Emotional responses in Papua New Guinea show negligible evidence for a universal effect of major versus minor music

Abstract

Music is a vital part of most cultures and has a strong impact on emotions [1–5]. In Western cultures, emotive valence is strongly influenced by major and minor melodies and harmony (chords and their progressions) [6–13]. Yet, how pitch and harmony affect our emotions, and to what extent these effects are culturally mediated or universal, is hotly debated [2, 5, 14–20]. Here, we report an experiment conducted in a remote cloud forest region of Papua New Guinea, across several communities with similar traditional music but differing levels of exposure to Western-influenced tonal music. One hundred and seventy participants were presented with pairs of major and minor cadences (chord progressions) and melodies, and chose which of them made them happier. The experiment was repeated by 60 non-musicians and 19 musicians in Sydney, Australia. Bayesian analyses show that, for cadences, there is strong evidence that greater happiness was reported for major than minor in every community except one: the community with minimal exposure to Western-like music. For melodies, there is strong evidence that greater happiness was reported for those with higher mean pitch (major melodies) than those with lower mean pitch (minor melodies) in only one of the three PNG communities and in both Sydney groups. The results show that the emotive valence of major and minor is strongly associated with exposure to Western-influenced music and culture, although we cannot exclude the possibility of universality.

Eye Closure Interacts with Music to Influence Vividness and Content of Directed Imagery

“…Both the prior and standardization are widely used in the auditory as well as music cognition literature (Beveridge, Cano, & Herff, 2021;Cecchetti, Herff, & Rohrmeier, 2022;Herff, Dorsheimer, Dahmen, & Prince, 2022;Herff, Harasim, Cecchetti, Finkensiep, & Rohrmeier, 2021;Herff et al, 2020;MacRitchie, Breaden, Milne, & McIntyre, 2020;Smit, Dobrowohl, Schaal, Milne, & Herff, 2020;Smit, Milne, Sarvasy, & Dean, 2022). Based on the research question at hand, each model then predicted a given dependent variable (vividness, distance, time, or emotional sentiment) whilst accounting for participant and trial effects through random intercepts.…”

The Major-Minor mode Dichotomy in Music Perception: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on its Behavioural, Physiological, and Clinical Correlates

“…This evidence seems to suggest that the affective connotation of musical mode might rely on a universal dimension. However, a recent cross-cultural study conducted between Australia and Papua New Guinea, reported that major mode does not induce greater happiness than minor in a group of people with minimal exposure to Western music (Smit et al, 2022). This remarks that the typical major/happy minor/sad association might partly be a culturally learned association, although the debate is still open, and more research is needed.…”

Cultural evolution of music and language

“…This will potentially be applied to the experiment on the formation of culturally dependent mapping of emotions and musical features (e.g. consonance, Smit et al, 2022, but also see Di Stefano et al, 2022) or the emergence of universal association patterns of specific behavioral contexts and musical features (Mehr et al, 2019;Yurdum et al, 2022), which may open up a new avenue for research on the cultural evolution of music.…”