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Emotion

The emotional power of music is usually reported as being the strongest motivation for listening to music. Music is a complex acoustic and temporal structure that induces a large variety of emotional responses in listeners, and this allows people to regulate their own emotional states and modulate the emotional state of others. Music notably plays a crucial role for emotional communication with infants, as attested by the universality of lullabies and infant-directed speech. The emotional power of music may be valuable for adaption, and several authors suggest that music may have preceded and prepared the emergence of symbolic forms of communication such as language during phylogenesis and ontogenesis.

The increasing number of studies investigating the psychological foundation of musical emotions provides a rigorous framework for a scientific investigation. Several issues have been debated, for instance, the difference between induced and perceived emotion. “Cognitivists” argue that listeners refer to a music piece as happy or sad because the music piece expresses happiness or sadness and not because music actually makes them feel happy or sad. By contrast, “emotivists” claim that music evokes real emotions in the listeners. There is growing experimental evidence that musical emotions can be reflected in physiological measures, supporting the emotovist's position. Embodied cognition also provides further evidence that recognizing an emotion requests to simulate that emotion and thus to experience it. Some paradox, specific to music, has also been reported. For instance, listeners usually experience pleasantness when listening to sad music, which is not the case for other stimuli, such as faces. This suggests that two aspects of the emotional valence of musical stimuli must be distinguished in music.

Content of the Emotions

One of the most intriguing issues deals with the content of the emotions associated with music. Preliminary empirical investigations have demonstrated that basic emotions, such as happiness, anger, fear, and sadness, can be recognized in and induced by musical stimuli in adults and in young children. Although the number of basic emotions has been a matter of debate, a discrete model of musical emotion has proven robust against cross-cultural, neural, and physiological studies. Basic emotions, however, are not associated with specific patterns of autonomic activation, and listeners may even experience both sad and happy feelings at the same time. A discrete model was further elaborated in order to capture the richness of musical emotion. The Geneva emotion music scale model (GEMS) includes nine categories: wonder, transcendence, tenderness, nostalgia, peacefulness, power, joyful activation, tension, and sadness as basic emotional responses to music. The discrete model of emotion is said to underestimate the richness of musical emotions in real life.

An alternative approach stipulates that musical emotions evolve in a continuous way along two or three major psychological dimensions. Numerous previous bodies of research have established a two-dimensional structure of emotion for facial expressions and affective words. In his circumplex model of affect, J. A. Russell proposed a cognitive structure of affective experience that relied on the interrelationship between affective concepts (words with hedonic meaning). The affective space he obtained by using three different scaling techniques revealed two orthogonal and bipolar dimensions of pleasure–displeasure and degree of arousal. In contrast to basic emotion concepts, dimensional models suggest that an interconnected neurophysiological system is responsible for all affective states. Behavioral studies confirmed that arousal and valence were actually the most important determinants of emotional responses to music, and specific neurophysiological reactions associated with both dimensions have been identified. A third dimension, which has sometimes been suggested, could be related to pleasure–displeasure, control, musical tension, or the kinematic aspect of emotion.

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