Tuomas Eerola

Durham University | DU · Department of Music

THE FIELD OF MUSIC AND EMOTION RESEARCH HAS grown rapidly and diversified during the last decade. This has led to a certain degree of confusion and inconsistency between competing notions of emotions, data, and results. The present review of 251 studies describes the focus of prevalent research approaches, methods, and models of emotion, and docume...

The contrast between consonance and dissonance is vital in making music emotionally meaningful. Consonance typically denotes perceived agreeableness and stability, while dissonance disagreeableness and a need of resolution. This study addresses the perception of consonance/dissonance in single intervals and chords with two empirical experiments con...

The recent surge of interest towards the paradoxical pleasure produced by sad music has generated a handful of theories and an array of empirical explorations on the topic. However, none of these have attempted to weigh the existing evidence in a systematic fashion. The present work puts forward an integrative framework laid out over three levels o...

Humans have a unique ability to coordinate their motor movements to an external auditory stimulus, as in music-induced foot tapping or dancing. This behavior currently engages the attention of scholars across a number of disciplines. However, very little is known about its earliest manifestations. The aim of the current research was to examine whet...

Studies in the field of emotions have yielded mixed findings regarding differences between women’s and men’s emotional reactivity. In the majority, emotional scenes, facial expressions, and movies were used as stimuli. However, music has been less frequently used, despite its capacity to evoke strong emotional responses in the listeners. In this st...

We present a novel framework for music and emotion research that addresses emotional experiences with music as functional episodes. This framework, called the Episode Model, places the situation and the function of the music for the individual at the centre of the experience and integrates acts of affective self-regulation to our understanding of m...

Consonance and dissonance generally have positive and negative associations, respectively, in Western tonal music. A negatively associated event is known to enhance the listener’s positive appreciation of the following event, and this is referred to as the contrast effect. The question then is: does dissonance enhance the pleasantness of the follow...

The emotional properties of music are influenced by a host of factors, such as timbre, mode, harmony, and tempo. In this paper, we consider how two of these factors, mode (major vs. minor) and timbre interact to influence ratings of perceived valence, reaction time, and recognition memory. More specifically, we considered the notion of congruence —...

Non-isochronous meters (NI), involving combinations of unequal beats, are more prevalent in some cultures. Previous studies have shown that Isochronous meters (ISO), common in Western rhythms, are better recognized than NI meters. Short passive exposure doesn’t enhance NI meter recognition in unfamiliar adults, and musicians outperform non-musician...

Over a decade of advocacy and policy reforms have attempted to increase the uptake of transparent research practices in the field of psychology; however, their collective impact is unclear. We estimated the prevalence of transparent research practices in (a) all psychology journals (i.e., field-wide); and (b) prominent psychology journals, by manua...

We present a novel framework for music and emotion research that addresses emotional experiences with music as functional episodes. This framework, called the Episode Model, places the situation and the function of the music for the individual at the centre of the experience and integrates acts of affective self-regulation to our understanding of m...

Research on music psychology has increased exponentially over the past half century, providing insights on a wide range of topics underpinning the perception, cognition, and production of music. This wealth of research means we are now in a place to develop broad, testable theories on the psychology of music, with the potential to impact our wider...

This study tested whether chords that do not differ in acoustic roughness but that have distinct affective connotations are strong enough to prime negative and positive associations measurable with an affective priming method. We tested whether musically dissonant chords low in valence (diminished, augmented) but that contain little acoustic roughn...

A fundamental task for research on music cognition is to pinpoint the exact roles of nature and nurture in the perception of consonance/dissonance, i.e., the relative agreeableness and stability versus disagreeableness and instability of concurrent pitch combinations. In this experiment listeners (N = 133) from two cultural groups (Indian and Weste...

There is debate whether the foundations of consonance and dissonance are rooted in culture or in psychoacoustics. In order to disentangle the contribution of culture and psychoacoustics, we considered automatic responses to the perfect fifth and the major second (flattened by 25 cents) intervals alongside conscious evaluations of the same intervals...

Over the last decades, theoretical perspectives in the interdisciplinary field of the affective sciences have proliferated rather than converged due to differing assumptions about what human affective phenomena are and how they work. These metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions, shaped by academic context and values, have dictated affective const...

There is debate whether the foundations of consonance and dissonance are rooted in culture or in psychoacoustics. In order to disentangle the contribution of culture and psychoacoustics, we considered automatic responses to the perfect fifth and the major second (flattened by 25 cents) intervals alongside conscious evaluations of the same intervals...

Multiple approaches have been used to investigate how musical cues are used to shape different emotions in music. The most prominent approach is a perception study, where musical stimuli varying in cue levels are assessed by participants in terms of their conveyed emotion. However, this approach limits the number of cues and combinations simultaneo...

The enjoyment and pleasure derived from sad music has sparked fascination among researchers due to its seemingly paradoxical nature in producing positive affect. Research is yet to develop a comprehensive understanding of this “paradox.” Contradictory findings have resulted in a great variability within the literature, meaning results and interpret...

Listening to music prompts strong emotional reactions in the listeners but relatively little research has focused on individual differences. This study addresses the role of musical preference and familiarity on emotions induced through music. A sample of 50 healthy participants (25 women) listened to 42 excerpts from the FMMS during 8 s while thei...

This registered report considers how emotion induced in an auditory modality (music) can influence affective evaluations of visual stimuli (words). Specifically, it seeks to determine which emotional dimension is transferred across modalities – valence or arousal – or whether the transferred dimension depends on the focus of attention (feature-spec...

We present here a unifying framework for affective phenomena: the Human Affectome. By synthesizing a large body of literature, we have converged on definitions that disambiguate the commonly used terms—affect, feeling, emotion, and mood. Based on this definitional foundation, and under the premise that affective states reflect allostatic concerns,...

This article is a hypothesis and theory paper. It elaborates on the possible relation between music as a stimulus and its possible effects, with a focus on the question of why listeners are experiencing pleasure and reward. Though it is tempting to seek for a causal relationship, this has proven to be elusive given the many intermediary variables t...

This paper discusses contemporary advancements in the affective sciences (described together as skeptical theories) that can inform the music-emotion literature. Key concepts in these theories are outlined, highlighting their points of agreement and disagreement. This summary shows the importance of appraisal within the emotion process, provides a...

Demography, particularly population size, plays a key role in cultural complexity. However, the relationship between population size and complexity appears to vary across domains: while studies of technology typically find a positive correlation, the opposite is true for language, and the role of population size in complexity in the arts remains to...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0244964.].

As of recent a consensus is emerging in the field of music perception research that the Western notion of consonance/dissonance is a combination of the acoustic phenomena of roughness and harmonicity, and the cultural aspect of familiarity. In this commentary we point out in the light of cumulative research evidence (cross-cultural research, rigoro...

Previous literature suggests that structural and expressive cues affect the emotion expressed in music. However, only a few systematic explorations of cues have been done, usually focussing on a few cues or a limited amount of predetermined arbitrary cue values. This paper presents three experiments investigating the effect of six cues and their co...

The perception of consonance and dissonance in intervals and chords is influenced by psychoacoustic and cultural factors. Past research has provided conflicting observations about the role of frequency in assessing musical consonance that may stem from comparisons of limited frequency bands without much theorizing or modeling. Here we examine the e...

Although music is one of the most important sources of pleasure for many people, there are considerable individual differences in music reward sensitivity. Behavioral and neurobiological characterizations of music reward variability have been topics of increasing scientific interest over the last two decades. However, it is not clear how difference...

The Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance Data Collection (IEMPDC) comprises six related corpora of music research materials: Cuban Son & Salsa (CSS), European String Quartet (ESQ), Malian Jembe (MJ), North Indian Raga (NIR), Tunisian Stambeli (TS), and Uruguayan Candombe (UC). The core data for each corpus comprises media files and comput...

Anecdotal propositions that music is “special” as a memory cue have been partially supported by research demonstrating that music can evoke qualitatively different autobiographical memories than various other cues. However, it is unknown whether such differences in memory qualities may be attributed to inherent differences in properties of the retr...

Online studies using recruitment services (such as Prolific or Amazon’s MTurk) and online testing platforms (such as Gorilla or PsyToolkit) are becoming increasingly common in psychological science. Although auditory disciplines have been slower to adopt these methods, uptake is rapidly increasing in auditory perception and cognition research. Util...

Emotion is one of the main reasons why people engage and interact with music [1] . Songs can express our inner feelings, produce goosebumps, bring us to tears, share an emotional state with a composer or performer, or trigger specific memories. Interest in a deeper understanding of the relationship between music and emotion has motivated research...

A positive correlation between population size and cultural complexity is perhaps one of the most consistent findings in the field of cultural evolution. However, previous findings are largely based on studies of technology and are not necessarily generalisable across diverse cultural domains. We investigate the relationship between population size...

It is unclear how music elicits chills (emotional experiences accompanied by goosebumps, shivers, and tingling sensations), and what psychological mechanisms underlie the response. Crucially, current explanations of chills struggle to encapsulate the variability of results linking the experience to musical features, psychophysiological activity, an...

Several computer systems have been designed for music emotion research that aim to identify how different structural or expressive cues of music influence the emotions conveyed by the music. However, most systems either operate offline by pre-rendering different variations of the music or operate in real-time but focus mostly on structural cues. We...

The aim of the present study is to determine which acoustic components of harmonic consonance and dissonance influence automatic responses in a simple cognitive task. In a series of affective priming experiments, eight pairs of musical intervals were used to measure the influence of acoustic roughness and harmonicity on response times in a word-cla...

Many people enjoy sad music, and the appeal for tragedy is widespread among the consumers of film and literature. The underlying mechanisms of such aesthetic experiences are not well understood. We tested whether pleasure induced by sad, unfamiliar instrumental music is explained with a homeostatic or a reward theory, each of which is associated wi...

The majority of research in the field of music perception has been conducted with Western participants, and it has remained unclear which aspects of music perception are culture dependent, and which are universal. The current study compared how participants unfamiliar with Western music (people from the Khowar and Kalash tribes native to Northwest...

Acoustic and musical components of consonance and dissonance perception have been recently identified. This study expands the range of predictors of consonance and dissonance by three analytical operations. In Experiment 1, we identify the underlying structure of a number of central predictors of consonance and dissonance extracted from an extensiv...

Music can be a potent cue for autobiographical memories in both everyday and clinical settings. Understanding the extent to which music may have privileged access to aspects of our personal histories requires critical comparisons to other types of memories and exploration of how music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) vary across individuals...

Previous research conducted on the cross-cultural perception of music and its emotional content has established that emotions can be communicated across cultures at least on a rudimentary level. Here, we report a cross-cultural study with participants originating from two tribes in northwest Pakistan (Khow and Kalash) and the United Kingdom, with b...

Interpersonal musical entrainment—temporal synchronization and coordination between individuals in musical contexts—is a ubiquitous phenomenon related to music’s social functions of promoting group bonding and cohesion. Mechanisms other than sensorimotor synchronization are rarely discussed, while little is known about cultural variability or about...

The authors respond to the commentary by Michael Spitzer which appeared in Vol. 14, No. 1-2 of Empirical Musicology Review. The response 1) points out the problem with equating nostalgia and tension in the perception of single chords, 2) makes a case for why studying the role of vertical harmony, isolated from other musical cues, is insightful, and...

The literature review reveals different conceptual and methodological challenges in the field of music and emotion, such as the lack of agreement in terms of standardized datasets, and the need for replication of prior findings. Our study aimed at validating for Spanish population a set of film music stimuli previously standardized in Finnish sampl...

Acoustic and musical components of consonance and dissonance perception have been recently identified. This study expands the range of predictors of consonance and dissonance by three analytical operations: In the first stage, we identify the underlying structure of acoustic and musical predictors within a large set of potential variables using an...

Music is often intimately linked to identity, as evidenced by the high value many people place on musical activities and the way in which music can become seemingly effortlessly coupled to important memories from throughout one’s lifespan. Previous research has revealed a consistent reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory—the disproportionate...

The aim of the present study is to determine which acoustic components of harmonic consonance and dissonance influence automatic responses in a simple cognitive task. In a series of experiments, ten musical interval pairs were used to measure the influence of acoustic roughness and harmonicity on response times in an affective priming task conducte...

Investigating cues that underpin perceptual judgments of interpersonal coordination has important implications for understanding sociocognitive evaluations of the quality of human interactions. With a focus on musical interpersonal coordination, we conducted 2 experiments investigating the impact of music style, modality of stimulus presentation, r...

The authors respond to the commentary of Michael Spitzer which appeared in Vol. 14, No. 1-2 of Empirical Musicology Review. The response 1) points out the problem with equating between nostalgia and tension in the perception of single chords, 2) makes a case why studying the role of vertical harmony isolated from other musical cues is insightful, a...

After losing a close other, individuals usually confide in an empathic friend to receive comfort and they seem to have a heightened desire for mood-congruent, consoling music. Hence, it has been proposed that affect-congruent music acts as a social surrogate for an empathic friend. Thus, we hypothesized that listening to comforting music, as a resp...

Previous studies using an affective priming paradigm have shown that valenced chords (e.g., consonant–positive; dissonant–negative) facilitate the evaluation of similarly valenced target words. The role of numerosity (the total number of pitches in a chord) and timbre has not yet been systematically investigated in previous priming studies using co...

The contrast between consonance and dissonance is a vital factor in making music emotionally meaningful. Consonance typically denotes perceived agreeableness and stability, while dissonance in turn disagreeableness and a need of resolution. The current research addresses the perception of consonance/dissonance in intervals and chords isolated from...

Dance is an icon of human expression. Despite astounding diversity around the world’s cultures and dazzling abundance of reminiscent animal systems, the evolution of dance in the human clade remains obscure. Dance requires individuals to interactively synchronize their whole-body tempo to their partner’s, with near-perfect precision. This capacity...

Numerous computer systems have been designed for music emotion research, aiming to identify how different structural and expressive cues of a musical piece affect the emotion conveyed by the music and perceived by the listener. However, most systems are either offline systems, which work by pre-rendering different variations of the music, or real-t...

Art brings rich, pleasurable experiences to our daily lives. However, many theories of art and aesthetics focus on specific strong experiences—in the contexts of museums, galleries, and concert halls and the aesthetic perception of canonized arts—disregarding the impact of daily experiences. Furthermore, pleasure is often treated as a simplistic co...

Two complementary aspects of interpersonal entrainment – synchronization and movement coordination – are explored in North Indian classical instrumental music, in the auditory and visual domains respectively. Sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) is explored by analysing pairwise asynchronies between the event onsets of instrumental soloists and their...

Experiencing pleasure and displeasure is a fundamental part of life. Hedonics guide behavior, affect decision-making, induce learning, and much more. As the positive and negative valence of feelings, hedonics are core processes that accompany emotion, motivation, and bodily states. Here, the affective neuroscience of pleasure and displeasure that h...

Studies have suggested that visual imagery forms an important part of the listening experience and might be one of the mechanisms by which music induces emotions in a listener. However, little is known about the content, prevalence, and function of visual imagery during music listening. To that end, an online survey was constructed to explore music...

Experiencing pleasure and displeasure is a fundamental part of life. Hedonics guide behavior, affect decision-making, induce learning, and much more. As the positive and negative valence of feelings, hedonics are core processes that accompany emotion, motivation, and bodily states. Here, the affective neuroscience of pleasure and displeasure that h...

Music is known to evoke emotions through a range of mechanisms, but empirical investigation into the mechanisms underlying different emotions is sparse. This study investigated how affective experiences to music and pictures vary when induced by personal memories or mere stimulus features. Prior to the experiment, participants were asked to select...

Research on musical chills has linked the response to multiple musical features; however, there exists no study that has attempted to manipulate musical stimuli to enable causal inferences, meaning current understanding is based mainly on correlational evidence. In the current study, participants who regularly experience chills (N = 24) listened to...

In Hindustani vocal improvisation singers often appear to engage with melodic ideas by manipulating imaginary objects with their hands while singing (Rahaim, 2012 and personal observations), such as through stretching, pulling, pushing and other effortful interactions, during which they seem to act as if they are encountering an increased resistanc...

The social surrogacy hypothesis holds that people resort to temporary substitutes, so-called social surrogates, if direct social interaction is not possible. In this exploratory study, we investigate social motives for listening to music in comparison to watching TV and reading fiction. Thirty statements about possible social reasons for the engage...