A Call for Hypothesis-Driven, Multi-Level Analysis in Research on Emotional Word Painting in Music: Commentary on Sun &amp; Cuthbert (2018)

Hansen, Niels Chr.

doi:10.18061/emr.v13i3-4.6771

Cited by 2 publications

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References 14 publications

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“…Little is known, however, about how music and lyrics interact in this process. A few studies show significant correlations between the emotional content of song lyrics and the perceived emotional meaning in the music they are combined with (e.g., Hansen, 2018;Sun & Cuthbert, 2018;Tiemann & Huron, 2011). Interactions between lyrics and music are shown by Ziv (2017), indicating that music can increase the emotional effect of a song's lyrics, dependent on the participant's political background.…”

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Singing and Accompaniment Support the Processing of Song Lyrics and Change the Lyrics' Meaning

Schotanus

2020

EMR

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A growing body of evidence indicates that music can support the processing of language. Some of its beneficial effects may even occur after one exposure. Accompaniment can also have an impact: in a-cappella singing, silences and out-of-key notes may confuse listeners, while accompaniment avoids silences and elucidates both rhythm and harmony, thereby supporting music-processing and concentration. These hypotheses were tested in two experiments. In a classroom setting, 271 pupils (M = 15.7 years old, SD = 0.9), listened to five out of 24 tracks (four songs in six different conditions) and completed a questionnaire after each one. As expected, the instrumental interludes between sung or spoken phrases in accompanied versions were rated less distracting than the silences that replace them in unaccompanied ones. Furthermore, perceived arousal, emotion, valence, and purity of singing were rated more positively in accompanied versions. Singing, on the other hand, supports the perceived intelligibility and comprehensibility of the lyrics. Finally, the music makes repetitions of words and phrases more meaningful and changes the lyrics' emotional meaning, wereby some aspects of sadness are associated with negative affect while other aspects of sadness are associated with positive affect. These results were by and large replicated in a better randomized laboratory experiment among 24 adults (M = 24.4; SD = 4.8).

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confidence: 99%

Singing and Accompaniment Support the Processing of Song Lyrics and Change the Lyrics' Meaning

Schotanus

2020

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“…Although Hansen (2018) may be right that issues with multiple comparisons weaken the results for pitch height, consonance, major-minor context, and tonal certainty, I still think these results are interesting. However, like Hansen, I think future research should attempt to improve the analyses by working with specific hypotheses and by distinguishing more clearly between strictly local effects and overall effects on phrase or song level.…”

Section: The Papermentioning

confidence: 96%

Comparing Word Affect and Tone Affect: Comment on Sun and Cuthbert 2017

Schotanus

2020

EMR

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In the article "Emotion Painting: Lyric, affect, and musical relationships in a large lead-sheet corpus", Sun and Cuthbert (2017) explored the correlations between affect-carrying lyrics and musical features such as beat strength, pitch height, consonance, and mode. Several musical features did indeed turn out to be highly correlated with the affect of the lyrics. However, correlations between other features, particularly mode-related musical features and lyric affect, were either insignificant or even contradicted previous research. In the current commentary, it is argued that the difference between the musical features that show significant correlations and those that do not is that the former have a local musical effect whereas the latter tend to affect the mood of a whole phrase or piece, and that the way Sun and Cuthbert estimate lyric affect for sentences or song may not be appropriate. Furthermore, a few remarks are made about the way Sun and Cuthbert treat multi-syllable words and about some basic assumptions concerning the relation between music and lyrics in a song. Nevertheless, the authors are praised for their innovative and interesting work, while several alternative and additional analyses (for example with scale-degree qualia and syncopations) are proposed.

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A Call for Hypothesis-Driven, Multi-Level Analysis in Research on Emotional Word Painting in Music: Commentary on Sun & Cuthbert (2018)

Cited by 2 publications

References 14 publications

Singing and Accompaniment Support the Processing of Song Lyrics and Change the Lyrics' Meaning

Singing and Accompaniment Support the Processing of Song Lyrics and Change the Lyrics' Meaning

Comparing Word Affect and Tone Affect: Comment on Sun and Cuthbert 2017

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