Expressive Musical Terms (EMTs) are commonly used by composers as verbal descriptions of musical expressiveness and characters that performers are requested to convey. We suggest a classification of 55 of these terms, based on the perception of professional music performers who were asked to: 1) organize the considered EMTs in a two-dimensional plane in such a way that proximity reflects similarity; and 2) rate these EMTs according to valence, arousal, extraversion, and neuroticism, using 7-level Likert scales. Using a minimization procedure, we found that a satisfactory partition requires these EMTs to be organized in four clusters (whose centroids are associated with tenderness, happiness, anger, and sadness) located in the four quarters of the valence-arousal plane of the circumplex model of affect developed by Russell (1980). In terms of the related positive-negative activation parameters, introduced by Watson and Tellegen (1985), we obtained a significant correlation between positive activation and extraversion and between negative activation and neuroticism. This demonstrates that these relations, previously observed in personality studies by Watson & Clark (1992a), extend to the musical field.

Recent stimuli affect the perception of current stimuli, referred to as serial effects. These effects were mainly studied in the visual modality, where it was suggested that perceptual biases towards previous stimuli (contraction) stems from high-level processing stages, and promotes object-level stability. We now asked whether high object-level stages underlie contraction also in the auditory modality. We administered a two-tone pitch discrimination task using both pure and complex tones. Both have pitch, but they are perceived as different timbre categories. Pitch contraction was observed to be largest between tones of the same timbre-category, in line with the object-level account. To decipher the role of early, frequency-specific, category-indifferent processing-stages we used complex tones with missing fundamental. They differ in their low-level frequency components yet have the same pitch. Hence, a high-level account predicts that pitch contraction will remain. Surprisingly, we observed no contraction to the missing fundamental frequency. Rather, pitch was contracted to the physically-present frequencies. Supporting the low-level contribution, we found that though attention enhances contraction, it is not necessary. These observations suggest that contraction bias is an inherent part of the various stages of the auditory hierarchy of sensory processing.

Expressive musical terms (EMTs) are often used in classical Western music as verbal instructions to performers to convey particular forms of expression. Recently, Sulem et al. (2019) analyzed the perception of EMTs by professional string players without reference to heard musical performances, defining four representative categories of EMTs located in the four quadrants of the two-dimensional model of affect whose parameters are valence and arousal. The present study focuses on listeners’ perceptions of musical expression in short excerpts from the violin repertoire, played according to the four representative categories and in a Neutral (i.e., non-expressive) manner. In Experiment 1, listeners’ perceptions of the performances were examined in terms of these five categories. In Experiment 2, listeners concentrated on the playing and sound characteristics of the performances, and paired-comparison analysis was used to estimate the perceived similarities between the performances in terms of their expression. The findings of the two experiments show that performances can be mapped in a three-dimensional perceptual space in which the valence and arousal dimensions are supplemented by a third dimension that can be associated with degree of expressiveness. This demonstrates the relevance of valence and arousal as fundamental parameters for characterizing the musical expression conveyed by the EMTs, as perceived by listeners, and introduces the concept of degree of expressiveness, reflecting the contrast between Neutral and expressive performances.