Mirroring the Expression

Abstract

This chapter considers a psychological mechanism that can arouse musical emotions called contagion. Contagion is something that people have experienced numerous times in everyday life — outside a musical context. For instance, some people can feel depressed after a conversation with someone who is depressed. Emotional contagion refers to a process whereby an emotion is induced by a piece of music because an independent region of the brain reacts to certain acoustic features as if they were coming from a human voice that expresses an emotion, which leads the listener to mirror the emotional expression internally. The contagion mechanism is strongly related to the emotional expression of the music.