Feelings Which Strike a Chord, and Chords Which Strike a Feeling

Abstract

The first part of this article addresses the main premise of the Theory of Musical Equilibration. It states that in contrast to previous hypotheses, music does not directly describe emotions: instead; it evokes processes of the will which the listener identifies with. It is not until these processes are experienced that music appears to take on an emotional character. The second part of the article focuses on demonstrating the emotional nature of musical harmonies. The Basic Test and the Rocky Test are presented. These tests were designed to find correlations between chords and scenes from fairy tales as well as emotional terms. 86% of the participants correlated the musical selection to the emotion outlined by the Theory of Musical Equilibration the authors developed in this context.