Recognition of emotion in music: The influence of culture and auditory cues

It is generally accepted that humans associate music with emotion. Studies investigating the link between music and emotion have been primarily focussed on studies of listeners' sensitivity to emotion in music of their own culture. This sensitivity may reflect listeners' enculturation to the conventions of their culture's tonal system. However, it may also reflect responses to cues present in all auditory stimuli that are independent of musical experience. There is some evidence to support the latter hypothesis (Balkwill and Thompson, 1999). The current study is an investigation of the cues that affect recognition of emotion in music of various cultures. The following questions were investigated: Can Western and Japanese listeners identify the intended emotion in music from familiar and unfamiliar tonal systems? If they can, is their sensitivity to intended emotions associated with perceived changes in specific auditory cues in music? Do the response patterns of these listeners differ as a function of culture and/or as a function of tonal system? Two groups of listeners were recruited, in Canada (n = 106) and in Japan (n = 111) to rate the emotional content of three sets of music (Hindustani, Western and Japanese). Each listener was randomly assigned to one of three emotion rating tasks (joy, sadness, anger) for one music set, and to one of three auditory cue rating tasks (tempo, loudness, complexity) for one other music set. Listeners were asked to continuously rate each of 10 excerpts for each intended emotion (mean length = 30 seconds) in each music set on a 9 point scale corresponding to their rating task, and to give an overall rating on the same scale at the end of each piece. Results indicate that Western and Japanese listeners were able to distinguish between joy, sadness and anger in all three music sets. Regression analyses indicated that judgements of emotion were related to judgements of one or more of the auditory cues. These cues were also significant predictors in the time series correlation analysis of the continuous data. These findings support the hypotheses that listeners are sensitive to musically-expressed emotion embedded in an unfamiliar tonal system, and, that this sensitivity is facilitated by the perception of fundamental auditory cues in music.