Emotional expression through musical cues: A comparison of production and perception approaches.

Multiple approaches have been used to investigate how musical cues are used to shape different emotions in music. The most prominent approach is a perception study, where musical stimuli varying in cue levels are assessed by participants in terms of their conveyed emotion. However, this approach lim...

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Main Authors: Annaliese Micallef Grimaud, Tuomas Eerola
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2022-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279605
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author Annaliese Micallef Grimaud
Tuomas Eerola
author_facet Annaliese Micallef Grimaud
Tuomas Eerola
author_sort Annaliese Micallef Grimaud
collection DOAJ
description Multiple approaches have been used to investigate how musical cues are used to shape different emotions in music. The most prominent approach is a perception study, where musical stimuli varying in cue levels are assessed by participants in terms of their conveyed emotion. However, this approach limits the number of cues and combinations simultaneously investigated, since each variation produces another musical piece to be evaluated. Another less used approach is a production approach, where participants use cues to change the emotion conveyed in music, allowing participants to explore a larger number of cue combinations than the former approach. These approaches provide different levels of accuracy and economy for identifying how cues are used to convey different emotions in music. However, do these approaches provide converging results? This paper's aims are two-fold. The role of seven musical cues (tempo, pitch, dynamics, brightness, articulation, mode, and instrumentation) in communicating seven emotions (sadness, joy, calmness, anger, fear, power, and surprise) in music is investigated. Additionally, this paper explores whether the two approaches will yield similar findings on how the cues are used to shape different emotions in music. The first experiment utilises a production approach where participants adjust the cues in real-time to convey target emotions. The second experiment uses a perception approach where participants rate pre-rendered systematic variations of the stimuli for all emotions. Overall, the cues operated similarly in the majority (32/49) of cue-emotion combinations across both experiments, with the most variance produced by the dynamics and instrumentation cues. A comparison of the prediction accuracy rates of cue combinations representing the intended emotions found that prediction rates in Experiment 1 were higher than the ones obtained in Experiment 2, suggesting that a production approach may be a more efficient method to explore how cues are used to shape different emotions in music.
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spelling doaj.art-7940903469384eda96dd058b8dd18eed2023-01-05T05:31:16ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032022-01-011712e027960510.1371/journal.pone.0279605Emotional expression through musical cues: A comparison of production and perception approaches.Annaliese Micallef GrimaudTuomas EerolaMultiple approaches have been used to investigate how musical cues are used to shape different emotions in music. The most prominent approach is a perception study, where musical stimuli varying in cue levels are assessed by participants in terms of their conveyed emotion. However, this approach limits the number of cues and combinations simultaneously investigated, since each variation produces another musical piece to be evaluated. Another less used approach is a production approach, where participants use cues to change the emotion conveyed in music, allowing participants to explore a larger number of cue combinations than the former approach. These approaches provide different levels of accuracy and economy for identifying how cues are used to convey different emotions in music. However, do these approaches provide converging results? This paper's aims are two-fold. The role of seven musical cues (tempo, pitch, dynamics, brightness, articulation, mode, and instrumentation) in communicating seven emotions (sadness, joy, calmness, anger, fear, power, and surprise) in music is investigated. Additionally, this paper explores whether the two approaches will yield similar findings on how the cues are used to shape different emotions in music. The first experiment utilises a production approach where participants adjust the cues in real-time to convey target emotions. The second experiment uses a perception approach where participants rate pre-rendered systematic variations of the stimuli for all emotions. Overall, the cues operated similarly in the majority (32/49) of cue-emotion combinations across both experiments, with the most variance produced by the dynamics and instrumentation cues. A comparison of the prediction accuracy rates of cue combinations representing the intended emotions found that prediction rates in Experiment 1 were higher than the ones obtained in Experiment 2, suggesting that a production approach may be a more efficient method to explore how cues are used to shape different emotions in music.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279605
spellingShingle Annaliese Micallef Grimaud
Tuomas Eerola
Emotional expression through musical cues: A comparison of production and perception approaches.
PLoS ONE
title Emotional expression through musical cues: A comparison of production and perception approaches.
title_full Emotional expression through musical cues: A comparison of production and perception approaches.
title_fullStr Emotional expression through musical cues: A comparison of production and perception approaches.
title_full_unstemmed Emotional expression through musical cues: A comparison of production and perception approaches.
title_short Emotional expression through musical cues: A comparison of production and perception approaches.
title_sort emotional expression through musical cues a comparison of production and perception approaches
url https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279605
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