Manipulating Greek musical modes and tempo affects perceived musical emotion in musicians and nonmusicians

The influence of different musical modes and tempi on time perception

Studies involving the interaction between musical mode and tempo on time perception have been carried out through comparisons between a single major mode and a single minor mode, presented in different tempi. However, classifying the modes only into major and minor has not been considered sufficient. The purpose of this study was to verify the influence of the musical mode and tempo interaction on time perception analyzing the effect of different modes performed in the slow, moderate and fast tempi. Fifty undergraduate students of both sexes individually listened to 12 musical excerpts (4 modes - Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian and Aeolian - and 3 tempi - 72 bpm, 114 bpm, and 184 bpm), one excerpt at a time. After each excerpt, the participants performed a time-reproduction task, in which they had to press a button (beginning of the task), recal the duration of each excerpt and press a button again (end of the task). Results showed no interaction between mode and tempi and no differences between musical modes, regardless of tempo. However, regardless of the mode, excerpts in slow tempo was judged shorter than in moderate and fast tempi, respectively, and excerpts in moderate tempo was judged shorter than excerpts in fast tempo. These results can contribute to understanding the psychological processes of attention, memory and expectancy related to the perception of time in music listening situations.

Emotion and expertise: how listeners with formal music training use cues to perceive emotion

Although studies of musical emotion often focus on the role of the composer and performer, the communicative process is also influenced by the listener's musical background or experience. Given the equivocal nature of evidence regarding the effects of musical training, the role of listener expertise in conveyed musical emotion remains opaque. Here we examine emotional responses of musically trained listeners across two experiments using (1) eight measure excerpts, (2) musically resolved excerpts and compare them to responses collected from untrained listeners in Battcock and Schutz (2019). In each experiment 30 participants with six or more years of music training rated perceived emotion for 48 excerpts from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) using scales of valence and arousal. Models of listener ratings predict more variance in trained vs. untrained listeners across both experiments. More importantly however, we observe a shift in cue weights related to training. Using commonality analysis and Fischer Z score comparisons as well as margin of error calculations, we show that timing and mode affect untrained listeners equally, whereas mode plays a significantly stronger role than timing for trained listeners. This is not to say the emotional messages are less well recognized by untrained listeners-simply that training appears to shift the relative weight of cues used in making evaluations. These results clarify music training's potential impact on the specific effects of cues in conveying musical emotion.

Effects of affective priming through music on the use of emotion words

Understanding how music can evoke emotions and in turn affect language use has significant implications not only in clinical settings but also in the emotional development of children. The relationship between music and emotion is an intricate one that has been closely studied. However, how the use of emotion words can be influenced by auditory priming is a question which is still not known. The main interest in this study was to examine how manipulation of mode and tempo in music affects the emotions induced and the subsequent effects on the use of emotion words. Fifty university students in Singapore were asked to select emotion words after exposure to various music excerpts. The results showed that major modes and faster tempos elicited greater responses for positive words and high arousal words respectively, while minor modes elicited more high arousal words and original tempos resulted in more positive words being selected. In the Major-Fast, Major-Slow and Minor-Slow conditions, positive correlations were found between the number of high arousal words and their rated intensities. Upon further analysis, categorization of emotion words differed from the circumplex model. Taken together, the findings highlight the prominence of affective auditory priming and allow us to better understand our emotive responses to music.

Synchronising to a frequency while estimating time of vibro-tactile stimuli

It is well known that subjective time perception can be modified by the emotional experience related to a specific event, by pharmaceutical compounds or by sensory stimuli. As for the latter, visual and auditory stimuli have been widely studied compared to tactile ones. Two experiments were conducted using different vibratory frequencies to stimulate participants who were asked to reproduce stimulus duration. Experiment 1 compared differences in reproduced times for 8-s stimuli ranging between 0.5 and 6 Hz in 100 participants who performed a time reproduction task with the stimulus present or absent during the reproduction. The task was done under prospective and retrospective paradigms. Experiment 2 assessed differences in reproduced times by 80 participants under vibrotactile stimulation of two frequencies simultaneously delivered to each hand, frequencies with specific proportions of 0.5 and 0.75 times the standard frequency for two groups of standard frequency (2 or 12 Hz). Reproduced times in Experiment 1 did not show significant differences among frequencies. Significant differences were found for the absence/presence condition, solely, in prospective tasks, where estimations were longer in the absence of the vibrotactile stimulus. Significant differences were found in Experiment 2 for reproduced time by participants between groups of standard frequency. Data analysis suggests the need to improve the understanding of the subjective time perception processes for higher frequencies considering the intensity modulation based on the amplitude and frequency relation. Results open the possibility of designing new protocols in the study of time perception and other cognitive functions.

Do Individual Differences Influence Moment-by-Moment Reports of Emotion Perceived in Music and Speech Prosody?

Comparison of emotion perception in music and prosody has the potential to contribute to an understanding of their speculated shared evolutionary origin. Previous research suggests shared sensitivity to and processing of music and speech, but less is known about how emotion perception in the auditory domain might be influenced by individual differences. Personality, emotional intelligence, gender, musical training and age exert some influence on discrete, summative judgments of perceived emotion in music and speech stimuli. However, music and speech are temporal phenomena, and little is known about whether individual differences influence moment-by-moment perception of emotion in these domains. A behavioral study collected two main types of data: continuous ratings of perceived emotion while listening to extracts of music and speech, using a computer interface which modeled emotion on two dimensions (arousal and valence), and demographic information including measures of personality (TIPI) and emotional intelligence (TEIQue-SF). Functional analysis of variance on the time series data revealed a small number of statistically significant differences associated with Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, musical training and age. The results indicate that individual differences exert limited influence on continuous judgments of dynamic, naturalistic expressions. We suggest that this reflects a reliance on acoustic cues to emotion in moment-by-moment judgments of perceived emotions and is further evidence of the shared sensitivity to and processing of music and speech.

Music, emotion, and time perception: the influence of subjective emotional valence and arousal?

The present study used a temporal bisection task with short (<2 s) and long (>2 s) stimulus durations to investigate the effect on time estimation of several musical parameters associated with emotional changes in affective valence and arousal. In order to manipulate the positive and negative valence of music, Experiments 1 and 2 contrasted the effect of musical structure with pieces played normally and backwards, which were judged to be pleasant and unpleasant, respectively. This effect of valence was combined with a subjective arousal effect by changing the tempo of the musical pieces (fast vs. slow) (Experiment 1) or their instrumentation (orchestral vs. piano pieces). The musical pieces were indeed judged more arousing with a fast than with a slow tempo and with an orchestral than with a piano timbre. In Experiment 3, affective valence was also tested by contrasting the effect of tonal (pleasant) vs. atonal (unpleasant) versions of the same musical pieces. The results showed that the effect of tempo in music, associated with a subjective arousal effect, was the major factor that produced time distortions with time being judged longer for fast than for slow tempi. When the tempo was held constant, no significant effect of timbre on the time judgment was found although the orchestral music was judged to be more arousing than the piano music. Nevertheless, emotional valence did modulate the tempo effect on time perception, the pleasant music being judged shorter than the unpleasant music.

Investigation of the Effect of Mode and Tempo on Emotional Responses to Music Using EEG Power Asymmetry

The combined interactions of mode and tempo on emotional responses to music were investigated using both self-reports and electroencephalogram (EEG) activity. A musical excerpt was performed in three different modes and tempi. Participants rated the emotional content of the resulting nine stimuli and their EEG activity was recorded. Musical modes influence the valence of emotion with major mode being evaluated happier and more serene, than minor and locrian modes. In EEG frontal activity, major mode was associated with an increased alpha activation in the left hemisphere compared to minor and locrian modes, which, in turn, induced increased activation in the right hemisphere. The tempo modulates the arousal value of emotion with faster tempi associated with stronger feeling of happiness and anger and this effect is associated in EEG with an increase of frontal activation in the left hemisphere. By contrast, slow tempo induced decreased frontal activation in the left hemisphere. Some interactive effects were found between mode and tempo: An increase of tempo modulated the emotion differently depending on the mode of the piece.