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Abstract
This thesis addresses the way emotion is communicated through music. It reviews existing literature and reports the findings of a large-scale experiment in the form of three studies that investigate two assumptions: the ways in which musical features (cues) operate individually or in isolation (i.e. experimental conditions) is the same as when in a larger context with many other cues (i.e. real musical works); and that they are processed by the listener linearly, in an additive way.
The first study investigated any links between how quickly participants could recognise a putative emotion in short excerpts of music and the number of cues available to them. The second study explored this further, specifically whether higher levels of cues that suggest the same emotion (congruous) would result in greater agreement on, and faster recognition of, the emotion being communicated. The third study looked at whether some cues were more influential than others in certain contexts.
No links were found between the numbers of cues and recognition speeds in Study 1. Furthermore, in Study 2, the levels of congruous cues could not always predict the participants’ face choices: greater aggregates of congruous cues did not always result in the most choices for that emotion. In Study 3, tempo was implicated in every majority rating for an emotion (when the cue was present as a source of information about emotion), whereas articulation was implicated in only 69% of occasions, suggesting that on 31% of occasions participants chose to go against the information it was providing.
The findings from the studies suggest that the process of cue utilisation is not simply linear and that cues may not work in the same way to communicate emotion when embedded with others than they do individually. For example, many cues known to communicate ‘happy’ did not always appear to make ‘happy’ easier to recognise. The findings of study 3 also appear to confirm those of Juslin (2000), who found tempo to be more important to listeners than articulation. These studies have important implications for assumptions made in research on emotion in music.