Music has strong emotional powers. How are we to understand affective responses to music? What does music teach us about emotions? Why are musical emotions important? Despite the rich literature in philosophy and the empirical sciences, particularly psychology and neuroscience, little attention has been paid to integrating these approaches. This extensive review aims to redress this imbalance and establish a mutual dialogue between philosophy and the empirical sciences by presenting the main philosophical puzzles from an affective science perspective. The chief (...) problem is contagion. Sometimes, listeners perceive music as expressing some emotion and this elicits the same emotion in them. Contagion is perplexing because it collides with the leading theory of emotions as experiences of values. This article mostly revolves around the critical presentation of the philosophical solutions to this problem in light of recent developments in emotion theory and affective science. It also highlights practical issues, particularly the role of musical emotions in well-being and health, by tackling the paradox of sad music, i.e., the question of why people enjoy sad music. It thus bridges an important gap between theoretical and real-life issues as well as between philosophical and empirical investigations on affective responses to music. (shrink)

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are being investigated as an access pathway to communication for individuals with physical disabilities, as the technology obviates the need for voluntary motor control. However, to date, minimal research has investigated the use of BCIs for children. Traditional BCI communication paradigms may be suboptimal given that children with physical disabilities may face delays in cognitive development and acquisition of literacy skills. Instead, in this study we explored emotional state as an alternative access pathway to communication. We developed (...) a pediatric BCI to identify positive and negative emotional states from changes in hemodynamic activity of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). To train and test the BCI, 10 neurotypical children aged 8–14 underwent a series of emotion-induction trials over four experimental sessions (one offline, three online) while their brain activity was measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Visual neurofeedback was used to assist participants in regulating their emotional states and modulating their hemodynamic activity in response to the affective stimuli. Child-specific linear discriminant classifiers were trained on cumulatively available data from previous sessions and adaptively updated throughout each session. Average online valence classification exceeded chance across participants by the last two online sessions (with 7 and 8 of the 10 participants performing better than chance, respectively, in Sessions 3 and 4). There was a small significant positive correlation with online BCI performance and age, suggesting older participants were more successful at regulating their emotional state and/or brain activity. Variability was seen across participants in regards to BCI performance, hemodynamic response, and discriminatory features and channels. Retrospective offline analyses yielded accuracies comparable to those reported in adult affective BCI studies using fNIRS. Affective fNIRS-BCIs appear to be feasible for school-aged children, but to further gauge the practical potential of this type of BCI, replication with more training sessions, larger sample sizes, and end-users with disabilities is necessary. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWith over 560 citations reported on Google Scholar by April 2018, a publication by Juslin and Gabrielsson presented evidence supporting performers’ abilities to communicate, with hig...

Basic Emotion theory has had a tremendous influence on the affective sciences, including music psychology, where most researchers have assumed that music expressivity is constrained to a limited set of basic emotions. Several scholars suggested that these constrains to musical expressivity are explained by the existence of a shared acoustic code to the expression of emotions in music and speech prosody. In this article we advocate for a shift from this focus on basic emotions to a constructionist account. This approach (...) proposes that the phenomenon of perception of emotions in music arises from the interaction of music’s ability to express core affects and the influence of top-down and contextual information in the listener’s mind. We start by reviewing the problems with the concept of Basic Emotions, and the inconsistent evidence that supports it. We also demonstrate how decades of developmental and cross-cultural research on music and emotional speech have failed to produce convincing findings to conclude that music expressivity is built upon a set of biologically pre-determined basic emotions. We then examine the cue-emotion consistencies between music and speech, and show how they support a parsimonious explanation, where musical expressivity is grounded on two dimensions of core affect (arousal and valence). Next, we explain how the fact that listeners reliably identify basic emotions in music does not arise from the existence of categorical boundaries in the stimuli, but from processes that facilitate categorical perception, such as using stereotyped stimuli and close-ended response formats, psychological processes of construction of mental prototypes, and contextual information. Finally, we outline our proposal of a constructionist account of perception of emotions in music, and spell out the ways in which this approach is able to make solve past conflicting findings. We conclude by providing explicit pointers about the methodological choices that will be vital to move beyond the popular Basic Emotion paradigm and start untangling the emergence of emotional experiences with music in the actual contexts in which they occur. -/- . (shrink)

Together with language, music is perhaps the most distinctive behavioral trait of the human species. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in our species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the self-domestication view of human evolution, according to which the human phenotype is, at least in part, the outcome of a process similar to domestication in other mammals, triggered by (...) the reduction in reactive aggression responses to environmental changes. We specifically argue that self-domestication can account for some of the cognitive changes, and particularly for the behaviors conducive to the complexification of music through a cultural mechanism. We hypothesize four stages in the evolution of music under self-domestication forces: (1) collective protomusic; (2) private, timbre-oriented music; (3) small-group, pitch-oriented music; and (4) collective, tonally organized music. This line of development encompasses the worldwide diversity of music types and genres and parallels what has been hypothesized for languages. Overall, music diversity might have emerged in a gradual fashion under the effects of the enhanced cultural niche construction as shaped by the progressive decrease in reactive (i.e., impulsive, triggered by fear or anger) aggression and the increase in proactive (i.e., premeditated, goal-directed) aggression. (shrink)

A recently emerging view in music cognition holds that music is not only social and participatory in its production, but also in its perception, i.e. that music is in fact perceived as the sonic trace of social rela- tions between a group of real or virtual agents. While this view appears compatible with a number of intriguing music cognitive phenomena, such as the links between beat entrainment and prosocial behaviour or between strong musical emotions and empathy, direct evidence is lacking (...) that listeners are at all able to use the acoustic features of a musical interaction to infer the affiliatory or controlling nature of an underlying social intention. We created a novel experimental situation in which we asked expert music improvisers to communicate 5 types of non-musical social intentions, such as being domineering, dis- dainful or conciliatory, to one another solely using musical interaction. Using a combination of decoding studies, computational and psychoacoustical analyses, we show that both musically-trained and non musically-trained listeners can recognize relational intentions encoded in music, and that this social cognitive ability relies, to a sizeable extent, on the information processing of acoustic cues of temporal and harmonic coordination that are not present in any one of the musicians’ channels, but emerge from the dynamics of their interaction. By manipulating these cues in two-channel audio recordings and testing their impact on the social judgements of non-musician observers, we finally establish a causal relationship between the affiliation dimension of social behaviour and musical harmonic coordination on the one hand, and between the control dimension and musical temporal coordination on the other hand. These results provide novel mechanistic insights not only into the social cognition of musical interactions, but also into that of non-verbal interactions as a whole. (shrink)

Three experiments were conducted in order to validate 56 musical excerpts that conveyed four intended emotions (happiness, sadness, threat and peacefulness). In Experiment 1, the musical clips were rated in terms of how clearly the intended emotion was portrayed, and for valence and arousal. In Experiment 2, a gating paradigm was used to evaluate the course for emotion recognition. In Experiment 3, a dissimilarity judgement task and multidimensional scaling analysis were used to probe emotional content with no emotional labels. The (...) results showed that emotions are easily recognised and discriminated on the basis of valence and arousal and with relative immediacy. Happy and sad excerpts were identified after the presentation of fewer than three musical events. With no labelling, emotion discrimination remained highly accurate and could be mapped on energetic and tense dimensions. The present study provides suitable musical material for research on emotions.Keywords. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrevious research on the development of emotion recognition in music has focused on classical, rather than popular music. Such research does not consider the impact of lyrics on judgements...

We examined whether facial expressions of performers influence the emotional connotations of sung materials, and whether attention is implicated in audio-visual integration of affective cues. In Experiment 1, participants judged the emotional valence of audio-visual presentations of sung intervals. Performances were edited such that auditory and visual information conveyed congruent or incongruent affective connotations. In the single-task condition, participants judged the emotional connotation of sung intervals. In the dual-task condition, participants judged the emotional connotation of intervals while performing a secondary (...) task. Judgements were influenced by melodic cues and facial expressions and the effects were undiminished by the secondary task. Experiment 2 involved identical conditions but participants were instructed to base judgements on auditory information alone. Again, facial expressions influenced judgements and the effect was undiminished by the secondary task. The results suggest that visual aspects of music performance are automatically and preattentively registered and integrated with auditory cues. (shrink)

Music is universal at least partly because it expresses emotion and regulates affect. Associations between music and emotion have been examined regularly by music psychologists. Here, we review recent findings in three areas: (a) the communication and perception of emotion in music, (b) the emotional consequences of music listening, and (c) predictors of music preferences.

Although music is universal, there is a great deal of cultural variability in music structures. Nevertheless, some aspects of music processing generalize across cultures, whereas others rely heavily on the listening environment. Here, we discuss the development of musical knowledge, focusing on four themes: (a) capabilities that are present early in development; (b) culture-general and culture-specific aspects of pitch and rhythm processing; (c) age-related changes in pitch perception; and (d) developmental changes in how listeners perceive emotion in music.

Emotion regulation is an umbrella term to describe interactive, goal-dependent explicit and implicit processes that are intended to help an individual manage and shift an emotional experience. The primary window for appropriate emotion regulation development occurs during the infant, toddler, and preschool years. Atypical emotion regulation development is considered a risk factor for mental health problems and has been implicated as a primary mechanism underlying childhood pathologies. Current treatments are predominantly verbal- and behavioral-based and lack the opportunity to practice in-the-moment (...) management of emotionally charged situations. There is also an absence of caregiver-child interaction in these treatment strategies. Based on behavioral and neural support for music as a therapeutic mechanism, the incorporation of intentional music experiences, facilitated by a music therapist, may be one way to address these limitations. Musical Contour Regulation Facilitation is an interactive therapist-child music-based intervention for emotion regulation development practice in preschoolers. The Musical Contour Regulation Facilitation intervention uses the deliberate contour and temporal structure of a music therapy session to mirror the changing flow of the caregiver-child interaction through the alternation of high arousal and low arousal music experiences. The purpose of this paper is to describe the Therapeutic Function of Music, a theory-based description of the structural characteristics for a music-based stimulus to musically facilitate developmentally appropriate high arousal and low arousal in-the-moment emotion regulation experiences. The Therapeutic Function of Music analysis is based on a review of the music theory, music neuroscience, and music development literature and provides a preliminary model of the structural characteristics of the music as a core component of the Musical Contour Regulation Facilitation intervention. (shrink)

We examined liking for happy- and sad-sounding music as a function of exposure, which varied both in quantity (number of exposures) and in quality (focused or incidental listening). Liking ratings were higher for happy than for sad music after focused listening, but similar after incidental listening. In the incidental condition, liking ratings increased linearly as a function of exposure. In the focused condition, liking ratings were an inverted U-shaped function of exposure, with initial increases in liking (after 2 exposures) followed (...) by decreases (after 8 or 32 exposures). The results documented that: (1) sad music is liked as much as happy music in some instances; (2) frequency of exposure causes both familiarity (positive) and over-familiarity (negative) effects; and (3) effects of exposure on liking differ for focused and incidental listening. (shrink)

This study investigated person perception in respect of variables associated with affect in music following motor synchronization to music. Participants were tested in a task involving stepping with a researcher to the beat of slow or fast music in major or minor mode, following which measures concerning the synchronised partner were collected. Significant effects were found only for the ‘likeability’ measure, modulated by gender, suggesting that variables associated with affect perception in music, such as mode and tempo appear relevant for (...) person perception in a synchronization task in ways that differ for men and women. The results of this ‘proof of concept’ study indicate the need for further research on the effect of motor synchronization based on ecologically valid musical interaction tasks. (shrink)

An overview of the computational prediction of emotional responses to music is presented. Communication of emotions by music has received a great deal of attention during the last years and a large number of empirical studies have described the role of individual features (tempo, mode, articulation, timbre) in predicting the emotions suggested or invoked by the music. However, unlike the present work, relatively few studies have attempted to model continua of expressed emotions using a variety of musical features from audio-based (...) representations in a correlation design. The construction of the computational model is divided into four separate phases, with a different focus for evaluation. These phases include the theoretical selection of relevant features, empirical assessment of feature validity, actual feature selection, and overall evaluation of the model. Existing research on music and emotions and extraction of musical features is reviewed in terms of these criteria. Examples drawn from recent studies of emotions within the context of film soundtracks are used to demonstrate each phase in the construction of the model. These models are able to explain the dominant part of the listeners’ self-reports of the emotions expressed by music and the models show potential to generalize over different genres within Western music. Possible applications of the computational models of emotions are discussed. (shrink)

Illness narratives convey a person’s feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and descriptions of suffering and healing as a result of physical or mental breakdown. Recognized genres include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, and films. Like poets and playwrights, musicians also use their life experiences as fodder for their art. However, illness narratives as expressed through popular music are an understudied and underutilized source of insights into the experience of suffering, healing, and coping with illness, disease, and death. Greater attention to the value of (...) music within medical education is needed to improve students’ perspective-taking and communication. Like reading a good book, songs that resonate with listeners speak to shared experiences or invite them into a universe of possibilities that they had not yet imagined. In this article, we show how uncovering these themes in popular music might be integrated into medical education, thus creating a space for reflection on the nature and meaning of illness and the fragility of the human condition. We describe three kinds of illness narratives that may be found in popular music (autobiographical, biographical, and metaphorical) and show how developing skills of close listening through exposure to these narrative forms can improve patient-physician communication and expand students’ moral imaginations. (shrink)

This paper discusses contemporary empirical approaches to the topic of music and emotions that are conducted at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and musicology. I show that within this interdisciplinary programme a number of general issues were posed that are not that distant from the questions asked by the classical authors such as Stravinsky and Hanslick. The main purpose of the paper is to show that there are three areas of cognitive and behavioural activity of the listener and the respective (...) types of musical emotions: embodied emotions, cognitive emotions, as well as associative and contextual emotions. (shrink)