Musical Expression of Moodstates

Three different age groups (5- and 10-year-old children, and adults) were asked to link a number of selected excerpts of music to one of the four moodstates: "happiness", "sadness", "fear" and "anger" (represented by facial expressions). The consensus of choices was considerable, even among the youngest children, and increased with age. Fear and anger were harder to identify in music than happiness and sadness. In the case of anger, this is probably caused by the phenomenon that the subjects (especially the youngest children) were often inclined to answer not by identifying the character of the stimulus, but in terms of the character of their response: fear. In a preliminary experiment in which a group of adult subjects was asked to judge a large number of moodstates for their possible expression in music, we found some indications that music expresses the positive-negative value and the degree of activity of a moodstate particularly well. The position of happiness, sadness and anger on those dimensions is quite clear. Fear is probably harder to express by music since its position on the activity dimension is less well-defined.

"Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature.... "(Stravinsky, 1936)

"People usually complain that music is so ambiguous; that it is so doubtful what they ought to think when they hear it; whereas everyone understands words. With me it is entirely the converse.... The thoughts which are expressed to me by a piece of music which I love are not too undefinite to be put in words, but on the contrary too definite. "(Mendelssohn, 1842)