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Music Structure and Emotional Response: Some Empirical Findings
Abstract
Eighty-three music listeners completed a questionnaire in which thev provided information about the occurrence of a range of physical reactions while listening to music. Shivers down the spine, laughter, tears and lump in the throat were reported by over 80(% of respondents. Respondents were asked to locate specific musical passages that reliably evoked such responses. Structural analysis of these passages showed that tears were most reliablN evoked by passages containing sequences and appogiaturas, while shivers were most reliably evoked by passages containing new or unexpected harmonies. The data generally support theoretical approaches to elmotion based on confirmations and violations of expectancv.
... For example, engagement with movie trailers led to cognitive and ER, driving interest and likelihood to watch. Music streaming services �ind matching music to mood increases ER and listening loyalty (Sloboda, 1991). While research has demonstrated the role of ER in music consumption more broadly, studies speci�ically investigating its impact in the context of traditional music are still limited. ...
... It heightens listeners' af�inity for music and engenders a deeper engagement in the musical experience, triggering a chain of ER (McDonnell et al., 2017). The conveyed emotions in a musical work stimulate listeners' emotional responses, subsequently impacting their emotional experiences and behaviors (Sloboda, 1991). ...
... Cognitive evaluations shaped by culture and experience determine emotional responses, providing insight into individual differences (McDonnell,2017;Large, 2008). Emotional contagion occurs when a listener perceives the emotion conveyed by a minor key or slow melody (Sloboda, 1991). ...
This study, focusing on Suzhou Pingtan, a traditional Chinese musical storytelling art form, investigates the impact of emotional resonance on consumer behavior in the traditional music market. Emotional resonance, defined as the emotional connection and degree of resonance between consumers and traditional music works, is explored through literature review and data collection. With 316 valid questionnaires gathered online, the study employs a questionnaire survey method to gauge consumers' emotional resonance towards Suzhou Pingtan and its correlation with consumption behavior. Utilizing data analysis techniques such as correlation and regression analysis, the research aims to elucidate the relationship between emotional resonance and consumer behavior. Tailored for local audiences, the questionnaire and structural equation model help unravel various influencing factors. The findings reveal that emotional resonance significantly affects consumers' evaluations on cognitive factors and indirectly impacts participation levels through behavioral intention. Additionally, consumer intention emerges as a partial mediator between emotional resonance and final consumer behavior. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of consumer behavior in the traditional music market, offering valuable insights for market practice and strategy formulation.
... For example, engagement with movie trailers led to cognitive and ER, driving interest and likelihood to watch. Music streaming services �ind matching music to mood increases ER and listening loyalty (Sloboda, 1991). While research has demonstrated the role of ER in music consumption more broadly, studies speci�ically investigating its impact in the context of traditional music are still limited. ...
... It heightens listeners' af�inity for music and engenders a deeper engagement in the musical experience, triggering a chain of ER (McDonnell et al., 2017). The conveyed emotions in a musical work stimulate listeners' emotional responses, subsequently impacting their emotional experiences and behaviors (Sloboda, 1991). ...
... Cognitive evaluations shaped by culture and experience determine emotional responses, providing insight into individual differences (McDonnell,2017;Large, 2008). Emotional contagion occurs when a listener perceives the emotion conveyed by a minor key or slow melody (Sloboda, 1991). ...
This study, focusing on Suzhou Pingtan, a traditional Chinese musical storytelling art form, investigates the impact of emotional resonance on consumer behavior in the traditional music market. Emotional resonance, defined as the emotional connection and degree of resonance between consumers and traditional music works, is explored through literature review and data collection. With 316 valid questionnaires gathered online, the study employs a questionnaire survey method to gauge consumers' emotional resonance towards Suzhou Pingtan and its correlation with consumption
behavior. Utilizing data analysis techniques such as correlation and regression analysis, the research aims to elucidate the relationship between emotional resonance and consumer behavior. Tailored for local audiences, the questionnaire and structural equation model help unravel various influencing
factors. The findings reveal that emotional resonance significantly affects
consumers' evaluations on cognitive factors and indirectly impacts
participation levels through behavioral intention. Additionally, consumer intention emerges as a partial mediator between emotional resonance and final consumer behavior. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of consumer behavior in the traditional music market, offering valuable insights for market practice and strategy formulation.
... Acoustic elicitors of MECs are low-level properties of the auditory signal. Early research on MECs identified a relationship with sudden dynamic changes, by analysing music scores for passages reported to elicit MECs by survey participants [14]. This relationship was confirmed empirically in subsequent research [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], in which loudness was extracted [or manually inspected from music scores, 19] around the onset of MECs experienced by participants when listening to music in a lab environment, which they reported either retrospectively or continuously by pressing a button or moving a slider. ...
... Musical elicitors of MECs are high-level properties of musical structure. In a seminal study from 1991, John Sloboda [14] found that musical passages associated with MECs (in 57 pieces supplied by 83 respondents to a questionnaire) included new or unprepared harmonies, sudden textural changes, melodic appoggiaturas, enharmonic changes, specific melodic or harmonic sequences, or prominent events arriving earlier than prepared for, in decreasing order of frequency. These self-reported effects of melodic and harmonic properties on MECs were confirmed in subsequent survey-based and empirical research [15,16,19,[25][26][27], notably through the identification of effects of structural transitions and alterations such as changes in tonality [25]. ...
... Rhythmic properties [27][28][29] and vocals [25,27] were also found to be involved, although there is a lack of specificity regarding which exact properties were associated with MECs. Additional findings revealed effects of crescendi, build-ups and climaxes [15,16,22,25,28,30], as well as textural changes [14,15,22,28], notably through the entrance of new instruments or the interplay between solo and background instruments [15,16,19,25,26]. It has been argued that research on musical elicitors reflects a hypothesised effect of musical expectation on MECs [2,14,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37], positing that most of the musical elicitors of MECs listed above could be related to violations of expectation. ...
Music-evoked chills (MECs) are physiological responses to pleasurable events in music. Existing research on properties of music that elicit MECs has focused on low-level acoustic features in small samples of music. We created a large dataset of over 1,000 pieces of music timestamped with MECs and used computational methods to predict MEC onsets from both low-level acoustic features and high-level musical expectations. A machine learning classifier was trained to distinguish MEC onsets from non-MEC passages in the same pieces. The results show that MEC onsets are predicted better than chance and corroborate evidence for acoustic elicitors of chills with a much larger dataset. They also produce new empirical evidence that MECs are elicited by expectation, which is a more effective predictor of MEC onsets than acoustic elicitors, and may generalise to pleasurable experience in other domains such as language comprehension or visual perception.
... Interestingly, Huron (2006, p. 281ff) discusses the phenomenon of frisson using his one-dimensional picture of emotion. Referring to Sloboda (1991), Huron points out that such extreme emotions as chills can be induced by strongly unexpected modulations. The example is a passage from Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht (bars 225-230) where a change from Eflat minor to D-major occurs, accompanied by an unexpected change of dynamics and rhythm. ...
Music can have extrinsic and/or intrinsic meaning. The former is relevant in the case of program music. The latter conforms to pure (absolute) music, i.e. music that can be understood without reference to extrinsic sources. Taking the intrinsic content of music as basic, we must ask about its nature. I propose to identify it with aesthetic emotion. As tonal music is organized by series of chords relative to the context of a tonal scale, the question is how music forms can be mapped onto aesthetic emotions. I propose to ground the analysis on a two-dimensional space of emotions, where one dimension refers to arousal (activity) and the other dimension refers to valence. Relating valence with consonance and arousal with entropic uncertainty leads to an account which directly relates structural and probabilistic aspects of tonal music with its affective content. The present bare-bone semantics of pure music proposes an explicit modeling of the affective response based on an algebraic meaning conception.
... Musical tension, measured based on musical structures, provides a stepping stone to understanding and quantifying subjective, emotional responses. The link between emotion and tension has become apparent in many studies [55,56,57,58]. If a music generation system can generate music according to given tension profiles, it becomes directly relevant for applications in game and film music. ...
Automatic music generation systems have gained in popularity and sophistication as advances in cloud computing have enabled large-scale complex computations such as deep models and optimization algorithms on personal devices. Yet, they still face an important challenge, that of long-term structure, which is key to conveying a sense of musical coherence. We present the MorpheuS music generation system designed to tackle this problem. MorpheuS' novel framework has the ability to generate polyphonic pieces with a given tension profile and long- and short-term repeated pattern structures. A mathematical model for tonal tension quantifies the tension profile and state-of-the-art pattern detection algorithms extract repeated patterns in a template piece. An efficient optimization metaheuristic, variable neighborhood search, generates music by assigning pitches that best fit the prescribed tension profile to the template rhythm while hard constraining long-term structure through the detected patterns. This ability to generate affective music with specific tension profile and long-term structure is particularly useful in a game or film music context. Music generated by the MorpheuS system has been performed live in concerts.
In this article, the impact of three experimental parameters in a harmonic expectancy study are evaluated: stimulus duration (specifically the lead-in time prior to an unexpected event), ecological validity of the stimulus (original recording vs. piano only), and familiarity. This article also presents a novel experimental paradigm for detecting expectancy violations in a real-time listening context with increased ecological validity, as well as a novel quasi-blind stimulus-selection procedure. Results suggest that the importance of the ecological validity of the stimulus may depend on the population of the study (i.e., musicians or non-musicians), and that the role of familiarity ought to be more rigorously examined. Specifically, it appears that the ability to notice a harmonic expectancy violation may be modulated by the degree of prior familiarity with the stimulus. In addition, stimuli with longer lead-in times lead to an increase in the probability of marking a harmonically surprising event. Implications for expectancy-violation theory, computational modeling, prediction error theory, and general stimulus-selection procedures in music perception and cognition research are discussed.
In the last scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the king enters, shattered, bearing in his arms his dead daughter Cordelia, barbarously hanged.
“An aesthetic rhetoric counts on, attends to, and takes into account the body and its senses”—this assertion by the rhetoricians (Poulakos and Whitson, Quarterly Journal of Speech 81:378–385, 1995), 382) could be a motto for the first of the three main categories of moving forms that are to be discussed in this book.
Thirty-eight children between ages 3 and 12 listened to 12 short musical passages derived from a counterbalanced 2 × 2 arrangement of (1) major versus minor modes and (2) harmonized versus simple melodic realizations of these modes. For each passage, they pointed to one of four schematic faces chosen to symbolize happy, sad, angry, and contented facial expressions. The main result was that all children, even the youngest, showed a reliable positive-major/negative-minor connotation, thus conforming to the conventional stereotype. The possible contributions of native and experiential factors to this behavior are discussed.
Approximately half of those surveyed experience characteristic tingling sensations (thrills) when exposed to emotionally arousing stimuli. Music was especially effective as a stimulus. Thrills evoked by music were quantitated according to self-reports on frequency, intensity, and duration. In preliminary experiments with naloxone, an opiate receptor antagonist, thrills were attenuated in some subjects.