Music, Modes & Emotions

The Library of Congress Music and the Brain series resume earlier this month with a lecture and discussion featuring Dr. Steven Brown of McMaster University and the NeuroArts Lab in Hamilton, Ontario. Dr. Brown's lecture at the Whittall Pavilion in the LOC's Jefferson building included a discussion of whether music can induce emotion in listeners.

What are Emotions?

Dr. Brown's talk was "From Mode to Emotion" and one of his points was that emotions were based on some kind of evaluation - emotions have a stimulus and object to which the evaluations are attached. There are three dimensions of emotion - valence, the sense of what feels good or bad - intensity, glad ecstatic, annoyed, enraged, etc. and focus or quality what are the emotions about.

Brown mention that facial expressions have been used to determined emotions, but sometimes the five or 10 categories that scientists often talk about don't take into account the thousands of various degrees of emotion which people can express.

Dr. Brown said after some of his own explorations of emotion, he came across Clore and Ortony's research that encompassed many of the questions he was asking. He applied their theory to the arts and then to music.

Goal motivated emotions, object aesthetic emotions and agency emotions are three kinds Brown mentioned. The room got a good laugh when he said that the two things that caused revulsion included feces and politicians.

Cognitive theory applied to arts

"To what extent do art works induce emotions in its receivers?" he asked. "And to what extent do they simply represent emotions?" He said artworks are expressions of emotions, so receivers have to recognize the emotion in order to understand.

"When art work is most appreciated, the work elicits positive aesthetic emotions in the receiver," Brown said. "Sometimes art works have no effect on us, but when they do we are going to have this kind of positive emotional aspect that we feel."

The emotion in the art work can sometimes induce the same emotion in the recipient, but Brown said that is not often the case. Sad music cannot make you sad. However, we can recognize the emotion and the actual response might be different.

We might also have emotional appraisals of content - like disgust at something we don't like.

"The basic response we have in listening to music is an aesthetic one," Brown said. "We feel a sense of liking or disliking. It can be very strong, we might have chills, we can cry we feel moved, but in general that is the response to music and no so much the empathic induction of the emotion," he said.

Other arts

Brown said that other arts - dance, poetry, visual arts - are also capable of expressing emotion.

"I think music is very good at expressing some of the so-called 'outcome emotions'," Brown said. "Being happy, being sad, being pleased. As far as shame, pride or embarrassment, I think music is not so good," he added. Music often expresses beauty by being beautiful, but does not induce beauty in its hearers.

Brown said that music is often called a "prostitute" where music becomes associated with everything under the sun, where music reinforces other messages. He used an example of a time when he worked in Sweden and studied neo-Nazi martial music. The content was violent, but the music sounds very similar to western Classical music. There are evil associations of music, but music itself is not evil.

How does it do that?

Dr. Brown then explored how music does what it does. He mentioned the general arousal mechanisms, but music also uses different kind of scales to express emotions.

Three ways music expresses emotion include register, tempo and volume.
The different emotional valences are associated with different scale types - like the difference between Major and Minor scales. This was in Western music only, because in India Ragas there are literally thousands of different scales and each one represents a different emotion.

Brown also used two pieces from Beethoven to illustrate the arousal mechanisms of music. And he said they can vary independently - a major key can be played high energy or in a low arousal way. The same is true for a minor key piece. Brown used an example from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo where the music changes based upon whether actress Kim Novak was in a good, happy place or a mysterious or dangerous place.

Questions?

During the question and answer period, Dr. Brown discussed articulation, timbre and other elements that would evoke different reactions to music. He said he had simplified the discussion for the audience at LOC.

"In general music can induce emotions, but it is very weak at that. What it can do is bring about different aesthetic emotions, liking and disliking. The biggest effect is the aesthetic response - such as liking or disliking, chills, and all that, but it is a small effect as compared to other kinds of emotion inducers."

There are different rating scales for pleasantness or liking, versus actually being happy or sad. A question arose about the use of scale changes, or suspensions or dissonance as an inducer of emotion. Dr. Brown said it is mostly the same kind of thing, since modes come from scales and harmonies are based on scales.

The general result of the talk was that music seldom induces emotions, but the reactions we have are often aesthetic emotions rather than empathic emotions. It challenged the notion that music can make you feel a certain way; most of it seemed to say that it is what the audience brings to the music more than the music itself that causes our reactions.