Music Communicates Affects, Not Basic Emotions – A Constructionist Account of Attribution of Emotional Meanings to Music

Abstract

Basic Emotion theory has had a tremendous influence on the affective sciences, including music psychology, where most researchers have assumed that music expressivity is constrained to a limited set of basic emotions. Several scholars suggested that these constrains to musical expressivity are explained by the existence of a shared acoustic code to the expression of emotions in music and speech prosody. In this article we advocate for a shift from this focus on basic emotions to a constructionist account. This approach proposes that the phenomenon of perception of emotions in music arises from the interaction of music’s ability to express core affects and the influence of top-down and contextual information in the listener’s mind. We start by reviewing the problems with the concept of Basic Emotions, and the inconsistent evidence that supports it. We also demonstrate how decades of developmental and cross-cultural research on music and emotional speech have failed to produce convincing findings to conclude that music expressivity is built upon a set of biologically pre-determined basic emotions. We then examine the cue-emotion consistencies between music and speech, and show how they support a parsimonious explanation, where musical expressivity is grounded on two dimensions of core affect (arousal and valence). Next, we explain how the fact that listeners reliably identify basic emotions in music does not arise from the existence of categorical boundaries in the stimuli, but from processes that facilitate categorical perception, such as using stereotyped stimuli and close-ended response formats, psychological processes of construction of mental prototypes, and contextual information. Finally, we outline our proposal of a constructionist account of perception of emotions in music, and spell out the ways in which this approach is able to make solve past conflicting findings. We conclude by providing explicit pointers about the methodological choices that will be vital to move beyond the popular Basic Emotion paradigm and start untangling the emergence of emotional experiences with music in the actual contexts in which they occur.

The content and functions of vivid and soothing visual imagery during music listening: Findings from a survey study.

“…Although the present study cannot answer the question whether visual imagery is causally linked to emotions felt during music listening, our results provide further evidence that visual imagery is intricately woven into emotional responses to music by modulating the listener's arousal. Recent constructionist account of emotional meanings in music would also be consistent with such close linking of emotions and imagery; it assumes that the information from different sensory domains contributes to the active meaning-making process (Cespedes-Guevara & Eerola, 2018).…”

Simple and complex crossmodal correspondences involving audition

“…However, that said, one thing that remains unclear on the basis of this, and other studies like it, is whether any emotional mediation is based on the emotion experienced in response to the music, or rather, on a more cognitive assessment of the emotion that one might want to associate with the stimuli themselves [53]. Others, meanwhile, have questioned whether we should really be talking about affect rather than emotion [54].…”

Young Musicians' Learning of Expressive Performance: The Importance of Dialogic Teaching and Modeling

“…Both the perceived and intended meaning of a musical work tends to be connotative and ambiguous (e.g., Cross, 2005), and affected by various factors, such as the socio-cultural circumstances, experiences and environment of composer, performers and listeners (e.g., Tagg, 2012). Although some contend that music can mean nothing beyond itself (e.g., Small, 1999), others maintain that music can be perceived as expressive of, or referring to, various extra-musical ideas such as affects (Cespedes-Guevara and Eerola, 2018) or emotions (e.g., Gabrielsson and Juslin, 1996;Gabrielsson and Lindström, 2010). Notation traditionally used for Western classical music cannot represent all the intuitive aspects of an expressive performance (e.g., Howat, 1995;Palmer, 1997).…”