The relationship between music and emotions has been the focus of the study of musical experience. However, previous studies have focused in particular on what psychologists understand as the "basic emotions", which are rigorously defined. This thesis argues that the focus on basic emotions has indeed limited our understanding of what we feel when we listen to music. A narrative review of the recent literature has been carried out to closely examine the existing findings and limitations of previous studies have been revealed. In addition, a positive tendency is observed in listeners' responses to music. Participants' ratings of happiness were overwhelmingly high among different music excerpts. This suggests that listeners tend to feel positive when they listen to music regardless of the specific emotions aroused by music (e.g. happiness and sadness). The high level of happiness observed in the review may actually point to the experience of pleasure. Taking this as a starting point, this study moves on to introduce the psychological notion of pleasure and how it can be applied to the study of musical experience. The experience of pleasure involves an evaluation process and is not necessarily tied up with particular emotions. The relationship between pleasure and musical expectations is also explored. An explorative empirical study has been carried out to investigate listeners' experiences of pleasure and emotions when they listen to music. Participants listened to several music excerpts and they had to report the affective response induced by the excerpts in them. They also gave ratings to the level of pleasure they experienced with the music excerpts. Results show that different excerpts induced different responses in the participants, but the levels of pleasure they experienced towards different excerpts were not significantly different. Taken together, this study suggests that pleasure is commonly experienced when we listen to music and it is a psychological experience independent of emotions. A better understanding of musical pleasure can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of our musical experience. / published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

This thesis investigates implicit memory for music, as measured by repetition priming: a processing benefit for previously encountered items. Although repetition priming has been documented in many domains, including language, visual perception, and environmental sounds, it has not yet been demonstrated in music, a domain replete with pitch repetition. A novel methodology is presented in which participants sang back the final tone of a short melody. Experiments presented in Chapter 2 show that participants were faster to sing back a target tone when it was a repetition of a previous melodic tone than when it was not, and this effect was greatest when the repetition was closest to the target. These studies also showed a benefit for expected tonic tones, which were manipulated independently of the repetition effect. Chapter 3 presents a new analysis method for measuring response latencies in sung tones. A time-frequency representation that optimizes the tradeoff between time and frequency for each point in time yielded a measurement of singers' time to reach a target frequency, which takes into account both speed and accuracy of the vocal productions. The time-frequency measurement, applied to the data presented in Chapter 2, showed longer times to reach target frequency for higher pitches, as well as larger effects of tonal priming than were attained through traditional response latency measures. The experiments in Chapter 4 examine the time course of the effects of repetition and tonality. The singing-back paradigm used in Chapter 2 also was used with the additional manipulation of stimulus tempo. These studies implicated interference rather than decay as the cause of the decreased repetition priming effect. Stimulus tempo manipulations showed separate time courses for repetition and tonal priming. Together, these studies provide the first evidence of repetition priming in music, document its interaction with other factors including tonality and pitch height, and describe its time course. The findings are discussed in terms of sensory and cognitive theories of priming.

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The distinction between emotions expressed by and evoked by music is often blurred by the use of methodologies that are difficult to compare, preventing progress towards a unifying theory of emotion and music. In this thesis, a methodology for experimentation that clarifies how research in these areas can be conducted clearly and independently is proposed. The study of evoked emotions is emphasized, and two novel controllers are developed to examine methods of recording emotional response continuously. These controllers, along with a number of the proposed methodological changes, are tested against an established controller in an experiment designed to record emotional changes to participant-selected musical pieces. The results support predictions regarding the effects that the experimental setting can have on the emotional responses of the participant. Usability ratings of one of the new controllers were found to be slightly higher than those of the established controller, while providing an interface that is less emotionally distracting for the participant. It also provides the ability to record instances of physiological reactions evoked in the participant.

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This thesis is concerned with the perception of time in music with emphasis on tempo, emotion and time perception in music. Three studies were conducted to assess whether listeners were able to make consistent judgements about tempo that varied from piece to piece. Listeners heard short extracts of Scottish music played at a range of tempi and were asked to make a two alternative forced choice of 'too fast' or 'too slow' for each extract. The responses for each study were plotted as proportion too fast responses as a function of tempo for each piece, and cumulative normal curves were fitted to each data set. The point where these curves cross 0.5 is the tempo at which the music sounds right to the listeners, referred to as the optimal tempo. The results from each study show that listeners are capable of making consistent tempo judgements and that the optimal tempo varies across extracts. The results also revealed that rhythm plays a role, but not the only role in making temporal judgements. In the previous studies, it is possible that listeners might be using an average tempo from previously heard extracts to make every subsequent response. We wanted to assess this by presenting a single stimulus per participant and therefore remove any effects of the context on participant's responses. Using this technique we shall show that listeners can make 'too fast' and 'too slow' responses that are independent of previously heard extracts. In addition the data reveal similar results to those found in the first experimental chapter. The 3rd chapter deals with the effect of changes in the tempo of music on the perception of happy and sadness. Listeners heard short extracts of music that varied in tempo and were asked to make a 2AFC of happy or sad for each extract. Separate psychometric functions were obtained for each extract of music, and the points where these crossed 83% and 17% happy were calculated, and treated as happy tempo and sad tempo respectively. The results show that most extracts can be perceived as both happy and sad just by varying the tempo. However, the tempo at which extracts become happy or sad varies widely from extract to extract. We show that the sad and happy tempi are related to the size of the intervals (pitch changes) in the extract. In considering what might be involved in the perception of time in music we wanted to assess what effect small changes to a stimulus would have on perceived duration. We presented 2 auditory stimuli and show that the perceived duration of the test stimulus with a change in pitch increased as the size of the pitch change increased. The results are explained in terms of event strength where strong events cause perceived duration to increase whilst weak events are perceived to be shorter by comparison.

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