Research On The Factors That Affect The Intensity Of Sad Music Emotional Experience

Music has the ability to directly induce emotions beyond other art forms,and sadness which is a negative emotion valence is an important content of music.Sad music can generally induce a certain intensity of sadness among listeners.Different from the sad experience that people avoid in daily life,people are often attracted by sad music and enjoy the feeling of sadness.From perception to experience,from coding to decoding,music factors and individual factors affect the emotion arousal at the same time.Previous studies have shown that the changes of music attributes(pitch,timbre,melody,rhythm,etc.)directly lead to the change of music emotion,which is considered from the "objective" of music.Music training,cultural environment and personality traits are related to music emotion arousal.This study explores the influence of pitch and tempo changes on emotion arousal,and brings music training,cultural environment and personality traits of individual factors into the scope of the study.Focus on rumination and reflection,empathy,which three personality traits with a unique preference for sad music,to explore emotion arousal response of these personality traits to the changes of pitch and tempo of sad music.Ruminant(rumination)is unconsciously trapped in negative thoughts.Reflective(Reflectiveness)is a kind of ruminant behavior of constant self-reflection and self-examination.Unlike ruminating,reflection is a healthy psychological trait.People with ruminant or reflective traits are attracted to sad music with negative potency.Empathy(empathy)refers to one person's ability to experience emotions that match another.This study includes two experiments,one is to explore the effect of tempo and pitch on the emotion arousal of sad music,and the other is to discuss how individual factors(music training,cultural experience and personality traits)affect the emotional experience intensity of sad music.At the same time,we investigate how the interaction between musical factors(pitch,tempo)and individual factors affect emotion arousal of sad music.The formal experimental materials were elected by pre-experiment.Sixteen pieces of Chinese and Western music(half of Chinese music and half of Western music)are used to manipulate their pitch and tempo variables.It is classified into four types: slow slightly faster high pitch,slow slightly faster low pitch,slow slightly slower high pitch,slow slightly faster low pitch,a total of 64 fragments,in which the slow slightly faster music tempo is unified to 60 beats per minute.The tempo of slow music is unified to 46 beats per minute.In order to eliminate the interference of tonal factors,the high pitch categories is the high octavetransposition of low pitch categories.Subjects majoring in music and non-music majors were asked to screen out eight songs(4 Chinese music and 4 foreign music),a total of 32 music clips,in which the subjects were able to experience sadness and arousal(emotional experience intensity).For formal experiments.In study 1,the materials selected from the pre-experiment were used to explore the effect of sad music with different tempo and pitch that subjects felt sad by using the design of 2-2two-factor subjects and using the materials selected from the pre-experiment.Let the subjects listen to the music material and assess the emotion arousal they experience.The results showed that(1)low pitches sad music induced stronger sad emotional experience than sad music with high pitches.Tempo and pitch together affect emotion arousal induced by sad music.The slow and slightly slow low pitch music induced a stronger level of sadness experience than the slow and slightly higher music.The second study mainly takes individual factors as dependent variables to study whether there are differences in sad music emotion arousal among different individual music learning experiences or cultural experiences or personality traits.And to explore the possible interaction between musical experience or cultural experience and musical factors(pitch,tempo).A simple experimental design was used to investigate the effect of personality traits,especially those with preference for sad music,on the emotion arousal of sad music.The results showed that:(1)emotion arousal induced by sad music was different between music majors and non-music majors,and the degree of emotion arousal of music majors was higher.(2)sadness caused by western music is marginally significant than that of Chinese music.(3)the three personality traits of empathy,rumination and reflection were positively correlated with the emotional intensity aroused by sad music.(4)among the three different personality traits,there is a marginal correlation between reflection and emotion arousal of sad music,and there is a significant correlation between empathy sub-dimension selection and imagination and emotion arousal of sad music.This study found that emotion arousal of sad music experience is affected by changes in pitch and tempo,and slow low pitch music can induce high arousal sadness to the greatest extent.A large part of the emotion arousal is regulated by musical experience,cultural environment and personality traits.The adjustment of these individual factors and music factors(embodied in pitch and tempo in this paper)interact with each other to affect the emotion arousal of sad music.