Emotion and expertise: how listeners with formal music training use cues to perceive emotion

Abstract

Although studies of musical emotion often focus on the role of the composer and performer, the communicative process is also influenced by the listener’s musical background or experience. Given the equivocal nature of evidence regarding the effects of musical training, the role of listener expertise in conveyed musical emotion remains opaque. Here we examine emotional responses of musically trained listeners across two experiments using (1) eight measure excerpts, (2) musically resolved excerpts and compare them to responses collected from untrained listeners in Battcock and Schutz (2019). In each experiment 30 participants with six or more years of music training rated perceived emotion for 48 excerpts from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) using scales of valence and arousal. Models of listener ratings predict more variance in trained vs. untrained listeners across both experiments. More importantly however, we observe a shift in cue weights related to training. Using commonality analysis and Fischer Z score comparisons as well as margin of error calculations, we show that timing and mode affect untrained listeners equally, whereas mode plays a significantly stronger role than timing for trained listeners. This is not to say the emotional messages are less well recognized by untrained listeners—simply that training appears to shift the relative weight of cues used in making evaluations. These results clarify music training’s potential impact on the specific effects of cues in conveying musical emotion.

Multisensory integration of musical emotion perception in singing

“…Fourth, since emotion expression serves an important function, and since music communicates emotions (Gabrielsson & Juslin, 1996 ; Juslin & Laukka, 2003 , 2004 ), one might expect not only experts but also laypersons to be able to decode emotion expressions in music (Bigand et al, 2005 ). But musical training changes how music or sound is perceived (e.g., Besson et al, 2007 ; Neuhaus et al, 2006 ), and how emotional cues and expressivity are extracted from music or tone sequences (Battcock & Schutz, 2021 ; Bhatara et al, 2011 ; Broughton & Stevens, 2009 ; Thompson et al, 2004 ). It is thus important to clarify the role of expertise for emotion communication in music.…”

Exploring historic changes in musical communication: Deconstructing emotional cues in preludes by Bach and Chopin

“…We visualize these data first by showing a two-dimensional scatter plot illustrating both valence (x axis) and arousal (y axis) cue weights—derived from the 95% PIs of 10,000 sampled bootstrap replications (Figure 3). In addition to only analyzing preludes, this method differs from Battcock and Schutz’s (2019, 2021) analyses in the following two other ways: (1) our analyses comprise 10,000 rather than 1,000 replications and (2) we do not perform averaging on participant ratings before bootstrapping.…”

“…To explore the nuanced cue relationships underlying emotional expression, we employ commonality analysis (CA) to decompose emotional cue effects into unique and combined contributions. Although used since the 1960s (Nimon & Oswald, 2013), to the best of our knowledge, CA had not been applied to music prior to our team’s recent explorations (Battcock & Schutz, in press, 2019, 2021). Nonetheless, its ability to clarify the relative importance of interrelated cues has proven powerful in disciplines ranging from education (Mood, 1969; Werner et al, 2019) and clinical psychology (Gustavson et al, 2018; Marchetti et al, 2016) to evolutionary biology (Cuevas et al, 2021).…”

Auditory affective processing, musicality, and the development of misophonic reactions

“…There is abundant evidence that, compared with non-musicians, musicians exhibit enhanced processing of fundamental musical components such as pitch, melody, timbre, chords, and musical rhythm (Franěk et al, 1991;Pantev et al, 2001;Micheyl et al, 2006;Chen et al, 2008;Brattico et al, 2009;Repp, 2010;Schellenberg and Moreno, 2010;Boh et al, 2011;Rammsayer et al, 2012;Matthews et al, 2016). Musicians outperform non-musicians at recognizing emotion conveyed in music (Castro and Lima, 2014;Kantor-Martynuska and Horabik, 2015;Akkermans et al, 2019;Dahary et al, 2020), they have more consistent, more rapid, and/or more intense experiences of both positive and negative musical emotion as reflected by subjective arousal ratings and physiological responses (Steinbeis et al, 2006;Brattico et al, 2009;Dellacherie et al, 2011;Mikutta et al, 2014;Park et al, 2014), and these affective responses are driven by a distinct set of musical cues such as dissonance, mode (major/minor), and harmony (Schön et al, 2005;James et al, 2008;Midya et al, 2019;Battcock and Schutz, 2021). Even the experience of frisson has been reported more often in musicians than in non-musicians (Sloboda, 1991; but see Grewe et al, 2007).…”