Emotional Effects of Music: Production Rules

It is an ancient, and very pervasive, idea that music expresses emotion. Apart from the copious literature to this effect contributed by composers, musicologists, and philosophers , there is also solid empirical evidence from psychological research, reviewed in chapters of this book (e.g. Gabrielsson & Lindström, this volume; Juslin, this volume), that listeners often agree rather strongly about what type of emotion is expressed in a particular piece. It is also a pervasive belief that music can, at times, actually produce emotion in listeners. The distinction between perception and production is related to the distinction between cognitivism and emotivism proposed by philosophers in their analysis of emotion in music (e.g. Kivy 1989). Whereas 'emotivists' hold that music elicits real emotional responses in listeners, 'cognitivists' argue that music simply expresses or represents emotions. Our view is that it would be premature to prejudge the issue and that both positions may be perfectly appropriate depending on a number of factors outlined below. Our purpose in this chapter is to provide a formalization of the processes whereby music produces emotional effects in the listener that go beyond the cognitive inference of what the music can be said to express. In addition, we review the pertinent evidence to date and suggest ways in which future research might investigate these processes in a systematic fashion. We state at the outset that our discussion and the review of the available evidence are largely based on Western classical music, thereby restricting the generalizability of our claims to other kinds of music and other cultures. Our attempt at a formalization of emotional effects of music will consist in defining the affective changes that music is supposed to produce in the listener and to identify the determinants of the listening situation (features such as the musical structure of the piece listened to, the interpretation by the performer, relevant state and trait characteristics of the listener, and the respective context). An important issue for discussion will be the relative weighting of the different determinants and the type of their interaction in producing the affective outcome. We follow the senior author's attempt to define the emotional meaning of music in analogy to Bühler's Organon model of language, postulating composition, expression, perception, and production rules to model the different facets of emotional meaning (Scherer, 2000d). In this context, the term rule is used to denote a certain regularity or lawfulness of the …