Emotional responses to music | Hauke Egermann | TEDxGhent
Summary
TLDRThe video explores how music evokes emotions, presenting four key explanations: learned associations, musical expectations, expressive movements, and activating sounds. The speaker conducts an experiment, illustrating how listeners perceive happiness or sadness in music. They highlight how learned cultural associations and knowledge of musical structure shape individual emotional responses, while universal emotional expressions and physiological arousal contribute to shared experiences. The presentation concludes by suggesting that music can evoke both personal and collective emotional reactions, connecting people through common emotional patterns.
Takeaways
- đ” Music is a universal phenomenon that plays a key role in shaping moods, creating shared experiences, and connecting people.
- đą The first musical excerpt in the experiment was perceived as sad, while the second one was interpreted as happy by participants.
- đ Music creates emotions in us, with some explanations suggesting these emotions are based on learned associations from cultural contexts.
- đ¶ Another theory posits that our emotional response to music stems from learned musical expectations and patterns, built from everyday experiences.
- đ Anticipation, tension, and surprise in music can evoke emotions, as listeners expect certain patterns and structures to occur.
- đ¶ Music can mirror emotional movement: happy emotions lead to faster, louder, and higher-pitched music, while sad emotions slow things down.
- đ Emotional responses to music can be similar across different cultures, suggesting some degree of universality in how we process music.
- đ§ Empathy may play a role in how we experience emotions in music, as we connect with the imagined emotions of others.
- đ A study in Congo and Canada showed that arousing music tends to induce physiological arousal, regardless of cultural background.
- â° Some music may trigger emotional arousal similarly to how an alarm clock wakes us up, by activating our sympathetic nervous system.
Q & A
What is the main topic of the presentation?
-The presentation explores how music influences our emotions and provides four different explanations for why music can create emotional responses in listeners.
What is the first explanation for why music creates emotions?
-The first explanation is based on learned associations, suggesting that people associate certain musical patterns with emotions due to their cultural context, such as music in happy or sad movie scenes.
How does the second explanation, 'musical expectations,' describe how music influences emotions?
-Musical expectations are built from our everyday experience of music. We develop statistical knowledge of musical structures, which creates expectations, anticipation, tension, and sometimes surprise, leading to emotional responses.
What role does 'expressive emotional movement' play in music-induced emotions according to the third explanation?
-Expressive emotional movement refers to how music mimics the physical and behavioral expressions of emotions, such as faster, louder sounds for happiness and slower, softer sounds for sadness, which listeners can relate to emotional states.
What evidence supports the idea that some emotional responses to music may be universal?
-Studies have shown that people from different isolated cultures could recognize emotions like happiness and sadness in music, and similar settings were used to express these emotions in music across distinct cultures.
What is the fourth explanation for music's emotional impact?
-The fourth explanation is that music can produce emotional reactions by acting as an activating sound that stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, similar to how an alarm clock arouses attention and physiological responses.
What did the study involving Congolese Pygmies and Canadians reveal about the universality of music's emotional effects?
-The study found that while the two groups had different emotional responses to Western music categorized as positive or negative, both groups showed arousal responses to music that was louder, faster, and higher in pitch, indicating shared physiological reactions to arousing music.
How does empathy factor into emotional responses to music?
-Empathy plays a role in emotional responses to music by allowing listeners to imagine and resonate with the emotions expressed through the music, making them feel similar emotions as if they were the person experiencing those feelings.
Why might not everyone in the experiment have agreed on whether the music excerpts were happy or sad?
-Emotional responses to music can vary due to individual differences in cultural background, personal experiences, and learned associations, which may lead to different interpretations of musical emotions.
What conclusion does the presenter draw about the combination of learned and universal responses to music?
-The presenter concludes that while learned associations and musical expectations can explain individual differences in emotional responses to music, expressive movement and activating sounds may explain universal response patterns, helping to create shared experiences through music.
Outlines
đ¶ The Ubiquity of Music and Its Emotional Impact
The speaker introduces the pervasive nature of music in everyday life, explaining how it influences moods and creates shared experiences. They pose the central question: why does music elicit emotions? The speaker, a music researcher, begins an experiment with the audience by playing two musical excerpts. The first is identified as happy by the majority, while the second is recognized as sad. The speaker highlights that although most agreed on the emotional tone of each excerpt, individual reactions can vary, leading to an exploration of why music evokes such emotions.
đ§ Learned Associations and Musical Expectations
The first explanation for music-induced emotions is learned associations. The speaker explains that cultural upbringing, particularly in Western Europe, teaches people to associate certain musical patterns with specific emotional contexts, like happy or sad movie scenes. The second explanation is musical expectations, where people subconsciously learn statistical properties of music. This knowledge allows them to anticipate musical patterns, creating pleasure, tension, or surprise. The speaker describes a study where unexpected musical segments induced both subjective and physiological arousal, supporting the theory that musical expectations play a role in emotional responses.
đ Emotional Movement in Music
The third explanation is based on expressive emotional movement. The speaker explains how happiness and sadness are not only feelings but also involve behaviors. Happy people move quickly and energetically, while sad individuals slow down and become inactive. These movements have parallels in music, where happy music is often louder, faster, and higher in pitch, while sad music is slower and lower. These patterns may be universal, as demonstrated by studies showing people from different cultures use similar musical settings to express emotions like happiness or sadness. Emotional movement in music may thus reflect empathetic processes, helping listeners resonate with the emotional state conveyed.
đ Universality of Music and Emotional Arousal
The speaker presents the results of a cross-cultural experiment involving participants from both Western societies and an isolated Congolese Pygmy population. While there was no universal agreement on whether Western music sounded positive or negative, both groups showed increased physiological arousal when exposed to music that was louder, faster, and higher in pitch. This suggests that while emotional recognition may be culturally specific, the arousing nature of certain musical features is more universal. The speaker also proposes a fourth explanation, where music triggers emotions simply by being activating sounds, similar to how an alarm clock can cause arousal by grabbing attention.
đ Four Explanations for Music-Induced Emotions
The speaker summarizes four key mechanisms that explain how music evokes emotions. The first two are based on learned associations and musical expectations, which explain why individual emotional experiences with music can vary. The other two mechanisms, expressive movements and activating sounds, are more universal and account for shared emotional responses across different cultures. These mechanisms together suggest that musicâs emotional impact can be both personal and collective, enriching individual experiences while also fostering shared emotional connections.
Mindmap
Keywords
đĄMusic and Emotions
đĄLearned Associations
đĄMusical Expectations
đĄEmotional Movement
đĄEmpathy
đĄCultural Influence
đĄArousal
đĄUniversal Responses
đĄStatistical Knowledge
đĄPhysiological Arousal
Highlights
Music is a ubiquitous phenomenon that influences our mood and creates shared experiences.
The experiment conducted showed different emotional responses to happy and sad music excerpts.
Learned associations play a significant role in how we emotionally perceive music, tied to cultural and environmental experiences.
Musical expectations are formed through statistical knowledge of musical patterns, influencing our emotions.
Music can create pleasure through anticipation, tension, and surprise based on our learned musical expectations.
An experiment showed that surprising musical segments induced physiological arousal, linking musical unpredictability with emotional responses.
Expressive emotional movement in music mirrors human emotions, such as happiness or sadness, through tempo and intensity.
Happy music tends to be louder, faster, and higher in pitch, while sad music is slower and lower.
Footstep sounds can convey emotional states like happiness or sadness, reflecting how human behaviors are linked to emotions.
Cultural studies show that people from different isolated cultures can recognize emotions in music, indicating some level of universal emotional expression in music.
Empathy plays a role in how we experience emotions in music by imagining the emotional state being expressed.
A cross-cultural experiment between Western participants and Congolese pygmies revealed differences in responses to positive and negative Western music.
Despite cultural differences, both groups responded similarly to arousing music, showing physiological and subjective arousal to louder, faster, and higher-pitched music.
The arousal caused by music could also stem from its general activating effect on the sympathetic nervous system, akin to an alarm clock.
Theories of music-induced emotions combine learned associations and musical knowledge with universal response patterns, creating both individual and shared emotional experiences.
Transcripts
hello everyone thank
you music is a very ubiquitous
phenomenon we make music and we listen
to music in our everyday lives it brings
us into the right mood it buns us to
other people and it also creates shared
experiences but how does that work why
does Music create emotions in us well I
myself I'm a music researcher and I
conduct experiments in order to find out
how music influences our emotions right
now I would like to do an experiment
with you so if you
agree I'm going to play you two exerpts
the first one goes like
this so now everyone who thinks that
this sounded sad please raise your
hand okay no one here uh who would say
that this one sounded happy please raise
your hand okay now let's go to the next
one and who would say that this one was
happy okay again no hands and who would
say that this one was sad
okay so I see a lot of hands so uh maybe
we can agree on that the first one was
happy excerpt and maybe also made you
feel happy a little bit and the second
one was a sad excerpt and made you feel
a little said however maybe not everyone
raised their hand so um there's some
similarities in your feelings however
not everyone may have agreed on that um
so there might have been s some
differences um so where does it come
from why does Music create emotions in
us I brought you here now four different
explanations the first one says that
this is based on learned associations so
all of you are probably uh from Belgium
you've been raised in uh the Western um
European World in a similar cultural
environment and you may have just learn
to associate the mut musical patterns I
just presented to you with emotional
contacts that made the music emotional
so for example excerpt one may have used
features that have been used in a happy
movie for example in in a scene where
people laugh and people smile and then
you just learn to associate these
features with happiness and exer 2 could
have been associated with sad contexts
which made this music sound
sad there's another explanation which is
based on learning which is termed or
which was termed musical expectations we
think that in our everyday experience of
Music we acquire statistical knowledge
about the properties the statistical
properties of M musical structures we
actually learn musical patterns musical
styles so may for example you may have
um experienced that once you were in
your car and you turned on the radio and
you heard a song that you've never heard
before however you may have been still
able to sing along with that song that's
because you've got musical knowledge
about the probabilities of musical
patterns the your knowledge about the
musical syntax and this knowledge May
create expectations and these
expectations may turn into emotions so
for example you may anticipate that
something in the music will come which
you like a lot and this will create
pleasure there could be also tension
because you know that something in the
music is about to come but you don't
know when and what is going to happen
and there may be also
surprise uh when we conducted a study
some years ago uh we presented our
participants a piece that had this and
other segments in it um and this
particular musical segment sounded like
this and in the context of that piece
our participants told us that this is
very unexpected to them it was
computationally difficult to predict
from the musical structure and we could
also measure that this segment and also
the other segments that were surprising
to our participants um induced
physiologically and subjectively arousal
in our
participants the third explanation says
that music induces emotions because of
expressive emotional
movement let's look at happiness and
sadness again of course when we're happy
and we're sad there's a subjective
feeling of happiness and sadness
associated with these um emotions
however there are also particular
behaviors that go along with that and
they maybe the reason why we experience
happiness and sadness when we are happy
we tend to become active and we are
approaching things and we're moving in a
fast way however when we're sad we
become slow we maybe we stop our current
behavior we're frustrated because we
didn't reach a certain
goal and along with these movements
there are also Expressions uh and these
expressions of emotions that can be
sometimes hurt um I brought you a
recording of a person now who's in a
happy State have fun again all
right even from the sound of foot
footsteps that's something we found out
in the study and people can recognize um
the emotional expression or the
emotional state person is in now let's
listen to someone who's in a sad mood
have fun on again all
right so if we compare the two
expressions now the happy Expressions
were louder faster and higher in Pitch
now let's listen to the Happy music
again and now to the sad music
again so also the happy music was louder
higher and faster and sorry higher and
pitch and
faster so we think music may be
emotional because it sounds like someone
is moving an emotional
way and these emotional Expressions can
be also to some extent be
Universal um in a study that some
colleagues of mine conducted they asked
people to control certain acoustical
parameters of music and there that those
that are I just mentioned and they asked
them to express happiness and sadness
and what they observe that people use
very similar settings in two very
different isolated cultures without any
contact with each other same goes for
emotion recognition so in another study
that some colleagues conducted they
observed that people also from two very
distinct and is isolated cultures were
able to recognize happiness and sadness
and happy Western uh and sad western
music but how does recognizing an
emotion become to feeling an emotion for
yourself we think that this is realized
through a process that is similar to
empathy so for example if we think of
excer one that may have made you feel
happy you may have empathized with that
person person you imagined that was
expressing
happiness in order to test all these
ideas of the universalness of emotion
induction uh we conducted an experiment
some years ago at McGill University and
established a collaboration with an
athon musicologist she went to the
northern um Congo rainforest and visited
a population of congales pigmies uh they
lived there without electricity without
access to electronic media and that were
very UNAM amiliar with western music
they basically have never heard it
before we then presented to those
participants and also to Canadians
western
music when we then categorized it into
Western positive music and Western
negative music so that's the Western
opinion about music we saw that the
responses to these two types of music
were very different for the two groups
so there was no Universal emotion
induction for veence so for positivity
or
negativity however when we group our
music with respect to its arousing
potential so also the Western opinion
again we could see that in both groups
arousing music compared with calming
music induced subjective and
physiological arousal so the sympathetic
nervous system our participants in both
groups became active and the arousing
music again was louder faster and higher
in
Pitch however there could be also fourth
explanation of these findings which does
not relate to exess Ive movement it
could could be also that music is also
just activating
sound that has a very diver influence on
our sympathetic nervous system uh where
that creates attention or orientation
and subjective sorry and subjective and
physiological arousal this could be
similar to your alarm clock in the
morning that wakes you
up now let me conclude and summarize um
why music creates emotions in us I just
presented you four different
explanations the first one says that
this is based on learned associations
the second one says that this is because
of your knowledge about musical
structures that builds up musical
expectations the third one says that
this is due to expressive movements and
the fourth one says that this is due to
activating
sounds the top two mechanisms are based
on learning and may explain um why our
emotions that can be sometimes very rich
um when we listen to music uh can be
very individual and different however
the bottom to mechanisms and
explanations I just presented to you um
may be based on more Universal response
patterns and help to explain why why our
responses are sometimes very similar and
um yeah maybe U binding us together and
creating shared experiences thank
you
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