In this paper, I address the question of how emotional qualities can be attributed to musical timbre, an acoustic feature that has proven challenging to explain using traditional accounts of musical emotions. I begin presenting the notion of musical expressiveness, as it has been conceived by cognitivists to account for the emotional quality of various musical elements like melody and rhythm. However, I also point out some limitations in these accounts, which hinder their ability to fully elucidate the emotional expressiveness (...) of timbre, especially when considering it as a result of non-cognitively mediated processes. Consequently, I explore the link between timbre and atmosphere by reviewing anecdotal sources that have characterized timbre in terms of atmosphere. The goal here is to determine if these characterizations should be seen as merely allusive and metaphoric expressions or if they genuinely reveal essential properties of timbre. To achieve this goal, I delve deeper into the notion of atmosphere, and I show that it shares several key traits with the notion of musical emotions as conceived in the cognitivist’s account. Both musical emotions and atmospheres are affectively charged externalities that are apprehended by the subject without cognitive mediation. Drawing from this insight, I conclude that the notion of atmosphere can serve as a valuable tool in explaining the emotional expressivity of timbre without invoking the resemblance-based mechanisms often found in cognitive accounts of expressiveness. (shrink)

Metal music today is bathed in a glow of serenity relative to its function as designated by Soviet authorities only thirty years ago. Mikhail Gorbachev permitted a Monsters of Rock concert to be st...

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)

This thesis is about moods in works of art, and how moods expressed in art can change how we view the world. Among those who speak of the value of discussing moods in philosophical aesthetics, it is normally assumed that the value of moods is in the way they are induced in the viewer of the work. In this thesis, I will argue that such an argument is not the best. Those who think moods are not relevant to aesthetics have (...) only to argue either that being induced with emotions is not an ideal way of approaching art, or that such reactions as being induced with mood belong to the more rare cases of approaching art. Therefore, focusing on how moods are induced hinders the potential of discussing moods in art. Instead I argue that the value of moods is in the way they are expressed. I argue that moods can be understood as a form of symbolic schemas. They affect how the world appears, and how one sorts and organizes things in the world. One can therefore use moods as resources for getting knowledge about the world. Because some works of art express moods, where expression is understood as metaphorical exemplification, they make the viewer epistemically aware of the mood. Thus one can imagine being in the mood expressed. Thereby moods can lead to knowledge, also in cases where they are not literally induced. When one succesfully imagines being in an expressed mood, parts of the world are sorted and organized differently as in accordance with the mood. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss some differences between empathy with real persons and empathy with fictional characters. Philosophers who have thought about th.

Listening to music can be an intensely moving experience. Many people love music in part because of its power to alter or amplify their moods, and turn to music for inspiration, comfort, or therapy. It is a puzzle, then, why many of us spend so much time listening to sad music. If music can influence our moods, and assuming that most people would prefer to be happy not sad, why would we choose to listen to sad music? I revisit the (...) question of why we like sad music, drawing from work in both the philosophy and psychology of music, as well as work in the philosophy and science of affect. I argue to shift the focus of the question to music-induced moods, not emotions. This reframes the debate but does not dissolve the paradox. To understand what is appealing about the affective experience of listening to sad music I suggest we take into account the unique features of music-induced sad mood. I argue that sad mood and a certain sort of focused music listening are mutually reinforcing in ways that differ from other mood/music interactions. Sad mood and sad music are, in a sense, made for each other. (shrink)

Philosophers of music and psychologists have examined the various ways in which music is capable of arousing emotions in a listener. Among philosophers, opinions diverge as to the different types of music-induced emotions and as to their relevance to music listening. A somewhat neglected question concerns the possibility of developing a general criterion for the artistic relevance of music-induced emotions. In this paper, I will try to formulate such a criterion. In whatever way music may induce emotions and regardless of (...) the sorts of emotion music is taken to arouse, a given emotion will qualify as artistically relevant if and only if it is caused by appropriate listening, it is dependent on features of the piece of music as a work of art and is capable of further directing our attention to such features. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beardsley for the Twenty-First CenturySusan L. Feagin (bio)When I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art,1 published originally in 1968, was all the rage, eclipsing Beardsley's monumental Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism as the most important book in the field at the time. Goodman's book veered decidedly away from aesthetics and toward the philosophy of art; insofar as "the aesthetic" remained, (...) it was explained in cognitive terms. However, Beardsley's Aesthetics continued to provide a valuable resource for those of us who took questions about value and evaluation to be central to the philosophical enterprise, even if we chose to focus on the philosophy of art more or less independently of the aesthetic. Beardsley's functionalist account of aesthetic value is adaptable as a framework for understanding artistic value and evaluation, as is his opposition to (what also seemed to me to be) the too-easy ploy of attributing intrinsic value to our experiences of art. I ended up writing my dissertation on general criteria of criticism—with a chapter devoted to Beardsley's views—arguing that once one employs the notion of artworks having a function, general criteria are not needed to provide a logical connection between a work's good-making or bad-making qualities and its value as a work of art.Nevertheless, Beardsley's instrumentalist view that the value of an artwork resides in its capacity to provide an aesthetic experience contains a major structural problem—what I shall call "Beardsley's dilemma," which he continued to struggle with in his later work.2 The problem lies in the tension between the claim that the value of a work resides in its capacity to evoke an experience having a certain phenomenological quality, and the claim that the properties or qualities of the work are valuable not merely as a means for producing such an experience. [End Page 11]Fifty years on, philosophers of art continue to struggle with this dilemma in various guises. Though the nature of aesthetic experience is still a lively topic of debate, it is just as common to find the evocation of emotions and other affective responses—from Aristotelian pity and fear; to anger and pride and horror; to moods such as sadness and melancholy—touted as among the functions of art.3 In the first section of this essay, I describe why understanding Beardsley's dilemma is important if one takes having emotions and other affective responses to art as part of what is valuable about it. Emotions, after all, are typically alleged to be "in us," not in the object; simply jettisoning the concept of aesthetic experience or aesthetic emotion does not make the dilemma go away. In the second section I distinguish between Beardsley's instrumentalism and a noninstrumentalist version of functionalism as two different models for understanding art's value. Noninstrumentalist functionalism involves the idea that the value of a work lies in the activity of appreciating what is (aesthetically or artistically) valuable about it, rather than in an experience that occurs as a result of perceiving the work. Some exercises involving the evaluation of art and nonart objects—exercises that might usefully be undertaken by students using objects of their own choosing—illustrate how functionalism skirts Beardsley's dilemma and better explicates the nature and locus of the values concerned.I: From Aesthetic Experience to Garden-Variety EmotionsThe view that at least some artworks have as part of their function the production of emotions or other affective responses is a contemporary analogue of Beardsley's instrumentalist view that the function of artworks is to provide an aesthetic experience. The contemporary analogue, however, is not committed to the view that all artworks have, in some abstract sense, the same function but only insists, minimally, that it is at least part of the function of some works of art to produce some variety of emotions and other affective responses. That is, producing emotions may be conceived of as part of the function of a work, and a perceiver's having them as part of appreciating its value.Beardsley's dilemma arises when (at... (shrink)