Dataset Information

Harmonic organisation conveys both universal and culture-specific cues for emotional expression in music.

ABSTRACT: 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 both groups being naïve to the music of the other respective culture. We explored how participants assessed emotional connotations of various Western and non-Western harmonisation styles, and whether cultural familiarity with a harmonic idiom such as major and minor mode would consistently relate to emotion communication. The results indicate that Western concepts of harmony are not relevant for participants unexposed to Western music when other emotional cues (tempo, pitch height, articulation, timbre) are kept relatively constant. At the same time, harmonic style alone has the ability to colour the emotional expression in music if it taps the appropriate cultural connotations. The preference for one harmonisation style over another, including the major-happy/minor-sad distinction, is influenced by culture. Finally, our findings suggest that although differences emerge across different harmonisation styles, acoustic roughness influences the expression of emotion in similar ways across cultures; preference for consonance however seems to be dependent on cultural familiarity.

SUBMITTER: Athanasopoulos G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7806179 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Harmonic organisation conveys both universal and culture-specific cues for emotional expression in music.

Athanasopoulos George G Eerola Tuomas T Lahdelma Imre I Kaliakatsos-Papakostas Maximos M

PloS one 20210113 1

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 both groups being naïve to the music of the other respective culture. We explored how participants assessed emotional connotations of various Western a ...[more]

PMID: 33439887

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Project description:An empirical investigation of how local harmonic structures (e.g., chord progressions) contribute to the experience and enjoyment of uplifting trance (UT) music is presented. The connection between rhythmic and percussive elements and resulting trance-like states has been highlighted by musicologists, but no research, to our knowledge, has explored whether repeated harmonic elements influence affective responses in listeners of trance music. Two alternative hypotheses are discussed, the first highlighting the direct relationship between repetition/complexity and enjoyment, and the second based on the theoretical inverted-U relationship described by the Wundt curve. We investigate the connection between harmonic structure and subjective enjoyment through interdisciplinary behavioral and computational methods: First we discuss an experiment in which listeners provided enjoyment ratings for computer-generated UT anthems with varying levels of harmonic repetition and complexity. The anthems were generated using a statistical model trained on a corpus of 100 uplifting trance anthems created for this purpose, and harmonic structure was constrained by imposing particular repetition structures (semiotic patterns defining the order of chords in the sequence) on a professional UT music production template. Second, the relationship between harmonic structure and enjoyment is further explored using two computational approaches, one based on average Information Content, and another that measures average tonal tension between chords. The results of the listening experiment indicate that harmonic repetition does in fact contribute to the enjoyment of uplifting trance music. More compelling evidence was found for the second hypothesis discussed above, however some maximally repetitive structures were also preferred. Both computational models provide evidence for a Wundt-type relationship between complexity and enjoyment. By systematically manipulating the structure of chord progressions, we have discovered specific harmonic contexts in which repetitive or complex structure contribute to the enjoyment of uplifting trance music.

Dataset Information

Harmonic organisation conveys both universal and culture-specific cues for emotional expression in music.

Publications

Harmonic organisation conveys both universal and culture-specific cues for emotional expression in music.

Similar Datasets

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