A cross-cultural study in Chinese and Western music: Cultural advantages in recognition of emotions

Abstract

The ability of music to communicate emotions cross-culturally has been explored in many studies. The first purpose of this study was to examine whether the previously hypothesised in-group advantage of emotion recognition in music holds between the Chinese and Western contexts. The second purpose was to investigate the associations between psychoacoustic features and the recognition of musical emotions in Chinese and Western listeners. Chinese and Western participants were asked to listen to both Chinese and Western music intended to express happiness, sadness, peacefulness, anger, and fear, and indicate to which degree they thought the music expressed the provided five emotions on continuous scales ranging from 1 to 5. A series of mixed analyses of variance (ANOVAs) revealed that the in-group advantage was not well established in this study as Chinese listeners seemed to be more sensitive to the recognition of happiness and sadness but less sensitive to fear compared to their Western counterparts. The psychoacoustic features were extracted through the MIR Toolbox 1.8.1 and processed through principal component analysis. The following hierarchical linear regressions for each type of rating for Chinese and Western music separately showed that the type, number, and degree of psychoacoustic features correlated with emotion recognition differed across cultures.