Traditional Approaches to Aesthetics

This chapter focuses on empirical aesthetics, which can be regarded as one of the oldest subfields in psychology. The most important contribution to the domain was made by the scholar Daniel Berlyne, who launched the ‘New Empirical Aesthetics’. In accordance with the prevailing ‘Zeitgeist’ of the 1960s, Berlyne focuses mainly on the notion of autonomic arousal as opposed to discrete emotions; he notes that art influences its perceivers mainly by manipulating their arousal. Berlyne further suggests that listeners' preferences are related to arousal in the form of an inverted U-shaped curve, sometimes referred to as the Wundt curve. The chapter then discusses what empirical aesthetics has contributed to the understanding of aesthetic responses to music.