Harmonic organisation conveys both universal and culture-specific cues for emotional expression in music

Athanasopoulos, G.; Eerola, T.; Lahdelma, I.; Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, M.

Abstract

Previous research conducted on the cross-cultural perception of music and its emotional content has established that emotions can be communicated across cultures at least on a rudimentary level. Here, we report a cross-cultural study with participants originating from two tribes in northwest Pakistan (Khow and Kalash) and the United Kingdom, with both groups being naïve to the music of the other respective culture. We explored how participants assessed emotional connotations of various Western and non-Western harmonisation styles, and whether cultural familiarity with a harmonic idiom such as major and minor mode would consistently relate to emotion communication. The results indicate that Western concepts of harmony are not relevant for participants unexposed to Western music when other emotional cues (tempo, pitch height, articulation, timbre) are kept relatively constant. At the same time, harmonic style alone has the ability to colour the emotional expression in music if it taps the appropriate cultural connotations. The preference for one harmonisation style over another, including the major-happy/minor-sad distinction, is influenced by culture. Finally, our findings suggest that although differences emerge across different harmonisation styles, acoustic roughness influences the expression of emotion in similar ways across cultures; preference for consonance however seems to be dependent on cultural familiarity.

Citation

Athanasopoulos, G., Eerola, T., Lahdelma, I., & Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, M. (2021). Harmonic organisation conveys both universal and culture-specific cues for emotional expression in music. PLoS ONE, 16(1), Article e0244964. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244964

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 19, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Jan 13, 2021
• Publication Date: 2021-01
• Deposit Date: Mar 16, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 17, 2021
• Journal: PLoS ONE
• Electronic ISSN: 1932-6203
• Publisher: Public Library of Science
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 1
• Article Number: e0244964
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244964
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1251156