Emotion and the Experience of Listening to Music A Framework for Empirical Research Matthew Montague Lavy Jesus College, Cambridge This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy April 2001 Contents Declaration iii Acknowledgements iv Abstract v I Accounting for Musically Evoked Emotion 1 1 The need for a model 2 2 Music as Sound 14 Response to Sound . 15 Response to Pattern . 23 Sounds and Patterns in Music . 28 3 Music as Utterance 39 Communication and Vocalisation . 39 Utterance, Evolution and Development . 44 Music as Utterance . 48 Utterance, Music and Gesture . 54 4 Music as Context 58 A Context for Listening to Music . 59 Context and the Evocation of Emotion . 67 5 Music as Narrative 75 Narratives in Music? . 77 Suspense and Expectation . 86 To Other Worlds . 97 6 The Model and its Implications 101 II An Empirical Investigation of Narrative 112 7 Music in the Presence of Explicit Narratives 113 Part One Method . 116 Part One Results and Discussion . 126 Part Two Method . 136 Part Two Results and Discussion . 143 General Discussion . 150 CONTENTS ii 8 Anomalous Suspense and Factual Recall 154 Experiment . 158 Method . 161 Results and Discussion . 172 General Discussion . 180 9 Arousal, Integration and Narrative Process 183 Method . 186 Results and Discussion . 197 Conclusions . 201 10 A Framework for Empirical Research 204 Bibliography 211 Declaration I declare that this thesis consists entirely of my own work, except where explicitly stated to the contrary. This thesis fits within the prescribed word limit of 80,000 words, excluding the Appendices (which consist largely of computer code). Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people whose help has been invaluable during the re- searching and writing of this thesis: Dr Ian Cross (who has given me advice and support throughout my time at Cambridge); colleagues at the Jesus College IT Department; my par- ents and family; friends, particularly Nicola Phillips and Alistair Turnbull for their sugges- tions and numerous insightful comments. This research was funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and my parents. Abstract That music evokes emotion is a well-known and uncontested fact. Rather more contentious have been the numerous attempts by philosophers, writers and musicians over the centuries to explain the phenomenon. In recent years, the development of cognitive psychology has led to renewed interest in the field; a growing number of music psychologists are devoting their energies to the empirical examination of various aspects of musically evoked emotion. Despite the wealth of data fast amassing, however, there exist few theoretical accounts of emotional response to music written from a music-psychological perspective within which empirical studies can be understood and upon which they can build. Furthermore, accounts that do exist have traditionally made rigid distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic sources of emotion, distinctions that do not fit well with our understanding of emotional antecedents in other domains. This thesis presents the foundations of a model of emotional response to music that places the experience of listening to music squarely within the wider frame of human en- gagement with the environment. Instead of presenting a categorization of music or an anal- ysis of cultural or individual semantic tokens, the model develops four basic assumptions concerning listeners and their relationship to music: 1. Music is heard as sound. The constant monitoring of auditory stimuli does not suddenly switch off when people listen to music; just like any other stimulus in the auditory environment, music exists to be monitored and analyzed. 2. Music is heard as human utterance. Humans have a remarkable ability to communicate and detect emotion in the contours and timbres of vocal utterances; this ability is not suddenly lost during a musical listening experience. 3. Music is heard in context. Listeners do not exist in a vacuum: music is always heard within the context of a complex web of knowledge, thoughts and environment, all of which can potentially contribute to an emotional experience. 4. Music is heard as narrative. Listening to music involves the integration of sounds, ut- terances and context into dynamic, coherent experience. Such integration, far from being a phenomenon specific to music listening, is underpinned by generic narrative processes. The first part of the thesis introduces the four components of the model, reviews existing empirical and theoretical research that supports its premises, and considers its ramifications. The discussion reveals that despite an abundance of evidence pointing to the importance of narrative for affective responses to music, virtually no empirical work has addressed the issue directly. Hence, the second part of the thesis presents three experiments that consti- tute a preliminary attempt to do so. First is an experiment that investigates the interaction between music and listening context in the evocation of emotional response. It presents par- ticipants with musical excerpts in conjunction with explicit extra-musical narratives in order ABSTRACT vi to demonstrate how readily music binds with extra-musical context to form a dynamic, co- herent whole. The second and third experiments seek to demonstrate that such binding is not specific to music but is an example of the workings of more generic cognitive processes that underpin narrative comprehension. In addition, both of these experiments are intended to exemplify research paradigms that could be used in future empirical research on the nar- rative processing of music and its role in the evocation of emotion. The thesis argues that the Sound-Utterance-Context-Narrative model constitutes a good framework for empirical work because it is specific enough to provoke detailed research questions and methodologies, but generic enough that a theoretically complete answer to all the questions it poses would constitute a comprehensive understanding of emotional response to music. Its over-arching claim is that an understanding of emotional response to music can only be attained by the development of models that refrain from treating music as a privileged class of object with intrinsic emotional properties, and instead consider the act of listening to music as a perfectly ordinary human activity. Part I Accounting for Musically Evoked Emotion Chapter 1 The need for a model Philosophers, writers and musicians have been investigating the power of music to evoke emotions for millennia; the pursuit is probably as old as the phenomenon of music itself. Over the last few decades the development of music psychology—with its promise of scien- tific objectivity—has sparked a renewed flurry of activity in this field. Literally thousands of papers have been published that present data relating to various aspects of phenomena involving music and emotion from many disparate disciplines. For the music psychologist, however, there has been a single fundamental question: what is it about music that enables it to evoke emotions in listeners?1 We know a considerable amount about the effects of music both from systematic obser- vation of human behaviour in the real world and from the results of controlled laboratory experiments. An abundance of evidence indicates not only that people regularly use music deliberately as a mood induction tool (e.g. Sloboda, 2000), but also that listening to music in everyday circumstances can lead to moderated mood and altered cognition (e.g. Bruner, 1990). For evidence of the centrality of music to the emotional lives of many Americans, at least, we need look no further than Frey (1985), whose massive survey reported that eight percent of all crying episodes in the USA were evoked either directly or indirectly by music. 1The terms “emotion”, “emotions”, “emotional response” and “affective response” are used informally throughout this thesis to refer to a broad category of pychological and physiological states that would, in com- mon parlance, be described as emotional. “Emotional response to music”, then, refers to any affective response whether momentary or longer-lived (mood-like) that has been induced by music. In using emotion terms some- what interchangeably, this thesis in no way wishes to denigrate the substantial work that has sought to differen- tiate between various affective phenomena, but merely to avoid making distinctions that are still largely a matter of contention even within the field of emotion psychology itself (see e.g. Davidson, 1994). As the thesis develops, it will become apparent that this decision has no impact on the model presented. There are some points in later chapters where it has been helpful to distinguish between categories of affect (for want of a better word); in these cases, both the distinctions and their rationale has been made explicit. CHAPTER 1. THE NEED FOR A MODEL 3 Sometimes, music evokes intense feelings of sadness and joy, which can occasionally lead even to strong physical reactions or overt physical behaviour, such as shouting, screaming or crying (Gabrielsson and Lindstrom,¨ 2000); less extreme physical reactions, such as pilo- erection and lumps in the throat, are commonly cited musically induced phenomena (e.g. Sloboda, 1991). Emotional responses to music are correlated with physiological function- ing, as evidenced by measurable effects on the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems (e.g. Iwanaga and Tsukamoto, 1997; Krumhansl, 1997b) and by detectable