Music tonality emotions in Brazilian musical-theory naïve individuals

Abstract

It is elusive if musical-theory naïve individuals have the same emotional perception as pro-fessionals. This study aims to investigate emotions associated with music keys. We asked 40 musical-theory naïve individuals to label keys. Positive, negative, and neutral emotions were referred by 45, 20, and 34% of the participants for major keys, and 20, 45, and 34% of the par-ticipants for minor keys. There was no correlation between key signature and emotion. Our study showed that music naïve individuals: associated major keys to positive emotions and minor keys to negative emotions in less than half the time associated neutral emotions to one-third of the tonalities; minor keys tended to correlate with the number of accidentals in the key signature.