Universal and culture-specific factors in the recognition and performance of musical affect expressions.

Abstract

We present a cross-cultural study on the performance and perception of affective expression in music. Professional bowed-string musicians from different musical traditions (Swedish folk music, Hindustani classical music, Japanese traditional music, and Western classical music) were instructed to perform short pieces of music to convey 11 emotions and related states to listeners. All musical stimuli were judged by Swedish, Indian, and Japanese participants in a balanced design, and a variety of acoustic and musical cues were extracted. Results first showed that the musicians' expressive intentions could be recognized with accuracy above chance both within and across musical cultures, but communication was, in general, more accurate for culturally familiar versus unfamiliar music, and for basic emotions versus nonbasic affective states. We further used a lens-model approach to describe the relations between the strategies that musicians use to convey various expressions and listeners' perceptions of the affective content of the music. Many acoustic and musical cues were similarly correlated with both the musicians' expressive intentions and the listeners' affective judgments across musical cultures, but the match between musicians' and listeners' uses of cues was better in within-cultural versus cross-cultural conditions. We conclude that affective expression in music may depend on a combination of universal and culture-specific factors.

Comparing the acoustic expression of emotion in the speaking and the singing voice

“…The parallelism of human emotion expression in speech and music has been demonstrated by a comprehensive review of empirical studies on patterns of acoustic parameters in these two forms of human affect communication (Juslin and Laukka, 2003). The assumption of powerful "affect primitives" in speech and language is also supported by research on the recognition of emotion in speech (Bryant and Barrett, 2008;Laukka et al, 2013b;Pell et al, 2009;Sauter et al, 2010;Scherer et al, 2001) and music (Laukka et al, 2013a). This research has generally shown the existence of both a fairly high degree of universality of the underlying expression and recognition mechanisms and of sizeable differences between cultures, especially for self-reflective, social, and moral emotions.…”

An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music

“…For instance, sadness expressed by music is associated with a consistent set of affective cues [18], which may convey the emotion even across cultures [19] and to young children [20].…”

Terapi Musik: Bebas Budaya atau Terikat Budaya?

“…Hal ini menjelaskan sisi lain dari adanya pengaruh budaya dalam musik. Penelitian serupa dilakukan oleh Laukka et al (2013), yang mencoba menggali apakah emosi bisa dikomunikasikan dengan musik dalam setting kultur yang berbeda. Penelitian tersebut dibuat karena dilatarbelakangi perdebatan apakah ekspresi dari musik merupakan hal yang dapat diidentifikasi secara universal atau kultural.…”

“…Musik sebagai fenomena muncul di berbagai kultur, ditambah bahwa unsur utama dari musik seperti pitch dan durasi merupakan aspek yang dapat dikenali secara universal. Di sisi lain, musik juga dianggap sebagai produk kultur karena persepsi dan kognisi dari struktur elemen musik yang dikenali secara berbeda oleh manusia dengan background kultur yang berbeda (Laukka, Eerola, Thingujam, Yamasaki, & Beller, 2013).…”

“…Hasil ini menjelaskan jika partisipan yang berasal dari latar belakang budaya yang sama atau yang berdekatan memiliki penilaian yang mirip terhadap emosi yang dirasakan dari musik, sedangkan partisipan yang berasal dari latar belakang budaya yang berbeda jauh, misalnya dari negara-negara Asia dengan masyarakat Barat, menunjukkan penilaian yang berbeda terhadap emosi yang dirasakan dari musik. Hasil penelitian tersebut menunjukkan bahwa musik sebenarnya juga terikat dengan budaya (Laukka et al, 2013).…”