Previous work on conveyed musical emotion has often focused on experimentally composed and manipulated music, or multi-lined music selected to express overt emotions. This highly controlled approach may overlook some aspects of the complex relationship between composers, performers, and listeners in transmitting emotional messages. My PhD research focuses on how listeners perceive emotion in music, specifically, how listeners interpret musical features such as timing, mode and pitch in complex musical stimuli. I also demonstrate how listeners with musical expertise use cues differently to perceive emotion and the effect of performer interpretation on this communication process.
Throughout this dissertation I use a dimensional approach capturing perceived valence and arousal to assess complex musical stimuli. I adapted a technique used in other domains to music, affording an opportunity to explore nuanced relationships between cues and listener ratings of emotion. In Chapter 1 I show that musically untrained adults mainly use cues of timing and mode when rating emotional valence, mirroring previously reported. Additionally, I show that although pitch information emerges as a significant predictor of listener’s valence ratings, listeners use it less than cues such as timing and mode. Further, I demonstrate that neither mode nor pitch information help listeners rate perceived arousal. Finally, in Chapter 4, I show differences in performer interpretation mediate the strength of individual cues, as well as the distribution of emotional ratings across each album. In Chapter 3, I demonstrate that listeners with musical training use cues differently than untrained listeners, with more reliance on information communicated through mode when making judgements of emotional valence. Altogether these findings corroborate previous evidence suggesting timing and mode cues are of the greatest importance in conveying /perceiving emotion, this process is further mediated by individual differences in both pianist (interpretation) and listener (musical training)—underscoring the complex relationship between composer, performer, and audience. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Musical performers and composers express emotions through the selection and use of various musical features, or cues. Studies exploring how listeners perceive emotion in music have identified several cues important to this process—often using tightly controlled (and constrained) tone sequences crafted for experimental purposes. More work is needed to examine how listeners decode communicated emotion in unaltered passages created by renowned composers—the kind of music routinely performed and enjoyed by audiences for generations. Here in three sets of experiments I apply a novel stimulus set and analysis to determine the relative importance of three musical features. Additionally, I explore the role of the listener’s level of expertise as well as the importance of performers’ interpretative decisions. My work offers a new way to understand the relationship between musical features and emotional messages, helping to clarify one of music’s most mysterious and powerful capabilities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/25224 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Battcock, Aimee |
| Contributors | Schutz, Michael, Psychology |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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