Modelling the relationships between emotional responses to, and musical content of, music therapy improvisations

Abstract

This article reports a study in which listeners were asked to provide continuous ratings of perceived emotional content of clinical music therapy improvisations. Participants were presented with 20 short excerpts of music therapy improvisations, and had to rate perceived activity, pleasantness and strength using a computer-based slider interface. A total of nine musical features relating to various aspects of the music (timing, register, dynamics, tonality, pulse clarity and sensory dissonance) were extracted from the excerpts, and relationships between these features and participants' emotion ratings were investigated. The data were analysed in three stages. First, inter-dimension correlations revealed that ratings of activity and pleasantness were moderately negatively correlated, activity and strength were strongly positively correlated, and strength and pleasantness were moderately negatively correlated. Second, a series of cross-correlation analyses revealed that the temporal lag between musical features and listeners' dimension ratings differed across both variables and dimensions. Finally, a series of linear regression analyses produced significant feature prediction models for each of the three dimensions, accounting for 80 percent ( activity), 57 percent ( pleasantness ) and 84 percent ( strength) of the variance in participants' ratings. Activity was best predicted by high note density and high pulse clarity, pleasantness by low note density and high tonal clarity, and strength by high mean velocity and low note density. The results are discussed in terms of their fit with other work reported in the music psychology literature, and their relevance to clinical music therapy research and practice.

Clustering Affective Qualities of Classical Music: Beyond the Valence-Arousal Plane

“…Schimmack and Grob [19] proposed a three dimensional model that combines valence dimension with the energy-tension plane. For what specifically concerns music, studies have been conducted using dimensions such as solemnity [20], potency [21], [22], [23], tension [24], [25], kinetics [26], interest [27], strength [28]. A higher dimensional space has been proposed by Zentner et al [29] (including dimensions such as nostalgia, wonder, and trascendence), on the basis of a large scale study.…”

“…Some studies are based on synthetic acoustic stimuli [21], [22] or simple monophonic recordings [26], too different from realworld musical recordings. Other ones do not use computable features [20], [23], [24], [25], [30] or use features computed from MIDI signals [28]. In other cases, no significant correlation has been found between features and secondary dimensions [27].…”

What Strikes the Strings of Your Heart?—Feature Mining for Music Emotion Analysis

“…He also proposed the basic expressive functions of all twelve notes of scale. Luck stated that music often elicits emotion through emotional associations to specific chord progressions [40].…”

What Strikes the Strings of Your Heart?–Multi-Label Dimensionality Reduction for Music Emotion Analysis via Brain Imaging

“…He also proposed the basic expressive functions of all twelve notes of scale. Luck stated that music often elicits emotion through emotional associations to specific chord progressions [52].…”