Music and felt emotions: How systematic pitch level variations affect the experience of pleasantness and arousal

Jaquet, Lucas; Danuser, Brigitta; Gomez, Patrick

doi:10.1177/0305735612456583

Cited by 39 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 50 publications

(126 reference statements)

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“…Considerable effort has been devoted to identify 'universal' cues intrinsic within music to determine the communication of specific emotion [e.g., [5][6][7][8][9], however, considerably less research has focused on extra-musical [e.g., 10,11] and culture-specific cues [e.g., [12][13][14]. Furthermore, the specifics of the cultural component remain to be understood.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Musical emotions in the absence of music: A cross-cultural investigation of emotion communication in music by extra-musical cues

Susino

Schubert

2020

PLoS ONE

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Research in music and emotion has long acknowledged the importance of extra-musical cues, yet has been unable to measure their effect on emotion communication in music. The aim of this research was to understand how extra-musical cues affect emotion responses to music in two distinguishable cultures. Australian and Cuban participants (N = 276) were instructed to name an emotion in response to written lyric excerpts from eight distinct music genres, using genre labels as cues. Lyrics were presented primed with genre labels (original priming and a false, lured genre label) or unprimed. For some genres, emotion responses to the same lyrics changed based on the primed genre label. We explain these results as emotion expectations induced by extra-musical cues. This suggests that prior knowledge elicited by lyrics and music genre labels are able to affect the musical emotion responses that music can communicate, independent of the emotion contribution made by psychoacoustic features. For example, the results show a lyric excerpt that is believed to belong to the Heavy Metal genre triggers high valence/high arousal emotions compared to the same excerpt primed as Japanese Gagaku, without the need of playing any music. The present study provides novel empirical evidence of extra-musical effects on emotion and music, and supports this interpretation from a multi-genre, cross-cultural perspective. Further findings were noted in relation to fandom that also supported the emotion expectation account. Participants with high levels of fandom for a genre reported a wider range of emotions in response to the lyrics labelled as being a song from that same specific genre, compared to lower levels of fandom. Both within and across culture differences were observed, and the importance of a culture effect discussed.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Musical emotions in the absence of music: A cross-cultural investigation of emotion communication in music by extra-musical cues

Susino

Schubert

2020

PLoS ONE

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“…However, in their experiment, the chords were played only in a single octave (C4) and exclusively with C roots. Hence, the results could be due to register differences between the inversions (e.g., the major triad’s second inversion being higher in register than the root position and the first inversion), as pitch height reportedly affects actual music perception (e.g., Ilie & Thompson, 2006 ; Jaquet, Danuser, & Gomez, 2014 ). Thus, we feel that with regard to the triadic inversions, the randomization of chord roots across two octaves can tell us more about the role of register in accounting for the results of Lahdelma and Eerola (2016) .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mild Dissonance Preferred Over Consonance in Single Chord Perception

Lahdelma

Eerola

2016

i-Perception

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Previous research on harmony perception has mainly been concerned with horizontal aspects of harmony, turning less attention to how listeners perceive psychoacoustic qualities and emotions in single isolated chords. A recent study found mild dissonances to be more preferred than consonances in single chord perception, although the authors did not systematically vary register and consonance in their study; these omissions were explored here. An online empirical experiment was conducted where participants (N = 410) evaluated chords on the dimensions of Valence, Tension, Energy, Consonance, and Preference; 15 different chords were played with piano timbre across two octaves. The results suggest significant differences on all dimensions across chord types, and a strong correlation between perceived dissonance and tension. The register and inversions contributed to the evaluations significantly, nonmusicians distinguishing between triadic inversions similarly to musicians. The mildly dissonant minor ninth, major ninth, and minor seventh chords were rated highest for preference, regardless of musical sophistication. The role of theoretical explanations such as aggregate dyadic consonance, the inverted-U hypothesis, and psychoacoustic roughness, harmonicity, and sharpness will be discussed to account for the preference of mild dissonance over consonance in single chord perception.

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“…Pitch can model the harmonic as well as the melodic aspect of the music and is thus a good low-level feature. It has also been shown that the systematic changes in pitch level can affect the experience of pleasantness and arousal 26 . Thus, we extracted three features based on the pitch: keyclarity, mode, and harmonic flux 23 .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Affective Multimedia Content on the Electroencephalogram and Facial Expressions

Siddharth

Jung

Sejnowski

2019

Sci Rep

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Most of the research in the field of affective computing has focused on detecting and classifying human emotions through electroencephalogram (EEG) or facial expressions. Designing multimedia content to evoke certain emotions has been largely motivated by manual rating provided by users. Here we present insights from the correlation of affective features between three modalities namely, affective multimedia content, EEG, and facial expressions. Interestingly, low-level Audio-visual features such as contrast and homogeneity of the video and tone of the audio in the movie clips are most correlated with changes in facial expressions and EEG. We also detect the regions associated with the human face and the brain (in addition to the EEG frequency bands) that are most representative of affective responses. The computational modeling between the three modalities showed a high correlation between features from these regions and user-reported affective labels. Finally, the correlation between different layers of convolutional neural networks with EEG and Face images as input provides insights into human affection. Together, these findings will assist in (1) designing more effective multimedia contents to engage or influence the viewers, (2) understanding the brain/body bio-markers of affection, and (3) developing newer brain-computer interfaces as well as facial-expression-based algorithms to read emotional responses of the viewers.

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Music and felt emotions: How systematic pitch level variations affect the experience of pleasantness and arousal

Cited by 39 publications

References 50 publications

Musical emotions in the absence of music: A cross-cultural investigation of emotion communication in music by extra-musical cues

Musical emotions in the absence of music: A cross-cultural investigation of emotion communication in music by extra-musical cues

Mild Dissonance Preferred Over Consonance in Single Chord Perception

Impact of Affective Multimedia Content on the Electroencephalogram and Facial Expressions

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