An Exploratory Study of Musical Emotions and Psychophysiology

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, Dec 1997 by Carol L Krumhansl

Brown's (1981) results, however, indicate limits to the specificity of musical emotions. One set of stimulus materials was chosen to span six grades of sadness: "funereal, strong but sorrowful", "sadness tinged with romantic mystery", and so on. Neither non musicians nor musicians categorized the excerpts accurately, although the latter were more accurate when presented with the experimenter's verbal descriptions. More substantial agreement was found by listeners highly conversant with the relevant musical genre. In general, however, these results suggest musical emotions are distinguishable primarily at the level of basic emotions such as happy, sad, fear, and anger.

Limits to generality across cultures were suggested by a recent study by Gregory and Varney (1996). Subjects in their study were either from a western or from an (East) Indian cultural background, and the excerpts included pieces from western classical and Indian classical music. Listeners indicated which emotional adjectives applied to the music. Although overall the emotion judgments were similar across groups, differences appeared for specific pieces. Such cross-cultural comparisons are an important complement to studies of development and training in understanding the effects of learning in a cultural context on musical emotions, but little research has been done along these lines to date.

Another recent trend in studies of musical emotion is to examine the time course of emotional responses. In an initial effort in this direction, Goldstein (1980) had subjects indicate the time and strength of thrill responses. The pattern of responses remained quite stable over repeated hearings by the same individual. Attenuated responses after injections of naloxone, an opiate antagonist, suggested a connection with emotion physiology. Waterman (1996) measured the number of emotion responses per bar of music. Systematic differences were found with certain bars receiving significantly more responses than others. These bars contained a number of the musical structures found by Sloboda (1991) to elicit emotional reactions. A study by de Vries (1991) used a technique developed by Clynes (1977) that measures finger pressure amplitude and direction on a finger rest. Excerpts with different emotions were reliably distinguished by the roughness of the force curve (fast vs. slow changes in force and angle), the skewness of the curve, and the angle of roughness.

Nielsen (1983) conducted an extensive analysis of musical tension using a pair of tongs that listeners pressed together to indicate the experienced degree of tension. The method produced strikingly regular tension curves that could be related to diverse musical factors, including dynamics, timbre, melodic contour, harmony, tonality, and repetition. This research has been extended more recently by Madson and Fredrickson (1993; Fredrickson, 1995). Krumhansl (1996) and Krumhansl and Schenck (1997) also obtained tension profiles using a computer display as the response mode. The former study found tension judgments correlated with melodic contour, note density, dynamics, harmony, and tonality, and corresponded with music-theoretic predictions (Lerdahl, 1988, 1996). The latter study examined correspondences between music and dance. Similar tension profiles were found for the music only condition and dance only conditions as well as similar qualitative emotion judgments. These results suggest music and dance can elicit similar emotional responses.