Does Music Evoke Emotional Responses?

Christensen, Lone Juul Dransfeldt

4. term

Medialogy, Master

2010

2010-05-31

149 pages

This study approaches the difficult task of determining if music does in fact evoke emotional responses in listeners. Initially the broad terms music and listeners were delimited. Music was delimited to western classical instrumental music with a homophonic texture, but without percussion, and listeners to listeners from the western culture. The approach of the study was to conduct an experiment to provide empirical evidence for the determination. The experiment relied on the understanding of emotions as consisting of components, and that a synchronisation of the two components -- subjective feeling and physiological arousal -- would indicate the occurrence of an emotional response. A two dimensional description of emotional states was adapted with the dimensions of valence and arousal. A developed application for continual self-reports was used to obtain continual valence levels in listeners. The arousal levels of listeners were obtained through ECG (heart activity) measurements. For a comparison with the state of musical features, an application for the detection of loudness, pitch level, pitch range, mode, harmony and timbre was developed. The experiment results indicated that an average of 30.8% of listeners responded emotional to the listening experience. No correlations of emotional responses were found across a majority of listeners, and thus a correlation with musical features was determined premature.

Music ; Emotions

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