Renee Timmers
It is hard to imagine listening to music without somehow being affected by it and experiencing a change in attention, attitude or physical arousal. Whether it is due to culture, biology or an interaction between the two, our listening to music is closely coupled with an affective-bodily experience that may lead us to say that we feel touched, lifted, transported, or otherwise moved or affected by the music. This is often in a positive way, making us feel better than before, but sometimes also affects us negatively. Perhaps we are conditioned to judge whether or not we recognize and like the music that we hear, inferring what the music means to us, and how we relate to it. Perhaps, as well, we are so used to moving along with music that we can’t help but feel aroused or calmed by it.
While this is a very broad description of responses to music, it contains a number of characteristics that suggest the involvement of emotion, if we assume that emotion is a valenced (i.e. positive or negative) appraisal of a stimulus (in this case music and events in it), accompanied by an action-readiness of the body (and mind) to respond.
More precisely, Scherer (2005) distinguished five components, whose inter-play and synchronized occurrence characterize emotion, including a) cognitive-appraisal, b) neurophysiological, c) motor, d) motivational, and e) subjective feeling components. Importantly, engagement with music seems to simultaneously involve several of these components. For example, music and its characteristics are evaluated (appraised) as e.g. pleasant, soothing, shocking, or novel; features of the music may trigger (or perhaps better afford) bodily and physiological responses (e.g. dancing and a faster heart-beat); encountering the music may draw us in (e.g. dancing together) or repel us; and this whole experience may give rise to feelings of happiness or otherwise.
These examples give an initial indication of how it is possible that music evokes feelings of emotion in listeners who engage with music, which has been one of the questions central to emotion in music research. Other central concerns have been to clarify what emotions are perceived and felt in music, and how music can be heard as expressive of certain emotions. A distinction is made in the literature between perceived emotions in music and felt emotions, acknowledging the independence of these two responses (Gabrielsson, 2002). Furthermore, one of the central objectives of research in music and emotion has been to uncover the roles of the compositional structure and the manner of performance (see relevant chapters in Juslin & Sloboda, 2010) in the experience of emotion in music. It is assumed that all three (composition, performer and listener) play a role, in addition to factors related to the context in which the music is heard.
Most of this chapter will be dedicated to these central questions, starting with considering what emotions are perceived in music and how they are perceived, and continuing with the discussion of what, and how emotions are felt in response to music. Additionally, I will consider a recent development in research that investigates the role of emotions in the music listening process—do emotions influence the way we perceive and remember music? The focus in this chapter will be on emotions in response to Western tonal music, in particular “classical” music, as this has been the central domain for music and emotion research, but I will also deal with film music. References to cross-genre variations and generalities will be made where available and appropriate.
In an important summary of research on emotion perceived in music, Gabrielsson and Juslin (2003) found the perception of certain basic categories of emotions in music to be particularly reliable. Listeners agree when deciding whether a musical excerpt sounds “happy,” “sad,” “fearful,” or “angry,” in contrast to more subtle distinctions (e.g. between sad or melancholy) or more abstract emotions (e.g. surprise). Arguing for a special status of basic emotions in the communication of emotion in music, Juslin and Laukka (2003) summarized parallels between the expression of basic emotions in speech by actors and in music by performers. They argued that musicians shape particular acoustical features in performance so as to communicate a particular emotion, which is similar to the way actors portray emotional speech. The effectiveness of this ability to express basic emotions through sound may have a biological origin: From an evolutionary perspective, it is beneficial to be able to effectively communicate and perceive emotional states, and vocal expressions are an important form of such communication. Specialized forms of expression may have consequently arisen for so called primary emotions. Evidence in favor of this hypothesis comes from cross-cultural investigations (Laukka, Eerola, Thingujam, Yamasaki, & Beller, 2013) and comparisons between expressions in speech and music (Juslin & Laukka, 2003; Bowling, Sundararajan, Han, & Purves, 2012).
Nevertheless, despite compelling evidence and sound arguments, empirical data exploring these predictions often show less clear-cut communication of discrete emotions, with considerable variation in the ways emotions are expressed and confusions between emotions (e.g. sad and tender). Therefore, rather than expecting categorically different expressions corresponding to basic emotions, it may be that the relationship between emotion and vocal acoustic characteristics originates at a more general level: Physiological and motor patterns (e.g. smiling and tensing muscles) that are part of emotional responses also affect vocal expressions (Scherer, 1986; Banse & Scherer, 1996). This means that the expressions depend on the state associated with the experienced emotion, which varies with e.g. the intensity of the felt emotion.
In either case, it is clear that emotional expressions in music are not restricted to basic emotions, nor are expressive cues restricted to cues with a biological origin. Exploring the first question of what emotions are expressed in music, Schubert (2003) asked participants to rate the suitability of 91 emotion terms to “describe any kind of music.” Analysis of the terms that were considered to be suitable to describe music revealed nine clusters. Highest scoring terms were bright, lyrical, graceful, dreamy, dark, majestic, tragic, tense, and dramatic. More typical emotion terms were part of these clusters including (in the same cluster order) happy, humorous, tender, sentimental, sad, vigorous, agitated, and passionate/ exciting. This suggests that music-emotional expression is a combination of musical character (i.e. lyrical, dreamy) and emotion. This indicates perhaps stylized emotion (Schubert & Fabian, 2014) or emotion expressed in a broader meaning-bearing context (see also Clarke, this volume).
This focus on the communication of emotion categories may give the misleading impression that the goal of music is to convey a precise emotion. However, if precision is the goal, we would be better off with words! Indeed, Cross (2008) refers to music as having “floating intentionality,” emphasizing the indeterminacy of its meaning. Recognition of particular emotions may be part of a sense-making process where acoustic and music structural characteristics are interpreted within a contextual framework. In this explanation, the acoustic and structural characteristics of music convey emotional qualities in a broad manner, the meaning of which is further specified by the context (see Cross, 2008 for some interesting examples).
Dimensional models of emotion have been used to capture variations in broad emotional qualities, most frequently as a two-dimensional model of emotional valence (pleasant-unpleasant) and emotional arousal (sleepy-awake/aroused) (Russell, 2003). A three-dimensional model including potency/power as an additional dimension may provide a more complete characterization of emotions and emotional expressions (e.g. Goudbeek & Scherer, 2010). Moreover, empirical findings point towards the need to differentiate two types of arousal in characterizing emotions—“energetic arousal” as in active vs. calm and “tense arousal” as in frustrated vs. relaxed (Schimmack, & Rainer, 2002).
Dimensional models of emotion have been used to capture moment-to-moment variations in emotional expression as perceived or experienced in response to music (Schubert, 2004). Indeed, music seems well suited to convey varying degrees of emotional arousal and valence (Schubert, 2004), as well as tension (Ilie & Thompson, 2006). Of these, variations in emotional arousal appear to be communicated relatively robustly through music, showing unambiguous correlations with parameters including intensity, tempo and rhythmic articulation (Schubert, 2004; Gomez & Danuser, 2007; Timmers, 2007a). Similar correlations are found between acoustical features and emotional arousal in speech (Ilie & Thompson, 2006; Coutinho & Dibben, 2013). Variations in emotional arousal are recognized not only by enculturated listeners, but also by participants without prior exposure to the musical style in question (e.g. Congolese Pygmies listening to Western music, see Egermann, Fernando, Chuen, & McAdams, 2014).
Associations between physiological arousal and changes in vocal expressions were mentioned above as a possible underlying factor contributing to the perception of emotional arousal. A second contributing factor may be an association between temporal aspects of the music and a sense of movement, physical or imagined. Indeed, it has been suggested that emotional experiences of music are closely linked to experiences of motion (Molnar-Szakacs & Overy, 2006). Widening the scope of this approach further, cross-modal correspondences with musical parameters—including associations with force, magnitude, size or elevation—may mediate or contribute to the emotional character we perceive in a musical passage. Dancers might translate certain musical characteristics into lightness or heaviness, bodily fluidity or tension; listeners may understand these characteristics as implying different bodily and emotional states. A close association between cross-modal correspondences and emotion is also apparent from the clusters of musical descriptors referred to above (Schubert, 2003), in which emotion terms are clustered together with visual and physical imagery terms. Examples of a three-fold relationship between emotion, cross-domain mappings of physical attributes, and acoustical parameters can be found in speech and music (for a review see Eitan, Timmers, & Adler, in press; Eitan, this volume).
Experienced emotional valence may be successfully predicted on the basis of acoustical parameters to a certain degree (Coutinho & Dibben, 2013), but models formulated for particular examples do not generalize well to other examples (Coutinho & Dibben, 2013; Eerola, 2011; Timmers, 2007a). To vary emotional valence effectively, it is necessary to adjust aspects of the music’s compositional structure in addition to varying the music’s acoustic dimensions, such as intensity and tempo, in performance (Quinto, Thompson, & Taylor, 2014). A powerful way to vary emotional valence is to manipulate the inclusion of consonant/dissonant musical chords (Blood, Zatorre, Bermudez, & Evans, 1999). Despite this robust effect, familiarity with dissonant chords moderates the degree of perceived dissonance, making this a cultural as well as a psychoacoustic phenomenon (Arthurs & Tim-mers, 2016).
Varying the mode of a composition (major/minor) is another common way to vary its emotional valence. Children’s sensitivity to this manipulation of emotional valence develops with age, in particular where melodic sequences without supporting chords are concerned (Dalla Bella, Peretz, Rousseau, & Gosselin, 2001). The origin of this culturally supported association between mode and emotional valence has been the topic of considerable debate. Parncutt (2014) outlined six possible contributing factors: 1) The minor triad is more dissonant than the major triad; 2) it is less common and therefore marked as different; 3) it is more ambiguous in tonality and can be perceived as uncertain; 4) it is less familiar and so gains less positive associations; 5) it is more salient in timbre within its harmonic context; 6) and there is a parallel with (sad) speech in that the minor triad has a lower (or more subdued) pitch than expected (see e.g. Bowling et al., 2012). Parncutt (2014) refers to a number of relevant phenomena: Repeated exposure/greater familiarity is associated with increases of positive affect (Zajonc, 2001); prediction is a fundamental cognitive function and closely associated with affective response reinforcing learning (Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1997) and contextual presentation strongly influences connotations (Walker, 2016). Following Meyer (1956) and Huron (2006), Parncutt (2014) argues that (tonal) uncertainty and violation of expectancies induce a sense of negative valence.
It seems that our perceptual processing of structural and acoustical characteristics of music have affective implications. This may be through associations with vocal expressions, movement patterns, or physical and cognitive phenomena, or is perhaps intrinsic to the processing of musical materials themselves—i.e. expectations are confirmed or violated, an expected resolution is delayed, a musical passage comes to a halt, changes suddenly, is complex or easy to predict.1 Sounds and musical structures set up contexts with varying coloration (e.g. bright–dark), physical implications (e.g. strong–weak), and degrees of stability and predictability. The emotion we perceive in a musical passage is informed by these implications but also depends on the way we engage with the music, conceptualize emotions, and conceptualize what we hear (see for a discussion Moran, this volume). For example, when we visually perceive movement and facial expression, this informs us about expressed emotions, as well as the intensity of these emotions (e.g., Thompson, Russo, & Quinto, 2008; Vines, Krumhansl, Wanderley, Dalca, & Levitin, 2011). Furthermore, appraisals of emotion in music show influences of personal background, including influences of familiarity with the music, age, mood and personality traits (Laukka et al., 2013; Lima & Castro, 2011; Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2011). These inter-subjective differences become even more apparent when we look at felt rather than perceived emotional responses.
Feeling the emotion expressed in music can occur through a process of “emotional contagion”—one of the mechanisms included in Juslin and Västfjäll’s (2008) review on emotion induction in music listening. In their model, emotional contagion happens through internal mimicry of vocal expressions, which is seen as the primary source for perceived emotion in music (see also Juslin, 2013). Others interpret emotional contagion more broadly, including contagion through motor mimicry (e.g. Scherer & Coutinho, 2013). Contagion is related to empathy, but the two are not synonymous. In the latter, listeners imagine the experience of emotions felt by other actors, such as performers and composers. This difference becomes blurred, however, if we perceive emotion in music as deriving from a virtual musical agent or persona, where music is perceived as human expression without the need to attribute it to a particular person (composer, performer or conductor) (see for empirical support e.g. Watt & Ash, 1998). Still, we can imagine that empathy for (for example) a young soloist performer may lead to different emotional experiences than a focus on the perceived emotion in the music.
In cases of emotional contagion, one expects similar emotions to be felt in response to music as perceived, and perceived emotion to be stronger than felt emotion—which is indeed often the case (Schubert, 2013). Other emotion induction processes may, however, give rise to mixed or unmatched relationships, for example when some positively valenced musical passage reminds listeners of a negative period in their life (Gabrielsson, 2002; Schubert, 2013). With the aim to investigate what emotions are experienced in music listening situations, Zentner, Grandjean, and Scherer (2008) started with a list of 515 general terms, which were presented to participants who indicated for each term whether they would use the term to describe feelings of emotions they experience. Based on the results, the list was reduced to 146 “affect terms,” including 89 emotion terms that were reported to be perceived or felt with some frequency by participants in relation to music. After deleting synonyms, a list of 66 “musical emotion” terms was presented to 800 volunteers attending a music festival, who indicated their experience of these emotions during the festival. Analysis of the responses indicated 9 dimensions or groups of emotion terms. Six of these were positive in affect, including wonder, transcendence, tenderness, peacefulness, power, and joyful activation, while two were negative (tension and sadness) and one ambiguous in valence (nostalgia). Similarly, an experience sampling study investigating emotions experienced during everyday life episodes including music found a predominance of positive emotions, in this case including calmness, happiness, interest, and pleasure. Two groups of negative emotions were identified—sadness and anger-irritation—and the same ambiguously valenced emotion—nostalgia (Juslin, Liljeström, Västfjäll, Barradas, & Silva 2008). Differences between the findings of these studies suggest an influence of listening context (everyday life or concert experience) on emotional responses, although these differences may also be due to other methodological details.
Zentner and colleagues (2008) observed several differences between emotions reported to be frequent in music listening and frequent in everyday life. Negative emotions such as dysphoria (unease) and sadness were more often experienced in daily life than in music listening. Emotions more often experienced in music depended on the musical genre. For classical music and jazz, frequent responses were amazement and peacefulness, while for Latin music and Techno, they included activation and (for Latin) joy. In their experience sampling study, Juslin and colleagues (2008) also found a greater prevalence of negative emotions in episodes of everyday life without music, while episodes with music included more often experiences of happiness-elation and nostalgia-longing.
A debate is ongoing regarding the ways in which those emotions experienced in aesthetic response to music (and other art) differ from those experienced in day-to-day activities. “Musical emotions” are similar to otherwise evoked emotions in showing similar and equally strong brain activations and physiological responses (Koelsch, 2014). On the other hand, these emotions may differ in being more intrinsically driven and less goal-directed (Scherer, 2005). This doesn’t mean that musical emotions do not serve a purpose. In contrast, listeners often choose to listen to music with a certain purpose in mind (e.g. relaxation, motivation, and encouragement): The emotional effect of music is an important means to obtain this goal (see also Dibben, this volume, and Saarikallio, this volume). An association has been found between emotions experienced, music selected, and the context of listening (Juslin et al., 2008).
A further outstanding issue concerns responses to “sad” music. “Sadness” is reported relatively frequently when listening to classical music (Zentner et al., 2008), and yet such listening may be enjoyable. This sad-but-enjoyable response seems to depend on personality characteristics of the listeners: Listeners who enjoy listening to sad music tend to score relatively high in introversion, openness to experience and empathy (Ladinig & Schellenberg, 2012; Vuoskoski, this volume). In summarizing descriptions that listeners gave of experiences with sad music, Peltola and Eerola (2016) distinguished positive experiences of sad music (sweet sorrow), from two types of negative experiences (grief and melancholy). Indeed, they found different attitudes towards sad music, including “avoidance,” “appreciation,” “revival,” “amplification,” and “intersubjective” (Eerola, Peltola, & Vuoskoski, 2015), reflecting different ways in which participants conceptualized sad music and its effects. For example, participants reported to feel less alone in their grief when experiencing sad music (intersubjective); sad music strengthened awareness of the value and purpose of life (appreciation); or sad music made them feel sad (amplification). Providing a theoretical framework for responses to sad music and individual differences between listeners, Huron (2011) argued that listeners differ in the degree to which they empathize with the emotion expressed in the music, and also in the degree to which they are able to cognitively reassure themselves that the sad-inducing stimulus is fictional.
The example of experiencing sad music highlights the individual and contextual nature of emotional responses to music, in addition to feeling the emotion expressed in the music. As discussed above, this latter process of “emotional contagion” is one of the best-recognized induction mechanisms (Juslin et al., 2008), among several other mechanisms through which emotion may be induced. The best-known summary of emotion induction processes comes from the work by Juslin and colleagues (Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008; Juslin, 2013) and includes eight emotion induction mechanisms, abbreviated as BRECVEMA: Brainstem response, Rhythmic entrainment, Evaluative conditioning, Contagion, Visual imagery, Episodic memory, Musical expectancy, and Aesthetic judgment. Scherer and Coutinho (2013) also include these mechanisms in their summary of emotion induction processes. However, they frame them into four possible routes for felt emotion, each of which include multiple mechanisms, which offers fruitful avenues for further investigation. The first route, “appraisal,” is controversial in the sense that it is subsidiary for felt emotion in music according to Juslin (2013), while for Scherer and Coutinho (2013) it is central. The controversy arises partly from different interpretations regarding what “appraisal” entails. According to Scherer and Coutinho (2013), appraisal includes low-level, automatic evaluation of properties of stimuli as well as higher-level cognitive evaluations of the implications of stimuli for a person’s goals. The novelty (i.e. predicted, unexpected, sudden), urgency (i.e. loud), and intrinsic pleasantness (i.e. consonant or dissonant) of musical sounds are examples of low-level appraisals. This means that in Scherer and Coutinho’s (2013) framework both “Musical expectancy” and “Brainstem response” contribute to the appraisal route. This deviates from Juslin’s (2013) interpretation of appraisal as primarily referring to higher-level cognitive evaluations, which would have limited relevance for musical emotions because “music as such rarely has implications for life goals” (Juslin, 2013, p. 239). Nevertheless, as argued above, it is likely for the emotional effect of music to depend on both listening context and a listener’s relationship to the music. Support for this hypothesis is for example found in a study investigating physiological responses to music (in this case, the occurrence of a “chill” response). Grewe, Nagel, Kopiez, and Altenmüller (2007) explain that it is not sufficient to look for musical triggers “causing” the response. Instead, the response depends on listeners’ attitude and attention towards the music. For Grewe et al. (2007), “it is not so much the distinct musical feature, but the focus of [evaluative] attention on the music that is important for arousing chills” (p. 312).
An assessment of quality or aesthetic value of music is key to Scherer and Coutinho’s (2013) account of appraisal. Indeed, perceived quality and felt emotion have been found to be highly correlated in listeners’ judgments of musical performances (e.g. Timmers, 2007b; Schubert & Fabian, 2014). A close association between the two is also central to some theoretical accounts of expressiveness in music performance. As Dog ˘antan-Dack (2014) argues, “there is one particular feature that subsumes all those who engage with an expressive music performance, and this is the affective involvement that it elicits” (p. 16). This affective experience is related to “the value attributed to the performance and the performer, who may or may not set out to express or communicate the same or a similar affective content” (p. 15).
The second aspect of Scherer and Coutinho’s (2013) multifactorial process model is the “memory” route. This includes both episodic and associative memory. Emotions may arise through episodic memory, when listeners are reminded of previous emotional encounters with the music. In addition to specific reminders of autobiographical episodes, music may evoke non-episodic associations, including in the form of visual and auditory imagery. Indeed, much of music’s meaning may be learned through cultural exposure, through which musical patterns and structures become emotionally loaded.
Scherer and Coutinho’s third route, “entrainment,” refers to psychophysiological responses to musical characteristics, including but not restricted to motor responses to musical rhythms. It is not just that emotional responses trigger changes in physiological arousal: Physiological states dynamically interact with emotional response (for a musical example, see Dibben, 2004). Finally, as mentioned earlier, “emotional contagion” refers to a process whereby listeners internally mimic or experience emotions they observe or perceive, while in “emotional empathy,” listeners are empathetic towards emotions felt by other actors (e.g. performers and composer).
The complexity of emotion induction by music is amplified further by the interrelationships and interactions between different processes. For example, motor entrainment is a source for changes in physiological arousal. Additionally, if the music has a strong steady pulse, it is a source for prediction of musical events. Such accurate prediction may induce a positive appraisal (Huron, 2006), which may be stronger in cases when the prediction is challenging rather than simple (and perhaps when a listener is more invested in predicting the music). This question of the relationship between complexity, entrainment and experienced pleasure is relevant, for example, to the experience of “groove” music (Witek, Clarke, Wallentin, Kringelbach, & Vuust, 2014).
A considerable number of questions remain unanswered with respect to felt emotions, including the effect of variations across musical genres, with age and personality, and also those brain structures supporting various emotion mechanisms. The complexity of felt emotions is now being handled with increasing sophistication in empirical investigations. To allow for “ambiguous” emotions or the simultaneous experience of different emotions (such as sad AND happy), several authors have adopted the evaluative space model of emotion (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994) that proposes that negative and positive evaluations may be coupled in a reciprocal or coactive manner or uncoupled and be activated independently. Progress has been made in defining those emotions relevant for music listening, and in characterizing processes that play a role in emotion induction. These include an interesting mix of emotions and processes relevant for emotion in general, but also some domain-related specializations. Music as a source for pleasure and aesthetic reward is a considerable contributor to emotional response. Understanding music as an aesthetic reward in an individualized manner and relating this coherently to the proposed emotion processes will be an important challenge for coming research (see Juslin, 2013).
Given the frequency of perceived and felt emotions in music, we may wonder what implications they have for the listening process. Are emotions only a consequence of listening to music, or do they also interact with this listening process—influencing and shaping it in some way? Interactions between emotion and cognition are well evidenced outside of the musical domain. A few studies have begun to investigate this question empirically with respect to music cognition. One of the effects of emotion evoked in music listening is that it can influence memory for music. Houston and Haddock (2007) demonstrated that depending on the mood state (positive or negative) of listeners when learning a set of melodies, those melodies in major mode or minor mode were better remembered. It is also likely that strong emotional experiences with music strengthen memory for that music.
Another effect of emotion during music listening is that it may influence our perception of music and our expectations concerning the characteristics that music may have. Boltz and colleagues (2009) showed that the presentation of emotional visual stimuli alongside music influenced the perception of emotional as well as non-emotional attributes, including judgments of the tempo of music—tunes were judged to be faster in the context of positive affect compared to negative affect. Similarly setting up an emotional context using visual images, Timmers and Crook (2014) demonstrated that emotions influence musical expectations: depending on the emotional context, listeners expected the music to go up rather than down, or to continue with larger rather than smaller intervals. Such expectations may additionally change the way we attend to music. For example, we may focus more strongly on melodic movement in a lower pitch range in a sad context, while attending to a higher pitch range in a happy context (Timmers, Crook, & Morimoto, 2012).
While this is a recent area of research, several studies have offered implicit evidence of the influence of emotion on the perception of music. For example, studies have demonstrated the influence of visually expressed emotion on the perception of a musical performance (e.g. Vines et al., 2011). It is likely that interactions between emotion and cognition of music play a greater role than generally acknowledged. Emotions have been shown to play a role in musical preference and uses of music (see Vuoskoski, this volume; Dibben, this volume), but they should also be considered when investigating memory for music, attention to music and perception of music. Music may be chosen for its emotional effect, but also better remembered for it. Moreover, moments marked emotionally draw our attention, and our emotional experience of the music influences what musical aspects we focus on and how we perceive the music.
Emotion in music has attracted considerable research attention in recent years and this body of research continues to grow. This includes behavioral studies of emotional effects of music in everyday life, laboratory studies of emotional responses to music with various characteristics, neuroscientific investigations, therapeutic uses of music and emotion, and larger-scale survey studies that allow investigation of individual differences and cross-cultural differences, among others. Central to research in music and emotion is the assumption that listeners (but also performers and composers) perceive music as a means to express emotion, and as a means to feel emotion. The types of emotions perceived and felt may vary, and not all music may be equally “emotional.” Variations across different genres are one of the promising areas for further investigation. Despite these variations, there is evidence for a biological basis for emotional responses to sound and music associated with vocalizations of emotion, which helps to explain communication of emotions in early infancy and across cultures. Other physical and biological processes further inform and constrain expression and perception of emotion, including learned and structural correspondences between sensory and kinesthetic domains. Cross-domain correspondences may also be a precondition for motor entrainment to arise (Patel, 2014), which seems in turn central to emotion perception and experience. However, cognitive and cultural factors also play an important role, as emotional responses to music tend to vary strongly across individuals, contexts, and occasions. Moreover, it seems that the ways we use music (e.g. in film, theatre, church, or privately) affect the kinds of emotions expressed and experienced through music, which is itself culturally shaped. At an individual level, we may have certain expectations concerning emotions evoked by music depending on the way we use and engage with music, but also depending on the way we normally express and experience emotions. It is interesting to consider that our engagement with music may reflect many dimensions of our lives, including aspects of our emotional personality, and how we employ music listening in guiding and informing our inner, emotional selves and narratives.
1. Confirmation and violation of expectations are generally primarily included as sources of “felt” emotion. However, it is likely that these aspects also influence listeners’ accounts of perceived emotion.
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