Music & Emotion

In the first few years of my academic career I focused on the connection between music and emotion. My PhD 'Shared Emotions in Music' (completed in 2007) argued that musicians can literally share token emotional states by performing music together. Since then, I've walked back on the claim that groups share single mental states, mostly because I don't think the collective activity can sustain group consciousness (see instead my work on group minds). However, I still believe that group performance can sustain a genuinely collective mental phenomenon. The cognitive task of figuring out the musical content, and thereby the emotional meaning of the situation, can be socially distributed. Thus co-ordinated musicians and listeners can genuinely point to what 'we feel'.

Because I have a large number of publications on music and emotion, if you are interested in knowing my full opinion on music I recommend the following works in particular, as I build up to claims about joint musical performance.

  1. A Simulation theory of musical expressivity (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2010)

This article outlines my core theory of how music manages to be expressive of emotions. I show how the apparently competing resemblance, arousal and persona/expression theories of expressivity can actually all be combined by focusing on different stages of the causal process involved.

  1. Using the persona to express complex emotions in music (Music Analysis, 2011)

This article builds on the simulation paper by unifying the experience of expressive properties of music under a flexible persona theory. That is, I think we hear the emotion in the music as the expression of a persona- though this persona can be identified in a variety of ways. I then explore how the persona theory can accommodate the expression of complex emotions- specifically jealousy.

  1. Moved by Music Alone (British Journal of Aesthetics, 2021)

In this article I give my account of how music arouses emotion. By making use of contemporary theories of emotional bodily feelings, I show how the tension-release mechanism proposed by Leonard Meyer can be synthesised with resemblance-based contagion mechanism. However, musical appreciation following formalistic rules of focus should not arouse garden-variety emotional states. Instead, it should arouse simulations of bodily emotions that are the constitutive basis of aesthetic pleasures. This brings my account of musical arousal into line with my rejection of aesthetic emotions in my 2021 aesthetics book.

  1. The Real Properties of Music Ch.4 of Shared Emotions in Music (PhD, University of Nottingham, 2007)

My position on the subjective variability of expressive contents is still best stated in this chapter of my PhD thesis. I argue that music possesses real powers to convey certain emotional qualities, so long as listeners come along who have normal simulative capacities and where further true beliefs about the music does not undermine their impressions. Such judgements are always relative in kind- thus 'sadder' rather than 'sad' simpliciter. See also my review in Mind of Kathleen Higgins' book The Music Between Us (link below).

  1. Expression and Extended cognition (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2008)

Originally chapter 5 of my PhD. I argue that since musicians can, if they wish, use music to sincerely express their emotions, they can further use the resource of music (and the instrument) to extend the cognition of their emotional states. The cognitive basis of figuring out what to play and what to feel is literally extended into the interaction with the instrument and the music it produces. (I'm pretty sure I was the first person to apply the idea of extended cognition to emotions as well as the first to apply it to the arts.)

  1. On the resistance of the instrument (The Emotional Power of Music, 2013)

This chapter builds on my extended cognition paper, focusing on the values of musical expression and the role that the physical instrument plays in supporting those values. I argue that the history of musical instrumental development reveals two distinct values that are somewhat in tension with each other i) the exploration of creative possibilities, and ii) the drive to collaborate with others. This is the only paper in which I outline my 'mood organ' project (see below). I argue that its goal to directly translate the musician's emotion into music is an expression of the goal to smoothly share one's emotional states.

  1. Joint Attention to Music (British Journal of Aesthetics, 2009)

I argue that the perceptual task of listening to music together (and dancing together) is qualitatively and structurally different from listening to music alone, and that it enables the collective task of deciding one's emotion.

  1. Group Flow (The Routledge Companion of Embodied Music Interaction, 2017)

This chapter explores the reports that musicians sometimes make of intense collective engagement in musical activity such that they feel taken over by group mindedness (which was the original stimulus of my PhD). I argue that the phenomenon possesses the same basic control structure as individual flow states. The cognitive activity of producing the music is genuinely distributed across the group. However, the matching of intentions with performance results in the occlusion of one's intention (and thus the sense of flow) rather than the literal disappearance of one's individual intentions.

Here's an interview I did for Brandon Polite's wonderful series 'Polite Conversations' where we talk all about joint attention to music. It includes a discussion of the precise aesthetic qualities of Tchaikovsky's piece 'June' (from the seasons) and how all this connects up with my theory of aesthetic value.

The Mood Organ

From 2010 to 2012 I worked at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast on a music technology project called 'The Mood Organ'. It was named after the device people use to control their own emotions in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (this cool invention is unfortunately not mentioned in the Blade Runner film). The basic idea of the project was to apply my previous philosophical research on the extended cognition of emotion. I developed a computer system that automatically generates music in response to physiological signals of emotion (facial expression, skin conductance, muscle tension, heart rate and heart rate variability). The project was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Other articles on music and emotion

This is a review article on the ways in which philosophers have made use of empirical psychology and neuroscience to inform the long-standing debates about musical expressivity and arousal.

  • Expressive dimensions in music. In Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, M. Barthet & S. Dixon (eds.), 2012, Springer: 20-28. Co-author: Oliver Rosset.

This is the only time I led my own psychology experiment into the expressive powers of music. I found that listeners rate the dimension of valence in music in alignment with musical variables of harmonic dissonance and noise saturation, while they rate the dimension of power in music in alignment with musical variables of tempo, note sustain and decrease in reverb.

This was a very nice project to interview 3 well-known composers on their attitudes towards emotions in music. I was particularly happy to interview Carter Burwell, who is best known as the composer for all the Coen Brothers films.

This is an fMRI study that I conducted mainly with Wiebke Trost (who is the first author). We scanned participants while they listened to 3 pieces of classical music, each with a theme and variations structure- Mendelssohn's Variations sérieuses, the second movement of Schubert's Death and the Maiden string quartet, and the second movement of Prokofiev's 3rd piano concerto. Analysis indicated that areas in the brain linked with the processing of valence and arousal correlated with these dimensions of the music.

Book Review

I present the main arguments of Higgins' book. I agree with her empirically well-supported claim that there are relatively universal ways that music affects humans, and thus that music has a definite capacity to connect people across cultural boundaries. However, I raise some sceptical considerations about how uniquely or strongly music can do this (in comparison to, say, sharing food, or even just babbling at each other).

Edited Collection

This is a 26 chapter volume with contributions from philosophers, musicologists, psychologists, sociologists and historians. For the record, I am the only person who edited this volume. Neither Klaus Scherer nor Bernadino Fantini made any serious contributions (i.e. in writing the proposal, coordinating authors, reviewing and editing the chapters, writing the introduction, organising the conference upon which it was based). However, at least Scherer wrote his own section introduction (unlike Fantini), and no doubt his name helped it to get accepted by OUP. The 'scientific model' of academic collaboration is the exploitation of junior researchers.


Note: The bits about music in my books The Emotional Mind (2018) and The Aesthetic Value of the World (2021) are covered in more detail in, respectively, my papers Expression and Extended Cognition, and Moved by Music Alone.

Here is a conversation that I recorded with a sound therapist based in Karachi named Faisal Gill. The discussion ranges over the various ways that music helps us to regulate our emotions and support well-being.