We like Mozart. Although this might in part be because his music arouses particular “emotions” in us, the satisfaction we get from music must be considered under a much broader affective umbrella, perhaps best summarized as “feelings.” Mozart takes us on a cascade of feelings, entailing ups and downs of affective intensity. Such feelings do not often fit comfortably in the categories that psychologists use to describe emotion. Music produces aesthetic pleasure, a sense of peace and relaxation and/or stimulation and arousal, along with the narrow category of entities that psychologists have carved out and called emotions. Juslin & Västfjäll (J&V) have accurately described what psychologists mean by emotion, but by limiting the feelings aroused by music in this way, they have missed much of the appeal of music. Pleasure itself, and its companion liking, do not fall under the heading of emotion, but are surely an important part of understanding music. Music produces a sense of aesthetic pleasure (e.g., Berlyne Reference Berlyne1971) that defies our linguistic categories. Psychologists distinguish pleasure, pain, and moods from emotions. This is a very questionable set of distinctions; “emotion” is not even represented as a word in all languages. And pleasure itself is multifaceted, including sensory, mastery, and aesthetic pleasure (summarized in P. Rozin Reference Rozin, Kahneman, Diener and Schwarz1999).
The single defining feature of emotion and pleasure is feeling. If someone feels sadness or pleasure, regardless of physiology and expression, affect has occurred. If someone does not feel sadness or pleasure, regardless of physiology and expression, there is no affect. Either, then, we should consider emotion a broader term, encompassing more than the standard set of discrete phenomena that psychologists study, or we should study musical affect rather than musical emotion. Perhaps, then, Leonard Meyer's (Reference Meyer1956) groundbreaking take on the subject should have been called Affect and Meaning in Music (instead of Emotion…).
J&V have done us all a favor by putting a diverse set of material about music and emotion in one place and in highlighting the different ways that music can generate emotion. In so doing, they break out of some field-wide ruts that have limited our ability to comprehend how an abstract string of sounds could possibly arouse sadness, hope, and other emotions.
J&V reasonably oppose the accepted definition of emotion as necessarily the result of cognitive appraisal. That said, we disagree with the authors’ insistence that all emotions, including musical emotions, must have intentional objects. Certain musical emotions are not about the music. One is not sad about Barber's Adagio for Strings or angry at a punk song. Other musical “emotions” do take music as an object. One can feel disgust for the quality of a performance, awe at compositional virtuosity, or joy about the sequence of musical feelings experienced throughout a piece. Such meta-emotions are important phenomena that do not fit into J&V's taxonomy. Their six mechanisms help distinguish between very different sources of musical affect. All contribute to musical affect. But we feel that one of these, which they label “musical expectancy,” has an especially important and powerful role in accounting for the universal appeal of music.
Consider the following examples:
1 We hear a foghorn. Surprising, emotional. A brain stem reflex. The foghorn reminds us of a ferry on Puget Sound (visual imagery) and the day we crossed the sound in a pouring rain (episodic memory). This scenario shows many of the mechanisms for the induction of musical emotion, and yet, this situation is not musical. Yes, brain stem reflexes, evaluative conditioning, emotional contagion, and, in a much more idiosyncratic way, visual imagery and episodic memory, all contribute to musical affect. But, in our view, music is more like a novel or well-crafted meal than it is like a foghorn; that is, it is the structure as incorporated implicitly in the listener, in accordance with the implication-realization model pioneered by Meyer (Reference Meyer1956) and furthered by Narmour (Reference Narmour1990; Reference Narmour1991; Reference Narmour1992).
2 We hear a Mozart piano sonata. The lightness of texture, major key, and fast tempo help create positive feelings. We hear a cadence coming: The dominant chord (e.g., a G-major triad in the key of C major) sounds as though it will resolve to the tonic chord (e.g., a C-major triad in the key of C major) but instead progresses to an Ab-major triad. This deceptive cadence, as it is called in music theory, surprises us and instantly changes our affective response to the music. All of these effects are feelings, but many don't qualify as emotions according to the definitions of psychologists.
This is music, and the aesthetic affect induction is due primarily to our appreciation of the implications in the music. What both of these examples demonstrate is the importance of temporal sequence for the experience of musical affect. The affective responses to the foghorn and to the deceptive cadence derive from the same basic source: surprise. The distinction between the two is that we react to the foghorn without any need for prior exposure, whereas we react with surprise and aesthetic pleasure to the deceptive cadence only if we have experience listening to specific musical styles. As Narmour (Reference Narmour1990; Reference Narmour1991; Reference Narmour1992) argues, expectations, musical and otherwise, stem from both innate (bottom-up) and learned (top-down) processing. We are born with the ability to detect changes in our environment such as a sudden loud (or sudden soft) sound, or the violation of a continuing repetitive event (accounting for a reaction to the AAB sequence in music of humor) (Rozin et al. Reference Rozin, Rozin, Appel and Wachtel2006). We develop a sense of musical expectations within a specific style such as those that derive from tonal hierarchies (e.g., major and minor). Thus, one could combine these two – brain stem reflexes and musical expectancies – into one more general category of implications.
Without the realizations and denials of implications, music might be sad or joyous, but it would not be an affective, aesthetic experience. The flow of the music, its temporal sequence, is the essential ingredient. Loud and fast music tends to make us happy, but it is primarily the structure that gives us the affective character and intensity.
We agree with J&V about ways that sounds, and that subset of them that we call music, can produce emotions. It is important to understand all six of the affect induction features of sounds and music, and to understand how they interact, usually to reinforce one another. But while we do this, we should remember that, at its core, music is about aesthetic pleasure linked principally to musical structure, its implications, and their probable realizations. Emotion, as a category in psychology, subtly limits our conception of music, and misses much of the story.
