Exploring intra-contextual influences in music emotion perception

Abstract

Context is one of the key parameters influencing music emotion perception in listeners. The current study systematically investigates the influence of immediate intrinsic musical context on the perception of music-evoked emotions. Four dominantly happy and four dominantly sad Hindustani classical music excerpts were chosen and rated for perceived emotions in two types of listening experiments. In the first experiment, baseline ratings of these excerpts were collected from general participants to establish the emotions perceived without any influence. In the second experiment, pairs of excerpts were presented in succession, without any breaks, and rated continuously for perceived emotions. The perceived emotion responses for the second excerpt in the pair were considered for possible influence by the preceding music excerpt. The baseline and influenced ratings were compared to understand the effect of immediate intrinsic musical context—the first excerpt in this case—on emotion perception. Significant differences in terms of intensity of perceived emotions were found between baseline and influenced conditions for both happy and sad excerpts, either in the form of changes in perceived dominant emotion or in perceived nuance, and this phenomenon was termed intra-contextual influence. The results reflect the importance of immediate intrinsic musical context on emotion perception of musical excerpts and might be used to understand music semantics better.