Evaluative conditioning of responses to unfamiliar chords by exposure to valenced images

Abstract

The extent to which emotional responses to musical elements are influenced by their past associations with specific emotional responses is largely unknown. To assess this possibility, the present study tested whether pairing positive, negative, or neutral chords from an unfamiliar musical system (a microtonal Bohlen–Pierce tuning) with positively or negatively valenced pictures would have an effect on subsequent liking ratings. The microtonal chords used in this experiment had been previously rated, independent of any other affective input, in an earlier experiment; this allows us to class each chord as intrinsically positive, negative, or neutral. It was found that exposure with an image increases liking ratings independent of the valence of the images, compared with no exposure which supports a mere exposure effect; but, interestingly, we did not find substantial evidence for evaluative conditioning. Results are discussed in light of theoretical accounts of evaluative conditioning and musical implications.

Making the Unfamiliar Familiar: The Effect of Exposure on Ratings of Unfamiliar Musical Chords

“…Emotional responses to music are also explained by theories of underlying psychological mechanisms such as brain stem reflexes, evaluative conditioning, emotional contagion, episodic memory (Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008) and cognitive appraisal (Scherer & Zentner, 2001). We have reported on the role of evaluative conditioning paired with visual imagery elsewhere (Smit et al, 2020).…”

The sound of manufactured music: Reviewing the role of artificial stimuli in music cognition research.

“…In sum, studies on musical consonance using artificial (specifically, BP) stimuli have refined consonance theory in several important ways. Building on the seminal contributions of Mathews et al (1988) regarding the consonance of different versions of the BP scale, the work of Smit et al (2019Smit et al ( , 2020Smit et al ( , 2022 provides strong and replicable evidence that intrinsic factors such as harmonicity and roughness independently impact consonance ratings, above and beyond measures or manipulations of extrinsic factors such as familiarity (12-TET dissimilarity and [evaluative] conditioning). Although this line of work also revealed a small mere exposure effect on the ratings of BP stimuli, it generally asserts a privileged role for intrinsic factors in predicting musical consonance.…”

“…Replication of roughness/harmonicity effects on BP chord preference ratings; introduction of presentation mode as additional intrinsic factor Smit et al (2022) Experiment 1 (N = 60) No effect of evaluative conditioning on BP chord ratings; some evidence of mere exposure (i.e., short-term familiarity) effect Learning Loui and Wessel (2006) Experiment 1 (N = 24) Experiment 2 (N = 24) Experiment 3 (N = 24)…”

“…To take their investigation of chord valence, exposure, and consonance one step further, Smit et al (2022) selected an even stricter subset of six BP chords (two positive, two negative, and two neutral; Smit et al, 2019) and differentially paired them with positive or negative visual images in an evaluative conditioning paradigm. In this experimental design ( N = 60), positive images were hypothesized to increase liking for the chords they were paired with, regardless of those chords’ preexisting valence (as measured by preratings of BP chords from Smit et al, 2019).…”

Evidence for a universal association of auditory roughness with musical dissonance

“…The exposure group (minimal, Lutheran, SDA, Sydney non-musician, Sydney musician) encodes each participant's extent and type of exposure to Western music, and we are interested to see how this moderates the effect of a number of psychoacoustic predictors, particularly for the minimal exposure group. Prior work has shown the following psychoacoustic features (by which we mean features derived only from the musical signal, which incorporate plausible perceptual transformations of it) to predict Western participants' ratings of the valence, pleasantness, and stability of both familiar Western chords and unfamiliar microtonal chords (Smit et al, 2019(Smit et al, , 2020Hearne, 2020;Smit et al, 2021a): roughness; harmonicity; spectral entropy; mean pitch.…”