998) as cited by Kruschke (2018):…”

Evaluative conditioning of responses to unfamiliar chords by exposure to valenced images

“…We tested for a mere exposure effect by comparing the no exposure with the negative exposure conditions and found that the higher liking ratings for positive chords when paired with negative exposure compared with no exposure are suggestive of a mere exposure effect. In a previous study, we examined happiness and pleasantness ratings of the same chords using a paradigm that was specifically designed to test for mere exposure (Smit et al, 2020). In that study, we only found an increase in happiness ratings after exposure for negative chords, but not for the other two chord types.…”

Emotional responses in Papua New Guinea show negligible evidence for a universal effect of major versus minor music

“…Although several possible origins have been proposed 10 , there is no consensus over exactly how harmony and pitch affect our emotions and to what extent these effects are culturally mediated or universal 2,5,[14][15][16][17][18][19][20] . Experiments conducted with Western participants have shown that emotions induced by psychoacoustic features related to the pitch content of the musical signal -such as roughness, harmonicity, spectral entropy, and mean pitch -are relevant not only for familiar musical examples, but also for unfamiliar microtonal stimuli [21][22][23] . Although this suggests that harmony and melody may have the capacity to communicate universally, mixed results have been obtained from four prior experimental investigations in remote communities without access to mass media: Mafa, Cameroon 24 ; Mebenzélé Pygmies, Congo 18 ; Tsimane', Bolivia 19 ; Khow and Kalash, Pakistan 25 .…”