The Feeling of Music Past: How Listeners Remember Musical Affect

Abstract

This study was conducted to determine how listeners derive global evaluations of past musical durations from moment-to-moment experience. Participants produced moment-to-moment affective intensity ratings by pressing a pressure-sensitive button while listening to various selections. They later reported the remembered affective intensity of each example. The data suggest that the assumption that remembered affect equals the sum of all momentary affects fundamentally misrepresents how listeners encode and label past affective experiences. The duration of particular rather than uniform episodes contributes minimally to remembered affect (duration neglect). Listeners rely on the peak of affective intensity during a selection, the last moment, and moments that are more emotionally intense than immediately previous moments to determine postperformance ratings. The peak proves to be the strongest predictor of remembered affect. We derive a formula that takes moment-to-moment experience as input and predicts how listeners will remember musical affect. The formula is a better predictor of postperformance affect than any other on-line characteristic considered. Last, the utility of the formula is demonstrated through a brief examination of compositional decisions in a string quartet movement by Borodin and one typical format of four-movement symphonies from the classical period.

Modeling continuous self-report measures of perceived emotion using generalized additive mixed models.

“…Continuous self-report measurement requires a participant to watch or listen to a stimulus and continuously report on the nature of their perception, feeling, or understanding of that stimulus as they are perceiving it-providing real-time feedback on their current state in response to the stimulus. Rozin, Rozin, and Goldberg (2004) have emphasized the importance of continuous response in understanding the emotion induced by music and provide evidence that summative judgments (taken after the stimulus has finished) differ from those taken during the stimulus. However, Schubert (2010) discussed the difficulties that researchers face in developing statistical techniques that can cope with the fluctuations over time and inherent nonlinearity that characterize continuous self-report data.…”

Formiranje globalne retrospektivne evaluacije: zanemarivanje trajanja iskustva i pravilo vrhunca i kraja

“…Potpuno ili djelomično zanemarivanje trajanja potvrđeno je u istraživanjima u kojima su sudionici trpjeli bol (Kahneman, Frederickson, Schreiber i Redelmeier, 1993;Ariely, 1998), slušali neugodne zvukove (Ariely, 1998;Schreiber i Kahneman, 2000), slušali poznatu ili klasičnu glazbu (Rozin, Rozin i Goldberg, 2004), jeli ili zamišljali kako jedu (Rode, Rozin i Durlach, 2007), procjenjivali privlačnost niza monetarnih transakcija (Langer, Sarin i Weber, 2005), procjenjivali kvalitetu televizijskoga prijenosa (Hands i Avons, 2001) i gledali televizijske reklame (Baumgartner, Sujan i Padgett, 1997). Osim eksperimentalne provjere, fenomen zanemarivanja trajanja potvrđen je i u realnim uvjetima.…”

Our Varying Histories and Future Potential: Models and Maps in Science, the Humanities, and in Music Theory

“…However, there is convincing evidence to show that listeners also remember emotional peaks and emotional endings (see Rozin, Rozin, & Goldberg, 2004). What this means in terms of memory is that any theory that deals with only the structural aspects of a work provides only half an analysis, ignoring altogether the remembered affective structuring.…”