Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
6.1
Introduction
Music by its nature has the ability to communicate strong emotions in everyday life.
Given the important role of emotion in music, the topic of music and emotion has
recently become an expanding
field of research with up-to-date developments.
The aim of this chapter is to summarize and present the current knowledge about
music and emotion from a multi-disciplinary perspective.
We intended to make this chapter accessible to a wide range of readers from
different disciplines including computer science, engineering, musicology, music
information retrieval, and brain
computer interfaces.
The chapter is organized into eight sections. The
-
first section consists of this
introduction, which describes the objectives of the chapter and its structure.
The
first issue raised in the research on music and emotion is the modeling and
representation of emotions. Section
6.2
focuses on the existing emotional models
and their adequacy in modeling emotional responses to music. The two main
approaches, discrete and dimensional, and their variants are described and discussed
in different applications. A comparison between the two approaches is presented,
and the advantages and drawbacks of each approach are analyzed.
How music evokes emotions? A fascinating question that still remains open. To
explain how music can induce strong emotions in listeners is of great importance
for numerous disciplines including psychology, musicology, and neuroscience. All
these years, however, it was assumed that musical emotion can be studied without
necessarily knowing the underlying induction mechanisms. In Sect.
6.3
, the existing
approaches are reviewed and state-of-the-art proposed mechanisms beside cognitive
appraisal are presented and discussed.
Musical characteristics such as tempo, mode, loudness, and so on are inherent
properties of the musical structure and have been shown to in
uence the emotional
states during music listening. Although affective associations of both tempo and
mode are fairly well established, relatively little is known about how these musical
parameters interact. In Sect.
6.4
, the role of each individual parameter on emotional
responses as well as their interactions is reviewed and analyzed.
Section
6.5
discusses and compares different ways of measuring emotional
responses. Emotions are subjective phenomena, and therefore, their measurement is
a dif
cult task. Measurement of emotional responses is closely related to the
existing emotional models. When using discrete models, distinct labels are
employed such as happiness, anger, etc. In contrast, when dimensional models
are used, rating scales of valence and arousal are employed. Both approaches are
mainly based on
“
subjective
”
self-reports. Physiological responses to music offer an
“
alternative for measuring emotional responses to music.
Emotional responses during music listening are related to physiological
responses. To understand the relationship between the two is not an easy task and
has been the subject of intensive investigation. In Sect.
6.6
, the main physiological
responses to music listening are brie
objective
”
y discussed and their application to emotion
recognition and to emotion intelligence in human
machine interaction is described.
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