What music makes us feel: At least 13 dimensions organize subjective experiences associated with music across different cultures

Abstract

What is the nature of the feelings evoked by music? We investigated how people represent the subjective experiences associated with Western and Chinese music and the form in which these representational processes are preserved across different cultural groups. US (n = 1,591) and Chinese (n = 1,258) participants listened to 2,168 music samples and reported on the specific feelings (e.g., “angry,” “dreamy”) or broad affective features (e.g., valence, arousal) that they made individuals feel. Using large-scale statistical tools, we uncovered 13 distinct types of subjective experience associated with music in both cultures. Specific feelings such as “triumphant” were better preserved across the 2 cultures than levels of valence and arousal, contrasting with theoretical claims that valence and arousal are building blocks of subjective experience. This held true even for music selected on the basis of its valence and arousal levels and for traditional Chinese music. Furthermore, the feelings associated with music were found to occupy continuous gradients, contradicting discrete emotion theories. Our findings, visualized within an interactive map (https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/∼acowen/music.html) reveal a complex, high-dimensional space of subjective experience associated with music in multiple cultures. These findings can inform inquiries ranging from the etiology of affective disorders to the neurological basis of emotion.

Identifying the Representational Structure of Affect Using fMRI

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The effects of background music on neural responses during reading comprehension

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The neural representation of visually evoked emotion is high-dimensional, categorical, and distributed across transmodal brain regions

“…To elucidate the structure of diverse emotional experiences, Cowen and Keltner (2017, 38 Furthermore, they found that the affective dimensions explained only a fraction of the 48 4 variance in self-reports of subjective experience when compared to emotion categories, 49 a finding that has now been replicated in studies of facial expression, speech prosody, 50 nonverbal vocalization, and music (Cowen and Keltner, 2019;Cowen et al, , 51 2019aCowen et al, , 2020. This work lays a foundation for examining the neural bases of emotional 52 experience in terms of a rich variety of states, as well as whether -at the level of 53 neural response -categories or dimensions organize the experience of emotion, and 54 how a diverse array of states cluster in their neural representations.…”