Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Emotional expression through musical cues: A comparison of production and perception approaches

Micallef Grimaud, Annaliese; Eerola, Tuomas

Emotional expression through musical cues: A comparison of production and perception approaches Thumbnail


Authors



Abstract

Multiple approaches have been used to investigate how musical cues are used to shape different emotions in music. The most prominent approach is a perception study, where musical stimuli varying in cue levels are assessed by participants in terms of their conveyed emotion. However, this approach limits the number of cues and combinations simultaneously investigated, since each variation produces another musical piece to be evaluated. Another less used approach is a production approach, where participants use cues to change the emotion conveyed in music, allowing participants to explore a larger number of cue combinations than the former approach. These approaches provide different levels of accuracy and economy for identifying how cues are used to convey different emotions in music. However, do these approaches provide converging results? This paper’s aims are two-fold. The role of seven musical cues (tempo, pitch, dynamics, brightness, articulation, mode, and instrumentation) in communicating seven emotions (sadness, joy, calmness, anger, fear, power, and surprise) in music is investigated. Additionally, this paper explores whether the two approaches will yield similar findings on how the cues are used to shape different emotions in music. The first experiment utilises a production approach where participants adjust the cues in real-time to convey target emotions. The second experiment uses a perception approach where participants rate pre-rendered systematic variations of the stimuli for all emotions. Overall, the cues operated similarly in the majority (32/49) of cue-emotion combinations across both experiments, with the most variance produced by the dynamics and instrumentation cues. A comparison of the prediction accuracy rates of cue combinations representing the intended emotions found that prediction rates in Experiment 1 were higher than the ones obtained in Experiment 2, suggesting that a production approach may be a more efficient method to explore how cues are used to shape different emotions in music.

Citation

Micallef Grimaud, A., & Eerola, T. (2022). Emotional expression through musical cues: A comparison of production and perception approaches. PLoS ONE, 17(12), Article e0279605. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279605

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Dec 10, 2022
Online Publication Date Dec 30, 2022
Publication Date 2022
Deposit Date Jan 24, 2023
Publicly Available Date Jan 24, 2023
Journal PLoS ONE
Electronic ISSN 1932-6203
Publisher Public Library of Science
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 17
Issue 12
Article Number e0279605
DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279605
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1184765

Files

Published Journal Article (749 Kb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2022 Micallef Grimaud, Eerola. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.





You might also like



Downloadable Citations