Music and the Emotion: How Music Can Affect Your Mood

The case whereby the hero Odysseus blocked his companions with wax to escape the song of the siren indicates the power of the force of music (Grewe, Nagel, Kopiez & Altenmüller, 2007). Numerous people are capable of recognizing emotions that are basic in music and experience reactions that are effective to it. The question therein lies whether music can induce emotion, occasion subjective feelings, bring to the realization motor reactions, and cause physiological arousal. To determine this, an interdisciplinary study measured skin conductance, the activity of facial muscles, and the inclusion of self-monitoring strategies in synchronization with music stimuli. Using a group of participants listening to various types of music, which ranged from rock music to classical and pop, the individuals noted their feelings in a two-dimensional emotion space in the course of the listening process. This paper analyzes the premise that music directly affects the emotions of individuals as articulated through their facial expressions and physiological reactions. Moreover, it approaches the idea that the induction of similar emotional experiences is typically through idiosyncratic musical configurations.

Fundamentally, two schools of thought exist concerning this posit. Emotivists have the belief that music directly affects the emotions of listeners, while on the other hand, cognitivists designate music as a trigger that expresses emotions best interpreted by the one listening only (Grewe, Nagel, Kopiez & Altenmüller, 2007). Various research up to now concentrates on music’s ability to express emotions. There is a difference between perceived emotions and felt emotion. Therefore, individual emotional experience appears to be the most significant motive for the listening of music. To comprehend music’s appeal to the emotion of individuals, the concept of affective responses is highly pivotal. In the recent past, the conceptual and definitional shortcomings of research in human emotions continue to pervade the academic world. This has led to a reality whereby various disciplines that deal with emotions in response to inquiry in music to differ tremendously, leading them not to have consistent views of a similar occurrence, but rather have dissimilar ones on substantively divergent phenomena. To avoid such ambiguity, an all-inclusive definition of affective response is imperative. As such, in this study, affective response is selected as an overall expression used in the event an observable phenomenon is not sufficiently comprehended.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, the constituents of preceding emotional response triads necessitate exceptional approaches in methodologies that coordinate and balance each other efficiently. As such, the methods used in this study analyzes the physiological arousal, subjective feeling and motor expression component in a music-listening experimentation that employs the use of physiological measures. In addition, the assumption and goal of the study based on the various mentioned literature drew up conclusions that the induction of emotions through the employment of distinct musical patterns was true. Previous studies indicate that music typically affects three emotional components that are major, which are physiological alterations, motor activation, and subjective feeling. Commensurately, the aim of this study described the capability of complete musical pieces to change the emotional state of individuals. Such emotional states include the feelings, motor activation and bodily reactions (Grewe, Nagel, Kopiez & Altenmüller, 2007).

The study’s conclusions indicate that the results further provide substantial evidence to support the cognitivist position, which has the view that music is a stimulus that does not necessarily induce, but instead expresses emotions. Further, the proposition that patterns of music do not prompt emotions appears contra-intuitive and has to take an interpretation of an experimental setting. Moreover, the study postulates that the induction of synchronized components of the emotion has hitherto never been agreed upon. Overall, the suggested determination that musical patterns, which are distinct, do not universally induce emotions does not in essence rule out the stimulus on emotional constituents (Grewe, Nagel, Kopiez & Altenmüller, 2007).

Reference

Grewe, O., Nagel, F., Kopiez, R., & Altenmüller, E. (2007). Emotions over time: Synchronicity and development of subjective, physiological, and facial affective reactions to music.  Emotion ,  7 (4), 774-788. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.4.774