Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music

Abstract

It has long been debated which aspects of music perception are universal and which are developed only after exposure to a specific musical culture. Here, we report a crosscultural study with participants from a native African population (Mafa) and Western participants, with both groups being naive to the music of the other respective culture. Experiment 1 investigated the ability to recognize three basic emotions (happy, sad, scared/fearful) expressed in Western music. Results show that the Mafas recognized happy, sad, and scared/fearful Western music excerpts above chance, indicating that the expression of these basic emotions in Western music can be recognized universally. Experiment 2 examined how a spectral manipulation of original, naturalistic music affects the perceived pleasantness of music in Western as well as in Mafa listeners. The spectral manipulation modified, among other factors, the sensory dissonance of the music. The data show that both groups preferred original Western music and also original Mafa music over their spectrally manipulated versions. It is likely that the sensory dissonance produced by the spectral manipulation was at least partly responsible for this effect, suggesting that consonance and permanent sensory dissonance universally influence the perceived pleasantness of music.

Emotion recognition in music changes across the adult life span

“…Like in facial expressions and in speech prosody, basic emotions can be universally recognized in music (Balkwill & Thompson, 1999;Fritz et al, 2009) and recognition can occur within less than a second (Peretz, Gagnon, & Bouchard, 1998). The identification of emotions in music is highly consistent across subjects (Bigand, Vieillard, Madurell, Marozeau, & Dacquet, 2005;Thompson, 2009) and it has been shown to correlate with emotional intelligence (Resnicow, Salovey, & Repp, 2004).…”

Neuroaesthetics and beyond: new horizons in applying the science of the brain to the art of dance

“…What is clear so far is that more indepth inquiry into the aesthetic evaluation of artworks should turn toward investigation of the underlying physical properties and changes within the brain as it is solely this organ that is responsible for generating and evaluating aesthetic experience. For such reasons, in recent years, philosophers, physicists, engineers, and biologists who study the brain have increasingly been interested to a scientific approach to the study of aesthetics in a number of domains, giving rise to the emerging field of neuroaesthetics (e.g., Fritz et al 2009;Jacobsen et al 2006;Koelsch 2010;Limb and Braun 2008;Nadal et al 2008;Zaidel 2005;Zatorre et al 2007;Zeki 2000).…”

Functional specializations for music processing in the human newborn brain

“…Dissonance and consonance are basic perceptual properties of tones sounding together, and the perception of consonance and dissonance relies on properties of the auditory pathway, presumably independent of extended auditory experience (11,28,29). Particularly in Western listeners, consonant tone combinations are perceived as more pleasant than permanently dissonant ones (26,27,29) and 2-month old infants already show a preference of consonance over dissonance (11,30,31). We used the dissonant stimuli of set 3 to investigate whether neonates' brains are sensitive to dissonance.…”