No abstract

Prior research has amply documented that happy music tends to be faster, louder, higher in average pitch, more variable in pitch, and more staccato in articulation, whereas sad music tends to be slower, lower, less variable, and more legato in articulation. However, the bulk of existing studies are either correlational or allow these expressive cues to covary freely, thereby making it difficult to confirm the causal influence of a given cue. To help address this gap, we experimentally assessed whether the average height (F0) of a pitch gamut independently impacts the perceived emotional expression of melodies derived from the gamut. Study participants rated the perceived happiness/sadness of a set of isochronous and semi-random tone sequences derived from the Bohlen-Pierce scale, an unconventional scale based on pitch intervals that do not appear in common practice music. Results were consistent with the notion that higher average pitch height communicates happiness and/or that lower pitch height communicates sadness. Moreover, they suggested that the effect is: (1) sufficiently robust to be detected using rudimentary melodies based on an unconventional musical scale; and, (2) independent of interval size.

In this study, we investigated the psychological function of final ritardandi, assessing the predictions of recent theoretical models regarding the influence of these expressive variations on evaluative responses to chords that either enable or thwart cadential closure. To this end, we conducted an initial experiment in which individuals were exposed to novel melodies that (a) either ended in plagal cadences or anticipated such cadences but resolved to unexpected diatonic and/or dissonant chords; and (b) either included or failed to include final ritardandi. Although participants showed a clear preference for expected final chords, their evaluations of the pleasantness of these chords were not reliably affected by the inclusion of ritardandi. In 2 follow-up experiments, we assessed subjective judgments of overall melodies as well as final chords. Moreover, we systematically varied the rate of ritardandi associated with cadential closure (Experiment 2), situated final ritardandi within authentic as opposed to plagal cadences (Experiment 3), and employed musical materials derived from an existing corpus in place of "artificially" contrived melodies (Experiment 3). Again, results revealed no reliable impact of final ritardandi on pleasantness ratings. Together, our findings fail to support the notion that final ritardandi impact hedonic responses toward musical events at structural points of repose.

In tasks requiring a response to the location of a target stimulus (for example, reaching), responses often are slower to a location that was recently occupied by an irrelevant distractor stimulus. In most demonstrations of this Bspatial negative priming^(SNP), there is a 1-to-1 correspondence between possible stimulus locations and possible responses. As such, it is ambiguous whether the effect is due to a location-specific processing delay or to inhibition of a response. In the present experiment, subjects were required to press a key corresponding to the ordinal position of a target O in one of four locations, ignoring a distractor X appearing in another location. Location markers were widely or narrowly spaced, such that the inner two locations of wide displays corresponded to the outer two locations of narrow displays (hence, requiring different responses). SNP occurred when a target appeared at the location of a recent distractor, regardless of whether the response was associated with the distractor. In contrast, no SNP occurred for a target sharing the same response as a distractor, but in a different location. The results strongly support a location-specific, rather than response-specific, locus of SNP.