Projects

Among other projects, our lab is currently conducting research to answer the following questions regarding the link between music and emotion:

How does sadness influence music choice?

We have been conducting a series of studies attempting to shed new light on the age-old question of when and why people listen to expressively sad music. According to our main findings, when asked to anticipate their future music preferences, people overwhelmingly predict that they would choose to listen to expressively sad music if they were in a sad mood. However, these “common sense” intuitions appear to be misguided. When actually induced to feel intense sadness in the lab, individuals show no reliable preference to listen to sad music and, if anything, are particularly averse to hearing expressively happy music, often voicing the belief that listening to such music would feel inappropriate and fail to lift their spirits. Interestingly, these predictions also seem to be off the mark: When actually asked to listen to happy music, individuals previously induced into sad affective states in fact show striking improvements in mood, whereas sad music has a neutral or even negative impact. Together, these findings challenge the widespread notion that “misery loves company” with regard to musical preference and demonstrate that people may be surprisingly limited in their ability to correctly anticipate the emotional power of music. Critically, this predictive deficit may lead individuals to use music in a way that may fail to improve or even deepen states of despair. We are currently exploring whether individuals with tendencies to depression are more likely to (mis)use music in this way, with the goal of informing evidence-based music therapeutic approaches aimed at treating mood disorders.

How do timing variations influence music preference and musical emotion?

Musicians routinely infuse their performances with a wide variety of expressive variations, changes in timbre, pitch, dynamics, and timing that are not notated, or at least not precisely specified, in a musical score. These often subtle deviations distinguish human from computer-generated performances and contribute to music’s perceived emotionality. However, the psychological function of expressive variations, and specifically, the manner in which they influence listeners’ affective responses to and preferences for music, is still very much a matter of debate. In recent years, we have conducted a range of studies testing competing models of the emotional influence of the decreases in tempo typically implemented by performers at musical phrase and section boundaries. Such final ritardandi have been posited to heighten musical tension and thereby musical pleasure when anticipated resolutions materialize. They have also been theorized to heighten the perception of sadness and tenderness, thereby playing an important role in the musical code used by performers to communicate emotion. Our current research appears to support the latter view more than the former; however, we realize that this is far from the last word on the matter. We are actively developing new methods to better understand how ritardandi and other timing variations influence music preference and musical emotion.

How does pitch height contribute to the communication of sadness?

Prior research has amply documented that happy music tends to be faster, louder, higher in average pitch, more variable in pitch, and more staccato in articulation, whereas sad music tends to be slower, lower, less variable, and more legato in articulation. However, the bulk of existing studies are either correlational or allow these expressive cues to covary freely, thereby making it difficult to confirm the causal influence of a given cue. To help address this gap, we have begun testing whether the average height of a pitch gamut independently impacts the perceived emotional expression of melodies derived from the gamut. In a series of studies, we had participants rate the perceived happiness/sadness of a set of isochronous and semi-random tone sequences derived from the Bohlen-Pierce scale, an unconventional scale based on pitch intervals that do not appear in common practice music. Our results have been consistent with the notion that higher average pitch height communicates happiness and/or that lower pitch height communicates sadness. Moreover, they have suggested that the effect is sufficiently robust to be detected using an unconventional musical scale and is independent of interval size. In ongoing studies, we are examining the boundary conditions for the expressive role of pitch height and trying to better understand its contribution to how different musical scales express positive versus negative emotions.