Understanding Musical Beauty

Abstract

An exploratory study was conducted investigating the concept of beauty related to music listening—“musical beauty.” The study implemented an online qualitative questionnaire aimed to evaluate how listeners construe the concept of beauty, the pieces of music considered to be beautiful, and the intrinsic and/or extrinsic features that listeners attribute to musical pieces being considered as “most beautiful.” Analysis of long-answer responses provided by English-speaking participants ( n = 32) reveals the way that listeners characterize “musical beauty” and contributes to empirical evaluation of musical aesthetic experiences. Listeners in this study construe beauty in two ways: one construal emphasizes the perceivable or recognizable intrinsic features of the piece of music, while the other emphasizes the affective or emotional extrinsic features of their listening experience.