What does music express? Basic emotions and beyond

Abstract

Numerous studies have investigated whether music can reliably convey emotions to listeners, and—if so—what musical parameters might carry this information. Far less attention has been devoted to the actual contents of the communicative process. The goal of this article is thus to consider what types of emotional content are possible to convey in music. I will argue that the content is mainly constrained by the type of coding involved, and that distinct types of content are related to different types of coding. Based on these premises, I suggest a conceptualization in terms of “multiple layers” of musical expression of emotions. The “core” layer is constituted by iconically-coded basic emotions. I attempt to clarify the meaning of this concept, dispel the myths that surround it, and provide examples of how it can be heuristic in explaining findings in this domain. However, I also propose that this “core” layer may be extended, qualified, and even modified by additional layers of expression that involve intrinsic and associative coding. These layers enable listeners to perceive more complex emotions—though the expressions are less cross-culturally invariant and more dependent on the social context and/or the individual listener. This multiple-layer conceptualization of expression in music can help to explain both similarities and differences between vocal and musical expression of emotions.

Metaphor and music emotion: Ancient views and future directions

“…the understanding of pitch in terms of height is typically found in Western thought, but not necessarily in Eastern music discourse). This observation is consistent with a multi-layered conceptualisation of musical expression of emotions, whereby a (relatively culturally invariant) 'core' of basic emotions interacts with (context-dependent) additional layers enabling the expression and perception of complex emotions (Juslin, 2013). The resulting consideration is that CM is central to music (Zbikowski, 2008) on account of its combining physiological (universal) and cultural (contextual) aspects of music experience, which it achieves by acting both as a 'cognitive process', and as a 'cultural process ' (Mac Cormac, 1985, pp.…”

“…It is commonly held that listeners perceive music as both expressive (Gabrielsson & Juslin, 2003;Juslin, 2013) and evocative of emotions (Dowling & Harwood, 1986), and that this property is music's primary purpose (Cooke, 1959), and man's primary motive for engaging with it (Juslin & Laukka, 2004). The pervasiveness of this notion is illustrated by the widespread use of music in contexts in which the effectiveness of music to induce emotional states is taken for granted -e.g.…”

Hidden sources of joy, fear, and sadness: Explicit versus implicit neural processing of musical emotions

“…We hypothesized that cortical and subcortical areas of the limbic system would be important in implicit emotion processing as they are evolutionarily old areas associated with basic emotion responses even in non-primate mammals (Damasio & Carvalho, 2013). We thus expected to observe limbic activity during implicit processing, substantiating the hypothesis that musical emotions can be similar to reflexes, subcortically generated and not requiring the subject's awareness (Peretz, 2006;Juslin, 2013;Panksepp & Bernatzky, 2002). In contrast, for explicit emotion processing, we predicted recruitment of prefrontal areas, such as the dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, related to the conceptual act of categorizing emotions (Koelsch, 2014;Smith & Jonides, 1999;Burunat et al, in press), and parietooccipial areas, important for attentional focusing (Ptak, 2012).…”

Laras concept and its triggers: A case study on garap of jineman Uler Kambang

“…Almost all Javanese karawitan players enjoy their performance either directly or through audio visual recording document including that uploaded by Suharto (2013) (Juslin, 2013). This video has been viewed by more than 40,000 people and of those, 161 people show that they enjoy the video by giving their thumbs up.…”