Musicae Scientiae

According to the Hindustani music tradition, the ability of a song to induce certain emotions depends on the time of day: playing a song at the right time is said to maximise its emotional effect. The present exploratory study investigated this claim by combining findings in chronobiology, mood research and music perception. It has already been established that some aspects of our mood fluctuations follow a cyclical pattern. Besides, it is a known fact that our current mood influences our perception and assessment of emotions. However, these elements have never been linked together in a study examining the effect of mood cyclicity on perceived emotions in music. To test the hypothesis of a link between the two, Western film music excerpts were played to 36 participants at two different times (9 a.m. and 4 p.m.). Their task was to rate the perceived emotional content of each clip. The results showed that sad and tender clips were rated higher on sadness and tenderness in the morning compared to the afternoon. Furthermore, the more tired the participants were in the afternoon, the higher was their perception of fear in angry and fearful music. Although the reported effect sizes were small, these findings could have important implications for ethnomusicologists, emotion researchers and music therapists.

Music is frequently used to support emotional health and well-being, with emotion regulation the most commonly reported mechanism. Music-based emotion regulation has not yet been extensively investigated within the broader emotion regulation framework. The effects of music-based emotion regulation on emotional state and well-being outcomes have also rarely been tested in real time. The current study aimed to determine the consequences of emotion regulation strategies used during music listening, in terms of hedonic outcomes, and associations with emotional health and well-being. A sample of 327 participants used the MuPsych application (app), a mobile experience sampling methodology designed for the real-time and ecologically-valid measurement of personal music listening. Results revealed that using music to regulate a recently experienced emotion (response-focused strategies) yielded the greatest hedonic success, but was associated with poorer emotional health and well-being. Music-based emotion regulation differed from non-music emotion regulation findings in several key ways, suggesting that music-based emotion regulation does not occur in accordance with the process model. This supported the notion that personal music listening is utilized as an independent regulatory resource, allowing listeners to reach specific emotional goals. Regulation strategies are selected to reach a desired hedonic outcome, based on initial mood, and influenced by emotional health and well-being.

This study focuses on the affective experiences of listening to self-identified sad music. Previous studies have concentrated on the emotions induced by music by rationalizing and labelling emotions. However, focusing on such categorization leaves the subjective experiences of the individual aside. The aim of this article is to broaden the methodology of studying music and emotion by analysing the metaphorical language used in the narratives about the subjective experience of listening to music. A total of 373 participants answered open-ended questions about the experiences of listening to sad music via an online survey. The responses were then analysed using systematic thematic analysis concentrating on the metaphors used in participants’ narratives. The aim was to identify interesting themes not usually attainable through conventional self-report methods. The analysis thus focused on how affective experiences were narrated, and what kinds of metaphors and metonymies were used in describing them. The narratives were put into two categories: (I) spatial metaphors, and (II) metaphors of movement. The analysis also showed similarities in metaphorical mappings of the listening experience and its conceptualization by individuals.

Thirty rhythmic music excerpts were presented to 60 individuals. Dance movements to each excerpt were recorded using an optical motion-capture system, preference for each excerpt recorded on a 5-point Likert scale, and personality assessed using the 44-item version of the Big Five Inventory. From the movement data, a large number of postural, kinematic and kinetic features were extracted, a subset of which were chosen for further analysis using sequential backward elimination with variance inflation factor (VIF) selection. Multivariate analyses revealed significant effects on these 11 features of both preference and personality, as well as a number of interactions between the two. As regards preference, a U-shaped curvilinear relationship between excerpt preference and amount of movement was identified, hypothesized to relate to the role of emotional arousal in guiding music preference and dance moves. As regards personality, a different pattern of movement characteristics was associated with each of the Big Five dimensions, broadly supporting previous work.

The association between major/minor tonality and positive/negative emotional valence is psychologically robust, but without a single accepted explanation. I compare six partially related theories. Dissonance: On average, passages in minor keys are more dissonant because, on average, the minor triad is more dissonant (rougher, less harmonic) or because tonal structure is more complex. Alterity and markedness: Major triads and scales are more common than minor, and positive valence is more common than negative. Major and positive valence are the norm; minor and negative are marked Others. Uncertainty: The minor triad has a more ambiguous (less salient) root than the major, and the minor scale has more variable form and a more ambiguous (less stable) tonic; uncertainty is associated with anger, sadness, distress, and grief. Speech: By comparison to major triads and scales, minor contain pitch(es) that are lower than expected – just as sad speech is lower than expected. Salience: In diatonic chord progressions, flattened diatonic scale degrees are more salient than sharpened because their harmonics better match the prevailing scale. Scale degrees 3 and 6 are more likely to destabilize tonality in minor than major tonalities. Familiarity: Arbitrary emotional differences between major and minor were reinforced in a historical process of cultural differentiation. For each theory, there are credible arguments and evidence for and against. All theories are broadly consistent with Terhardt’s pattern-recognition model of pitch perception (non-musical perceptual familiarity with the harmonic series), Schenker’s concept of prolongation (specifically, tonal voice leading as a prolongation of the tonic triad), evolutionary explanations of the emotional connotations of alterity, and a psychohistory of tonality in which melody, polyphony, leading tones, and the major–minor system emerged at different times, explicable by different psychological principles.

“Strong experiences of music”—to use Alf Gabrielsson’s (2011) term—commonly, but apparently paradoxically, seem to involve people in both losing themselves and finding themselves in music. How can this be? Who or what is lost, and, equally, who or what is found, and how can they both happen together? In this paper I offer an approach to these questions, framed within the perspectives of musical consciousness and musical subjectivity, that attempts to bring together perceptual, emotional and embodied components of musical experience, embedded in the ecology of everyday listening. In doing so, I also argue for the importance of paying proper attention to phenomenological qualities of listeners’ experiences, for the historically specific and changing nature of human subjectivity experienced through music, and for a dynamic and animated understanding of musical engagement.