Juslin & Västfjäll (J&V) cut through a veritable thicket of research on emotion in music by wielding two powerful weapons. One is the claim that emotion in music is not a unitary phenomenon. The other is the claim that only by tracing the underlying mechanisms can we understand it. By disaggregating the variety of musical experiences that we call emotion, and by unearthing the numerous causal mechanisms responsible for this multiplicity, a messy field starts to sort itself out. Many of the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies in the literature are due to the failure to recognize that all these mechanisms – not just one – are at work. Collectively they account for a wide spectrum of emotional experiences in music. The target article therefore constitutes an immensely important contribution, and enables future research on music and emotion to be more lucidly framed.
Elsewhere we have argued that there are at least three categories of conscious musical experience: affect, motion, and structure (Bharucha et al. Reference Bharucha, Curtis and Paroo2006). Music serves to communicate conscious experience, and the spectrum of such experience is more varied and dense than is often acknowledged. In this commentary, we suggest three possible extensions of the theory developed by J&V: First, motion is another critical mechanism that leads to the elicitation of emotion in music. Second, emotions may be elicited by synchronization of conscious experience or motion. Third, emotions constitute only a subset of a denser and more richly textured spectrum of musical feelings.
Motion
Much has been written about the role of motion in music, and a review of this work is beyond the scope of this commentary. Suffice it to say that music can drive movement – which may or may not be inhibited, depending upon whether we want to move and it is socially appropriate to do so. J&V discuss movement in the context of social contagion. But movement that is not directly expressive of emotion, as well as its inhibition, may elicit emotion. If visual imagery qualifies as a mechanism for eliciting emotion in music, motion is surely even more powerful as a mechanism.
Synchronization
We have argued elsewhere that mere synchronization may be a powerful elicitor of emotion (Bharucha et al. Reference Bharucha, Curtis and Paroo2007). To the extent that music promotes group cohesion, one of the mechanisms by which this is achieved is through synchronization, or perceived synchronization, of conscious musical experience. Emotion need not be what is synchronized, but is a consequence of the recognition that a group is synchronized in some way. Motion and structure may also serve as vehicles for synchrony. People moving in synchrony can have powerful emotions not as a direct result of the music, but as a result of the recognition that they are moving in synchrony; music serves to elicit the synchronous movement, which in turn may elicit emotion in a derivative way. Similarly, even the recognition of musical structure can trigger the emotion that stems from synchronization. If I know that people are perceiving the same structural manipulations as I am, that recognition of the synchronization of our perceptual experience can elicit the kinds of emotions that promote group cohesion.
Spectrum of affective musical experience
If emotions are “about something” and last from a few minutes to a few hours, then we would argue that emotions represent only a subset of the spectrum of affective experience. J&V define affect as an “umbrella term that covers all evaluative … states such as emotion, mood, and preference” (see target article, sect. 2, Table 1). And they define feeling as the “subjective experience of emotion (or mood)” (sect. 2, Table 1). Yet, music may evoke feelings that are neither emotions, nor moods, nor preferences.
Musical feelings need not be about something, may or may not be valenced, and, unlike emotions (which are nameable, e.g., sad and happy), may not be readily nameable. Yet, they may have an affective quality in that they are felt and not just perceived. Some musical feelings that don't count as emotion can be named easily: for example, warm. Others may be more nuanced and possibly ineffable in the sense of defying verbal description; for example, Raffman (Reference Raffman1993) argues that musical experience is more fine-grained than the categories available to describe it. Other musical experiences may be gestures that aren't necessarily about objects and don't lend themselves to easy description but feel a certain way. And some may be more fleeting than the time span that characterizes emotions (minutes to hours). They may include sensory qualities; for example, the distinctive sound of an oboe, a particular singer's voice, or a plagal cadence.
In other words, music may engage a dense spectrum of feelings of which emotions form a subset. The theoretical framework proposed by J&V might extend beyond emotions to other affective states or feelings. For example, some of the categories of feelings described in the previous paragraph may be involved in evaluative conditioning and episodic memory in ways that are analogous to emotion.
What role might these more subtle musical feelings play? Even though they may not be about something and may not be nameable, they nevertheless advance the cause of group cohesion. For example, culturally learned musical gestures, and the feelings or sensory qualities they evoke (however nuanced, fleeting, and possibly ineffable), may signal group membership. Furthermore, they increase the number of channels available for synchronization beyond just happy, sad, angry, and so on. The benefits of synchronization require only that people be having similar experiences; those experiences need not have any communicative utility in and of themselves, and need not be emotions.
In conclusion, we argue that the proposed framework is a significant theoretical advance in understanding emotion. We also believe that the framework can support a spectrum of musical feeling that is denser and broader than emotion. Therefore, the larger question is not how we explain the role of emotion in music, but how we explain the role of all affective experience – or feelings – in music.
