Influence of Musical Context on the Perception of Emotional Expression of Music

Abstract

Factors determining and influencing the perception of emotional expression of music include those related to music itself, to the listener, and to the context. Among the latter there is also music, as we rarely listen to a single piece. A simple experimental study has been carried out into the effect of music listened to immediately beforehand on the perception of the emotional expression of a musical piece. The following variables were involved: type of emotional expression of music conceived in terms of a most basic sad-joyful dimension, initial and final mood of the listeners, their professional musical education vs. lack thereof, age, and gender. The subjects were students of three age groups: 9, 15, and 20-23 year olds, both from non-music and music schools. Each group listened to a sequence of two short pieces of music of the opposite emotional expression in two experimental conditions: sad-joyful and joyful-sad. The perceived expression of the listened music, as well as the initial and final mood of the subjects, were recorded with a simple self-report measure. The results demonstrated that the perception of emotional expression of the musical piece was entirely independent of the influence of the preceding music. The initial mood played no role. This was the case consistently in the musically educated and non-educated subjects, in all age and gender groups. Three patterns of changes in mood during the session of listening were also described: mood increase, mood decrease and mood stability. The latter proved to grow among musically educated with age.