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THREE EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES SUGGEST THAT music with more musical voices (higher voice multiplicity) tends to be perceived more positively. In the first experiment, participants heard brief extracts from polyphonic keyboard works representing conditions of one, two, three, or four concurrent musical voices. Two basic emotions (happiness and sadness) and two social emotions (pride and loneliness) were rated on a continuous scale. Listeners rated excerpts with higher voice multiplicity as sounding more happy, less sad, less lonely, and more proud. Results from a second experiment indicate that this effect might extend to positive and negative emotions more generally. In a third experiment, participants were asked to count (denumerate) the number of musical voices in the same stimuli. Denumeration responses corresponded closely with ratings for both positive and negative emotions, suggesting that a single musical feature or percept might play a role in both. Possible roles for both symbolic and psychoacoustic musical features are discussed.

While many social activities abruptly went online due to the pandemic, the HONK! Festivals of Activist Brass Bands would seem an unlikely candidate for going virtual. The global network of HONK! Festivals that emerged in Boston in 2006 fills public spaces around the world with crowds and acoustic music, promoting live, “unmediated” musical experiences. As such gatherings became impossible in 2020, this global festival network conceived of a virtual festival that would connect the diffuse festivals, which had generally been limited to local, ephemeral events. In the course of fifty hours over eight days in October 2020, HONK!United brought together musicians and activists from all seven continents to share music videos, documentaries, live chats, workshops, and panels, providing an opportunity for these disparate communities to gain unprecedented self-consciousness as a global movement. Drawing on the works of Judith Butler and Anna Tsing, this article discusses the practical and conceptual implications of making an in-person event virtual, the politics of public assembly in a virtual format, and frictions between diverse musical communities in global conversation. We argue that although the pandemic presented tremendous challenges to the sustainability of live music cultures, it also provided previously unimaginable opportunities for musical movement building across the world.

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