How emotions sound. A literature review of music as an emotional tool in tourism marketing

Tourism marketing scholars have recently focused on the experiential development of services. As a sensory tool, music has not been exhaustively approached from a multidimensional perspective. The goal of this paper is to understand the role of music and audio in the development of emotional reaction studies in tourism marketing by integrating and summarizing academic contributions during the last 50 years (1970–2021). Qualitative Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis are used to show historical overview and academic tendencies, relevance, relations, and methodological developments. There is an increasing interest in the scope that relates music and emotions, with exponential growth in the last 10 years. Retailing, branding and environmental studies are the most common research areas of application, and SOR and causal models are the theoretical and methodological trends. This approach offers significant insights as it combines theoretical bases proceeding from complementary areas to tourism marketing, such as psychology or psychophysiology.