Final 2: Mechanisms that trigger emotional response to music

This topic submitted by Montra, Mike, Lydia, Chris ( ScottyTe3@aol.com ) on 11/2/03 .

Natural Systems 1 Syllabus---Western Program---Miami University

I. Introduction
Music is said to soothe the beast within. Music can affect the emotions greatly. This is seen mostly in arts and entertainment. Eerie music fills the theater when the stranded couple enters the haunted house. Composers may try to make music to recreate their feelings or tell some tale. Music is greatly intertwined with culture in general (Meyer). Exactly how music affects the emotions, or at least how Western music does this, is still up to much debate.
A systematic understanding of musicÕs effects could be put to many uses. It could be applied in the arts and in entertainment, and advertising would probably exploit musicÕs effects for marketing purposes. Such an understanding could also result in more positive things. Music therapist could create certain music to positively affect people with depression, anxiety, or everyday stress among other things. Since overall emotional health is shown to have a positive affect on physical health, prolonged use of positive music could be used to help a patient maintain a positive outlook through out treatments, chronic disease, etc. Simply put, well-constructed music could help people stay well balanced.

II. Background
Baroque music is a style of European music that flourished from 1600 to 1750 (Palisca, 2003). Based off the rhetoric theories of the Greeks and Romans, Baroque composers attempted to direct the emotions, or affects, of the listener. These affects were rationalized emotional states. The composers attempted to create a sense of unity in the work, and usually focused on a certain affect (Buelow, 2001).
Although this practice was common earlier, no official theory was developed till about the mid-17th century (Buelow, 2001). At this time theorists such as Mersenne, Kircher, Werchmeister, Pritz, Mattheson, Marpurp, Scheibe, and Quantz began to categorize the different affects. One focus of the studies were the connotations certain aspects of music such as scales, and rhythms. Eventually these theories were compiled by German musicologists Kretzschmars, Goldschmidt and Schering as the ÒTheory of the Affects.Ó It is from this theory that the notion that positive emotions are communicated by major keys and negative emotions are communicated with minor keys.
Keys are derived from musical modes. Modes have three meanings in Western music. Concerning keys, mode denotes the relationship between note values brevis and longa(short and long). In major key, or modus perfectus, the relationship is three to one respectively. In minor key, modus imperfectus, the relationship is two to one (Powers, 2003).
The Theory of Affects fell out of favor after the Baroque period however. More recently the Theory of Affects has been considered by some to be a conditioned response (Boge, 10/8/2003). According to this notion, the only reason why a person would associate major key with positive emotions is because he or she was some how introduced to the idea the major key denotes positive emotions. Likewise a person who has never heard of the concept that minor key denotes negative emotions probably would not have a negative emotional response to a minor key.
Very recently, music theorists have been revisiting older theories. There is after all debate over how music arouses emotion (Madell, 2002). A recent study published in the Psychology of Music revisits the ancient Greek theory of harmonics, or the relationships to mathematics and music (Crickmore, 2003). Our project attempts to follow this precedent.
The project aims to revisit the Theory of Affects. Using statistics, we hope to test whether or not there is a statistical different of people whom agree with the Theory of Affects from the people whom run contrary to the Theory of Affects. Then we will examine the test participantsÕ responses to see how they line up. Perhaps only people who are familiar with Baroque music agree with the Theory of Affects, or only people who were in a bad mood disagree with the Theory of Affects.

III. Specific Research Design
Music can convey many different moods or emotional tones. It can convey happiness, sadness, excitement, anger, or any number of others. We want to determine what structural characteristics influence the mood communicated through or perceived in a song. We are not looking for how a song makes a person feel, as the mood a person is in may not be changed by a song they listen to. We want to know what emotional feeling people perceive in a song itself. We specifically want to know if the songÕs mode (major key or minor key) determines whether the mood or emotional tone of the song is a positive or a negative one.
In order to test this, we have chosen portions of eight songs that we will play for a number of people, asking them to evaluate the mood of the song in a survey. Each of the selections are excerpts from Baroque pieces, and they are each played on the harpsichord. We chose to use music from the Baroque time period because the composers deliberately arranged their songs with regard to the emotion they wanted to convey or produce. We chose to use pieces played on the harpsichord because we wanted the songs to all be played on the same instrument, and the harpsichord was available from our sources.
We will run our tests in the Peabody and Mary Lyon dormitories. We will walk through the halls asking students who are in the dorm at the time to come take part in our survey. We plan on holding two testing sessions in Peabody hall and one in Mary Lyon hall. We also plan on asking for time before or after an NS lecture to perform our survey as a backup plan. (This would be a backup in case we did not get enough data from the other surveys. If we got enough, we would not need this time.)
We will be using surveys to collect our data. On each testing date, once we have all the people gathered, we will hand out the surveys and read the instructions. We will also publicly credit our music sources. Then we will begin to play the music, leaving time after each selection for the listeners to fill out the information for the particular song. At the end of the testing session we will thank everyone for coming and ask them to turn in the surveys at the door, where we will collect them.
We have designed the survey to find out what mood people perceive in each song and to help control for some variables that could skew our data. The survey asks what mood a respondent is in, because while we are not looking at how the song affects their mood, we want to make sure that the mood a person starts out with does not affect their perception of the song. We will ask the respondents to answer this question before we begin playing the songs. The survey also asks whether or not the respondents have any memories associated with each song, as the mood they perceive in the song would very likely be influenced by the context of that memory. Then it asks the respondents to rate the mood of the song on a scale from 1 to 7 (the scale appears on the survey). These questions will be answered after each song, and we will allow time between songs for respondents to fill them out. The survey also asks how much, on a scale from 1-5 (scale included on survey) the respondents liked the style of the music we played. We included this question because we wanted to be sure that extreme preference for or dislike of the style did not influence a respondentÕs impression of the mood of the song. This question will appear at the end of the survey, to be filled out after all the songs have been played. (See sample survey on next page.)

IV. Materials and methods
The basic materials for this test are the music selections we will use, the equipment used to copy and play it, the survey to collect data, and the rooms in which we will administer the survey. We will also need people to take the survey. In addition, after the data is collected, we will be using a number of computer programs to organize and analyze the data.
Most of our music selections are samples from the website of the Baroque Music Club (http://www.baroquecds.com/musamples.html). They are all clips from longer pieces; they are not the whole work. We have used them with permission. The music selections from this source are as follows:
Fantasia in c-minor (BWV 906) by Johann Sebastian Bach (from BMC 24)
Fughetta in C Major Ð BWV 872a (Book II, "48" Preludes & Fugues) by Bach (from Bach 732)
Italian Concerto in F Opening (BWV 971) by Bach (BMC 24)
Partita 4 in D major Ð Gigue (BWV 828) by Bach ( Bach 705)
Prelude and Fugue in a minor (BWV 897) by Bach (Bach 732)
Parthie in A major Ð Gigue by Johann Josef Fux (BMC 28)
Suite 3 in d-minor Prelude by George Frideric Handel (BMC 23)
In the above list, the first set of parentheses (BWV #) gives the identification number of the specific song according to a system used to identify each of BachÕs works. The clips each come from a CD that the Baroque Music Club has for sale, and the second set of parentheses tells which CD the sample came from.
One of our pieces comes from a collection of MIDI files of Book II of the Well-tempered Clavier by Bach edited by Dr. Yo Tomita. This piece is not an actual recording of a performance, but it is configured to sound like a harpsichord, and so it will be usable for our purposes. It also is used by permission. This piece is:
Fugue 12 in f minor (BWV 881) by Bach.
These pieces will be saved to a CD, and we will probably play with a laptop computer.
We have attempted to use songs that would be generally unfamiliar to people in order to eliminate emotional impressions of a song due to the context of memory. If on the survey a person answers that they do have memories of a certain song, we will not use the data from that song. I this way we hope to eliminate the problem of impressions coming from the setting in which a song could be remembered.
Once we have collected the data, we will enter the information into tables using Microsoft Word (see partial table from the in-class test run on next page). This will allow us to organize the data by any category we need and will aid in our analysis later on. We could make graphs of this data in order to help predict and understand the results we get with our statistical testing

Example graph

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The analysis of our data would actually include a number separate steps or analyses, which could roughly be categorized as control analyses and comparison analyses. The control analyses would establish the usability of our data by trying to determine whether or not variables other than key influenced our results. Once we have established what portion of our data is comparable, we would us that to conduct the comparison analyses.
Our control analyses would try to determine whether or not a listenerÕs mood or feelings toward Baroque music influenced their impressions of each sample. In analyzing both of these variables, we would look at the data for each song individually. In the case of mood, we would compare the emotional description assigned to a song by listeners who said they were in a good mood to the description assigned by listeners who said in a bad mood, and likewise we would compare the data from those in both a good mood and a bad mood to those who said they were in a neutral mood. In order to do this we would do a series of three t-tests. We will use a similar system for comparing responses based on feelings toward Baroque music. If these tests show no statistical difference between these groups, we can go on to use the data having established that our results will not be based on these variables. If the tests show that these variables do, in fact, impact the responses to the songs themselves, we can at that time choose to narrow or split groups so that we are always working with comparable data.
There is one more control analysis that we might be able to do. On the Ohio State website about music cognition, there is an online program that runs tests on music. We might be able to use this program to analyze the structural differences between the pieces we use in our testing. The website is currently down, however, and this might prevent our use of it. It does say it should be working soon. The URL is http://www.music-cog.ohio-state.edu/.
We will analyze the working of the songsÕ key on the results by the use of two comparison analyses. For the first analysis, we will use a t-test to compare the response to each song written in major mode to the others, and likewise with those written in minor mode. If we find that there is a statistically significant difference between the response to one song in a major mode and the response to another song in a major mode (or minor mode different from another in minor mode), we will conclude that the fact that both songs are in major or minor keys does not mean that they will be similar. This would bring us to our answer in the inverse: we are looking for whether or not the key determines the difference; this says whether or not the key determines sameness.
For The second comparison analysis we will use a t-test to compare the response to each song written in major mode and the response to each song written in minor mode. This would bring us to the answer of whether or not people respond differently to songs in major or minor keys. If there is a statistically significant difference in response between each set of major and minor songs, we would conclude that the key did in fact make a difference in the response to major and minor keys. If there is not a statistically significant difference in response between the sets of major and minor songs, that would demonstrate that the key did not make a difference.
There are two or three ways in which we could include the class in our project. The first thing we would like to do with the class is perform a preliminary run of our test in order to smooth out any problems our design may have. We would also like to set up for a possible test time at the end of a lecture day, in case our original tests do not yield enough data. This would be a back-up day, and if we got enough data, we would not need it. Finally, we hope to have the class help take the data from our surveys and input it into a computer spreadsheet. This will save us time, as the input process will probably be a rather long one. These are the ways we would want to use our class day.

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Results From Test Run

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Works Cited
ÒAPA Style Made Easy.Ó [WWW document http://apastyle.net] Perry: askSam Systems. Accessed October 28, 2003.
-citation help
Boge, Claire. Personal Interview. October 8, 2003
-information of Theory of the Affects
Buelow, George J. ÒAffects, Theory of.Ó The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Muscians. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [WWW. Document http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=music.00253&anchor=music.00253] Accessed October 22, 2003
-Theory of the Affects
Crickmore, Leon (2003). ÒA re-valuation of the ancient science of harmonics.Ó Psychology of Music. London: SAGE Publications. Vol. 31 No. 4 pg. 391-403
-revisits harmonics, sets precedent for expirement
Madell, Geoffrey (2002). Philosphy, Music and Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.
-debate over musicÕs arousal of emotions
Meyer, Leonard B. (1956). Emotions and Meaning of Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
-relationship of music and emotions
Meyer, Leonard B. (1967). Music: The Arts and Ideas. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
-relationship of music and culture
Palisca, Claude V. (2003). ÒBaroque: Etymology and early usage.Ó The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Muscians. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [WWW. Document http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=music.02097.1] Accessed October 22, 2003.
-information on Baroque music
Powers, Harold S., et al. (2003). ÒMode.Ó The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Muscians. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [WWW. Document http://grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?from=search&session_search_id=3777336694&hitnum=1section=music.43718] Accessed October 22, 2003
-information on major/minor keys