The sound of arousal in music is context-dependent

Abstract

These authors contributed equally to this study.Humans, and many non-human animals, produce and respond to harsh, unpredictable, nonlinear sounds when alarmed, possibly because these are produced when acoustic production systems (vocal cords and syrinxes) are overblown in stressful, dangerous situations. Humans can simulate nonlinearities in music and soundtracks through the use of technological manipulations. Recent work found that film soundtracks from different genres differentially contain such sounds. We designed two experiments to determine specifically how simulated nonlinearities in soundtracks influence perceptions of arousal and valence. Subjects were presented with emotionally neutral musical exemplars that had neither noise nor abrupt frequency transitions, or versions of these musical exemplars that had noise or abrupt frequency upshifts or downshifts experimentally added. In a second experiment, these acoustic exemplars were paired with benign videos. Judgements of both arousal and valence were altered by the addition of these simulated nonlinearities in the first, music-only, experiment. In the second, multi-modal, experiment, valence (but not arousal) decreased with the addition of noise or frequency downshifts. Thus, the presence of a video image suppressed the ability of simulated nonlinearities to modify arousal. This is the first study examining how nonlinear simulations in music affect emotional judgements. These results demonstrate that the perception of potentially fearful or arousing sounds is influenced by the perceptual context and that the addition of a visual modality can antagonistically suppress the response to an acoustic stimulus.

Embodied Listening and Timbre

“…This confirmed our prediction of limbic recruitment, perhaps indicating greater intensity, arousal, and ecological urgency signaled by timbral qualities perceived to be ''noisy'' (Blumstein et al, 2012). Numerous studies have implicated the amygdala in emotion processing (Phelps & LeDoux, 2005)-particularly negative, high arousal emotions such as fear (Noesselt, Driver, Heinz, & Dolan, 2005) and aggression (Beaver, Lawrence, Passamonti, & Calder, 2008)-and the amygdala has been found to be preferentially involved in aversive responses to sound (Blood, Zatorre, Bermudez, & Evans, 1999;Kumar et al, 2012;Scott et al, 1997;Zald & Pardo, 2002).…”

“…There are ethological reasons to postulate that noisy timbres would elicit a more vehement motor and limbic response than nonnoisy timbres (Blumstein, Bryant, & Kaye, 2012). Noisy timbres possess enhanced salience owing in part to the physical arousal correlated with their production, typically in moments of heightened anger or alarm.…”

Do birds differentiate between white noise and deterministic chaos?

“…Further, nonlinear phenomena present in film soundtracks have been used to elicit fearful responses in humans (Blumstein, Davitian, & Kaye, 2010). Some singers intentionally incorporate biphonation, subharmonics, and abrupt frequency changes into their vocal performances to add musical effect (Neubauer, Edgerton, & Herzel, 2003), and studies have shown that nonlinearities added to music are emotionally evocative (Blumstein, Bryant, & Kaye, 2012).…”

Enjoy The Violence: Is appreciation for extreme music the result of cognitive control over the threat response system?

“…Musical emotions are studied as communicative signals that are encoded in sound by a performer, then decoded by the listening audience (Juslin and Laukka 2003), for whom hearing music as expressive involves registering its resemblance with the bodily or vocal expressions of such or such mental state (Juslin and Västfjäll 2008). For instance, joyful music is often associated with fast pace and animated pitch contours (as is happy speech), melancholic music with slower and flatter melodic lines and dark timbres (as is sad speech), and exciting music with high intensity and high levels of distortion and roughness (as may be an angry shout) (Juslin and Laukka 2003;Ilie and Thompson 2006;Escoffier et al 2013;Blumstein et al 2012).…”