How/why music causes emotion?

Pythagorean

Three notes with equal interval of half steps between them; like A C Eb

BenG549

Next to...

You have 3 notes played on a keyboard. It doesn't matter the size of the interval between the 1st and 2nd note as long at the interval between the 2nd and 3rd is the same "magnitude".

"decreasing vocal pitch is used to indicate strength and social dominance, whereas increasing pitch signals defeat, social subordinance and weakness. The affect of major or minor chords is thus inherently positive or negative because they imply social strength (“happiness”) or weakness"

This a big logical step in my book.. Deeper voices sound more assertive and dominant than high pitched voices, therefore decreasing the tone of 1 of 3 notes in an augmented chord by 1 semitone (the equivalent of close to 1 or 2 Hz in the lowest octave band) implies happiness... Interesting idea but it sounds pretty unsubstantiated. Also doesn't account for why music in a minor key is often used in an authoritative powerful dominant context.. the Imperial March in starwars being the first example that comes to mind... that music screams power and authority, not subordinance and weakness. Obviously you could argue that the music is meant to invoke the feelings of subordinance and weakness in us, but is the point not that we hear the "minor" sound in other people and it tell us that they are weak... other wise why do we hear music in a major key when we watch superman and hear his "theme"... unless we are supposed to feel more powerful and dominant than superman, are we not supposed to associate power and dominance with superman? I'm not sure the idea makes total sense.

They do accept this to a degree by saying... "It is of course true that all pitch changes in both music and language are highly context-dependent and therefore meanings can be altered by contextual changes"... and then they say... "but it is nonetheless a simple fact of diatonic harmonies that, starting with a minimal configuration of three-tone chords, the smallest (semitone) movement of one tone from a state of harmonic tension will lead to the positive affect of a major chord or to the negative affect of a minor chord, depending solely on the direction of pitch change."

As if that counters the fact that, in music especially, the idea of power or submissiveness is completely contextual... it obviously does not.

"This relates to the cross-cultural tendency to use rising F0 in questions and falling F0 in statements – indications of “informational weakness or strength”."

This is an interesting idea. However no justification for assuming the last part of that statement is given. In the form of a citation, for example. Sounds a lot like conjecture to me.



In general the article is interesting but it either skips over a lot of detail or it is just presumption and postulation.

The idea of things with lower pitch being more "authoritarian" is likely to do with the fact that things that have more authority are a lot bigger and able to produce these low tones we associate this with fear more than anything... how this lowering tone translates to happiness in music is not really explained in the paper.

Also doesn't explain how people would react to a low pitched minor chord (decreasing pitch being 'authority' 'positivity' etc.. minor being 'submissive' 'sad') compared to a high pitched major chord (increasing pitch 'submissive' 'sad' and major being 'authority' 'positivity')... or visa versa... I'm just not totally sure it makes sense, and with no real reference to earlier work regarding the bits that needed justifying I am sceptical.


Also sorry if a lot of that ramble didn't make sense it's 5 oclock in the morning here, just thought I'd throw my thoughts out there before I fell asleep!

Pythagorean

I'm pretty sure the minor version of the imperial march has lots of accidentals. It can also be written as a major key or as a Phrygian modal... it doesn't have a true key.

This is the beauty of western music and scales built from the circle of fifths. Theyre very versatile.

zoobyshoe

I don't buy this argument either, for the reason that going from a major to minor chord is simply accomplished by lowering the third a halftone. A lot of music starts out the gate in a minor key and doesn't have to be resolved there from one of those "tension" intervals. Lower music is more masculine than higher in either major or minor keys just because the human voice is divided between the sexes that way.

atyy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMYZBVbifh8 Sorry, couldn't resist just saw the musical!

Pythagorean

I think the idea is not that you have to wait for tension then resolution to feel something, but that you already have a layout of tension/resolution predictions based on actual social interactions you've already had.

I haven't really decided one way or another on the article, but I thought it was an interesting idea. I can think of contradictions to even their heavily cited statement though: when you say "oohhh kayyy" submissively, you drop in down (not raise) and when a tiger goes from a rumbling to a dominant growl, they rise in tone (not lower).

zoobyshoe

More than one person has noted the intrinsic irony there.

Personally, when I need to get back in touch with my masculine nucleus , I don't 'walk like a man'...I walk hard.

zoobyshoe

Psychologically this would be true, but the musical counterpart would seem to require tension be established then resolved up or down.

I think it's an interesting article also, but it's essentially spinning eccentrically, like an unbalanced tire.

Pythagorean

I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion about what the musical counterpart requires. Remember that when people speak, their tones are monophonic and variation is distributed temporally (from one tone to the next).

In a chord, we're able to distribute tones "spatially" (polyphonically) so there's a disconnect. The leap in this article is figuring out how the brain interprets polyphonic sounds in terms of monophonic social tones. The idea proposed is that if you hear a resolve chord, you "subconsciously imagine" it came from harmonic tension. Not that I'm arguing for that idea, just making sure you understand what you're arguing against. It doesn't seem like the spinning simile you proposed to me, though. It just seems a little unfounded to me.

Monophonic melodies are a lot simpler, since you can directly draw analogies between speech patterns and melodies.

What I wonder... is what the temporal structures of a chord look like. Within the beat notes, is there inherently a melody that quickly draws and resolves tension in a periodic fashion? It's nonlinear too, as the note rings, some frequencies decay faster than others. The harmonics, attack, decay, and sustain of the notes probably all play a role too (i.e. a piano and a violin note sound much different from each other).

zoobyshoe

The musical counterpart has been translated into a stylized version of speech tones based on a tone and its natural harmonics and the chords and scales and everything else that naturally results.