How are Music and Emotion Links Studied?

Abstract

This chapter considers ways to establish links between musical features and specific emotions. The first step is usually to conduct an experiment, in which listeners rate the emotional expression of different excerpts of music — either music from commercial recordings or pieces created specifically for the study. The next step is to extract musical features associated with emotion categories. This can be done in four ways: analyzing the musical score of the pieces; relying on experts, such as music theorists and musicians, asking them to rate various aspects of the musical structure; measuring acoustic parameters of the music (e.g. sound level, timing, frequency spectrum of the timbre), using dedicated computer software; and manipulating specific musical features in synthesized (computerized) performances, to evaluate how they influence a listener's judgments of emotional expression.