Emotion recognition in music changes across the adult life span

The emotions expressed through music have often been investigated by asking listeners to fill questionnaires at the end of a given musical performance or an excerpt; only few studies have been dedicated to the understanding of the dynamics of emotions expressed by music in laboratory or in social contexts. Based on a specific model of emotions related to music, the Geneva Emotion Music Scale (GEMS), we tested to what extent such dynamic judgments are reliable and might be a promising avenue to better understand how listeners are able to attribute different kinds of emotions expressed through music and how the social contexts might influence such judgments. The results indicate a high reliability between listeners for different musical excerpts and for different contexts of listening including concerts, i.e. a social context, and laboratory experiments.

Auditory Perception & Cogntion, 2021

Prior work has noted changes in musical cue use between the Classical and Romantic periods. Here we complement and extend musicological findings by blending score-based analyses with perceptual evaluations to provide new insight into this important issue. Participants listened to excerpts from either Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier or Chopin’s 24 Preludes – historically important sets drawn from distinct musical eras, with 12 major and 12 minor key pieces each. Participants selected one of five categories for each piece, adapted from previous musical analyses exploring historical changes in music’s cues. Combining participant classifications with score-extracted cues offers a useful way to complement and extend previous work exploring changes in the function of mode across musical eras based only on notational information. In doing so, we find evidence that changing associations of cues in the Romantic era influence judgments of affective meaning. This study provides a useful step toward bridging the divide between traditional approaches to musicology, music theory, and music perception by combining perceptual evaluations with cues extracted from musical scores to shed light on changes in musical emotion across eras.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2013

The aim of this study is to manipulate musical cues systematically to determine the aspects of music that contribute to emotional expression, and whether these cues operate in additive or interactive fashion, and whether the cue levels can be characterized as linear or non-linear. An optimized factorial design was used with six primary musical cues (mode, tempo, dynamics, articulation, timbre, and register) across four different music examples. Listeners rated 200 musical examples according to four perceived emotional characters (happy, sad, peaceful, and scary). The results exhibited robust effects for all cues and the ranked importance of these was established by multiple regression. The most important cue was mode followed by tempo, register, dynamics, articulation, and timbre, although the ranking varied across the emotions. The second main result suggested that most cue levels contributed to the emotions in a linear fashion, explaining 77-89% of variance in ratings. Quadratic encoding of cues did lead to minor but significant increases of the models (0-8%). Finally, the interactions between the cues were non-existent suggesting that the cues operate mostly in an additive fashion, corroborating recent findings on emotional expression in music (Juslin and Lindström, 2010).

Frontiers in Psychology, 2019

Previous research has shown that levels of musical training and emotional engagement with music are associated with an individual's ability to decode the intended emotional expression from a music performance. The present study aimed to assess traits and abilities that might influence emotion recognition, and to create a new test of emotion discrimination ability. The first experiment investigated musical features that influenced the difficulty of the stimulus items (length, type of melody, instrument, target-/comparison emotion) to inform the creation of a short test of emotion discrimination. The second experiment assessed the contribution of individual differences measures of emotional and musical abilities as well as psychoacoustic abilities. Finally, the third experiment established the validity of the new test against other measures currently used to assess similar abilities. Performance on the Musical Emotion Discrimination Task (MEDT) was significantly associated with high levels of self-reported emotional engagement with music as well as with performance on a facial emotion recognition task. Results are discussed in the context of a process model for emotion discrimination in music and psychometric properties of the MEDT are provided. The MEDT is freely available for research use.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2011

Adults and children 5, 8, and 11 years of age listened to short excerpts of unfamiliar music that sounded happy, scary, peaceful, or sad. Listeners initially rated how much they liked each excerpt. They subsequently made a forced-choice judgment about the emotion that each excerpt conveyed. Identification accuracy was higher for young girls than for young boys, but both genders reached adult-like levels by age 11. High-arousal emotions (happiness and fear) were better identified than low-arousal emotions (peacefulness and sadness), and this advantage was exaggerated among younger children. Whereas children of all ages preferred excerpts depicting high-arousal emotions, adults favored excerpts depicting positive emotions (happiness and peacefulness). A preference for positive emotions over negative emotions was also evident among females of all ages. As identification accuracy improved, liking for positively valenced music increased among 5-and 8-year-olds but decreased among 11-year-olds.

marcocosta.it

The study tested the hypothesis that people's emotion knowledge enables them to recognize subtle differences in the emotional quality expressed by a musical piece, and thus to distinguish Tenderness (T), Sadness (S), Anger (A) , and Fear (F) one from another, ...

Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge, 2015

The goal of this study was to evaluate the impact of the inclusion of listener-related factors (individual differences) on the prediction of music induced affect. A group of 24 subjects listened to a set of music excerpts previously demonstrated to express specific emotional characteristics (in terms of Arousal and Valence), and we collected information related to listeners' stable (personality, emotional intelligence, attentiveness, music preferences) and transient (mood, and physiological activity) states. Through a series of regression analysis we identified those factors which have a significant explanatory power over the affective states induced in the listeners. Our results show that incorporating information related to individual differences permits to identify more accurately the affective states induced in the listeners, which differ from those expressed by the music.

2009

During the creative process music composers draw on mechanisms in order to convey emotion to the listener. Within specific cultural contexts audiences have general agreement on the emotional connotations of these mechanisms. This type of auditory learning suggests a framework of musical features which categorizes music based on emotion. This study seeks to investigate the relationship between perceived emotion and musical features in the context of western popular music. A method of gathering participant responses to a corpus of music is presented based on a time continuous methodology. This measurement approach provides high resolution listener responses in terms of arousal and valence parameters. To identify musical features, audio signal analysis techniques are applied to the corpus and a base feature set is obtained. This feature set comprises acoustical and structural descriptions of the corpus which include a range of characteristics from low-level spectral features to high-level melodic representations. A description of this extraction process is discussed with particular emphasis on the interaction between acoustical and structural parameters. A comparison of listener responses to musical features moves towards identifying an optimal feature set for identifying perceived emotion.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2008

Research indicates that people value music primarily because of the emotions it evokes. Yet, the notion of musical emotions remains controversial, and researchers have so far been unable to offer a satisfactory account of such emotions. We argue that the study of musical emotions has suffered from a neglect of underlying mechanisms. Specifically, researchers have studied musical emotions without regard to how they were evoked, or have assumed that the emotions must be based on the "default" mechanism for emotion induction, a cognitive appraisal. Here, we present a novel theoretical framework featuring six additional mechanisms through which music listening may induce emotions: (1) brain stem reflexes, (2) evaluative conditioning, (3) emotional contagion, (4) visual imagery, (5) episodic memory, and (6) musical expectancy. We propose that these mechanisms differ regarding such characteristics as their information focus, ontogenetic development, key brain regions, cultural impact, induction speed, degree of volitional influence, modularity, and dependence on musical structure. By synthesizing theory and findings from different domains, we are able to provide the first set of hypotheses that can help researchers to distinguish among the mechanisms. We show that failure to control for the underlying mechanism may lead to inconsistent or non-interpretable findings. Thus, we argue that the new framework may guide future research and help to resolve previous disagreements in the field. We conclude that music evokes emotions through mechanisms that are not unique to music, and that the study of musical emotions could benefit the emotion field as a whole by providing novel paradigms for emotion induction.

Previous research investigating emotions, has often used the circumplex model, which posits that emotions can be understood in terms of two dimensions: valence and arousal. While numerous studies have supported this, the research has employed small sample of music. In contrast, the present research 143,353 pieces of music to test whether the energy and beats per minute of music (as proxies for arousal) and popularity as expressed by sales charts (as a proxy for pleasantness) can predict scores on six moods. Findings concerning energy were clearly consistent with the circumplex model; findings for beats per minute were consistent though more equivocal; and findings concerning popularity yielded only limited support. A second set of analyses considered variations between genres on each of the six moods, finding that there were also numerous relationships between popularity and mood, indicative of the commercial market for music in specific genres; and there was evidence of considerable differences in the mood scores between genres. In addition to the circumplex model and aesthetic responses to music, these results also have implications for music marketing, therapy, and everyday listening.