Perception of affect in unfamiliar musical chords

Abstract

This study investigates the role of extrinsic and intrinsic predictors in the perception of affect in mostly unfamiliar musical chords from the Bohlen-Pierce microtonal tuning system. Extrinsic predictors are derived, in part, from long-term statistical regularities in music; for example, the prevalence of a chord in a corpus of music that is relevant to a participant. Conversely, intrinsic predictors make no use of long-term statistical regularities in music; for example, psychoacoustic features inherent in the music, such as roughness. Two types of affect were measured for each chord: pleasantness/unpleasantness and happiness/sadness. We modelled the data with a number of novel and well-established intrinsic predictors, namely roughness , harmonicity , spectral entropy and average pitch height ; and a single extrinsic predictor, 12-TET Dissimilarity , which was estimated by the chord’s smallest distance to any 12-tone equally tempered chord. Musical sophistication was modelled as a potential moderator of the above predictors. Two experiments were conducted, each using slightly different tunings of the Bohlen-Pierce musical system: a just intonation version and an equal-tempered version. It was found that, across both tunings and across both affective responses, all the tested intrinsic features and 12-TET Dissimilarity have consistent influences in the expected direction. These results contrast with much current music perception research, which tends to assume the dominance of extrinsic over intrinsic predictors. This study highlights the importance of both intrinsic characteristics of the acoustic signal itself, as well as extrinsic factors, such as 12-TET Dissimilarity, on perception of affect in music.

Harmonic organisation conveys both universal and culture-specific cues for emotional expression in music

“…Finally, our third hypothesis postulated that acoustic roughness would play a distinct role in emotional expression. Based on past literature linking harmony perception with acoustic correlates, we predicted that higher roughness would generally lead to higher ratings of energy [ 51 ] and consequently dominance, and lower ratings of valence [ 48 , 61 ]. Such a broad associations were observed in the data collapsed across the stimuli ( Fig 2 ).…”

Probability of Heritage Language Use at a Supportive Early Childhood Setting in Australia

“…The Bayesian analysis was conducted using the brms package in R (R Core Team, 2014; Bürkner, 2017, 2018). A similar approach has been used previously in Smit et al (2019) who also provides a short overview of Bayesian regression (see also van de Schoot and Depaoli, 2014; van de Schoot et al, 2014). Bayesian statistics have a number of benefits compared to conventional frequentist methods, such as linear mixed models or analysis of variance (van de Schoot and Depaoli, 2014), that are particularly suited for naturalistic child data.…”

“…This background knowledge is reflected in the models by the use of priors. Before analyzing the data, a prior distribution can be chosen which reflects the amount of (un)certainty in the model's parameters (Smit et al, 2019). As this study is exploratory, and there were no prior assumptions about the behavior of the data's parameters, we used the so called weakly informative priors (Gelman et al, 2014(Gelman et al, , 2015.…”

Perceived Emotions of Harmonic Cadences

“…The effect of average pitch on perceived affect in Western diatonic music and microtonal music is suggestive of a bottom-up perceptual bias towards pitch (e.g. Smit et al, 2019), and is also supported by affect-related pitch prosody in speech (Huron, 2008). Overall, the consistent role of average pitch in music perception studies shows the importance of accounting for it when designing and analyzing music perception experiments (Eerola et al, 2001).…”

“…For Style , we therefore predict cadences including a tetrad to receive lower valence and higher arousal ratings. Higher Average pitch was expected to lead to higher valence and higher arousal ratings (Lahdelma & Eerola, 2016; Parncutt, 2014; Smit et al, 2019).…”