A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Influence of Timbre on Affect Perception in Western Classical Music and Chinese Music Traditions

Abstract

Timbre is one of the psychophysical cues that has a great impact on affect perception, although, it has not been the subject of much cross-cultural research. Our aim is to investigate the influence of timbre on the perception of affect conveyed by Western and Chinese classical music using a cross-cultural approach. Four listener groups (Western musicians, Western nonmusicians, Chinese musicians, and Chinese nonmusicians; 40 per group) were presented with 48 musical excerpts, which included two musical excerpts (one piece of Chinese and one piece of Western classical music) per affect quadrant from the valence-arousal space, representing angry, happy, peaceful, and sad emotions and played with six different instruments (erhu, dizi, pipa, violin, flute, and guitar). Participants reported ratings of valence, tension arousal, energy arousal, preference, and familiarity on continuous scales ranging from 1 to 9. ANOVA reveals that participants’ cultural backgrounds have a greater impact on affect perception than their musical backgrounds, and musicians more clearly distinguish between a perceived measure (valence) and a felt measure (preference) than do nonmusicians. We applied linear partial least squares regression to explore the relation between affect perception and acoustic features. The results show that the important acoustic features for valence and energy arousal are similar, which are related mostly to spectral variation, the shape of the temporal envelope, and the dynamic range. The important acoustic features for tension arousal describe the shape of the spectral envelope, noisiness, and the shape of the temporal envelope. The explanation for the similarity of perceived affect ratings between instruments is the similar acoustic features that were caused by the physical characteristics of specific instruments and performing techniques.

Construction of a Chinese traditional instrumental music dataset: A validated set of naturalistic affective music excerpts

“…However, the present study shows that the “anger” excerpt conveyed neutral and highly arousing emotion. Wang et al ( 2021 ) reported a consistent result in which “anger” in Chinese traditional music is a neutral and highly arousing emotion. Such a result indicates that Chinese traditional music has distinct emotional characteristics in the angry dimension.…”

“…In previous studies using Western music, neutral, tenderness, and peacefulness music were found to represent neither positive nor negative valence type (Paquette et al, 2013 ; Prada et al, 2018 ; Eerola & Vuoskoski, 2011 ; Fuentes-Sánchez et al, 2021 ; Wang et al, 2021 ). Consistently, in the present study, while the “gentleness” and “solemnness” excerpts were moderately arousing and the “peacefulness” and “transcendence” ones less arousing, they all demonstrated neutral valence.…”

Influence of music on the hearing and mental health of adolescents and countermeasures

“…Classified by region and country, music from different regions reflects their respective cultural characteristics and traditions. For example, Chinese music is famous for its unique pentatonic scale, strong expressiveness, and rich variety of instruments ( Wang et al, 2021 ; Su and Kong, 2023 ). The characteristics of Indian music are complex rhythmic structures, such as Tala, and improvisation based on the scale (Raga; Fletcher, 1915 ; Sharma et al, 2021 ).…”

MERP: A Music Dataset with Emotion Ratings and Raters’ Profile Information

“…Stereotypes of a culture may also have an impact on one’s perception of music from specific cultures [ 44 ]. Wang et al [ 45 ] compared the impact of musical background and cultural background on the perception of emotions by Chinese and Western participants. They found cultural background to have a larger impact as compared to the musical background of a participant.…”