Nicola Dibben

Psychoacoustic cues to emotion in speech prosody and music

There is strong evidence of shared acoustic profiles common to the expression of emotions in music and speech, yet relatively limited understanding of the specific psychoacoustic features involved. This study combined a controlled experiment and computational modelling to investigate the perceptual codes associated with the expression of emotion in the acoustic domain. The empirical stage of the study provided continuous human ratings of emotions perceived in excerpts of film music and natural speech samples. The computational stage created a computer model that retrieves the relevant information from the acoustic stimuli and makes predictions about the emotional expressiveness of speech and music close to the responses of human subjects. We show that a significant part of the listeners’ second-by-second reported emotions to music and speech prosody can be predicted from a set of seven psychoacoustic features: loudness, tempo/speech rate, melody/prosody contour, spectral centroid, spectral flux, sharpness, and roughness. The implications of these results are discussed in the context of cross-modal similarities in the communication of emotion in the acoustic domain.

Representations of femininity in popular music

Every text and every reading has a social and therefore political dimension, which is to be found partly in the structure of the text itself and partly in the social relations of the reader and the way they are brought to bear upon the text. (Fiske 1989b, pp. 97–8) The position outlined in the quotation above suggests that meanings are the result of convergence between material properties of a text, and the particular social allegiances of the reader. Two approaches to music and meaning are embodied in this stance: the first theorises music as the material realisation of social forces which are structured into the text and into the reading subject, while the second promotes a view in which the text is rewritten in the act of recontextualisation within the practices of everyday life. Both approaches, the former represented by the critique of mass culture offered by the Frankfurt School, the latter by theories of popular culture, have their roots in the Marxist tradition which theorises the fundamental conflict in society as one between the dominant economic class and all those subordinated by it. Within this context, music is subject to a critique which reveals its stance as either affirming or opposing the ideology of the dominant economic order. The central question is therefore not whether music is ideological, but how ideology is made material and the extent to which listeners are free to produce meanings. In this paper these issues are examined in relation to ideologies of femininity in popular music.

Music and mind in everyday life

1. Music in peoples lives MAKING MUSIC 2. Motivations and skills 3. Expression and communication in performance 4. Improvising and composing USING MUSIC 5. Hearing and listening 6. Individuals using music 7. Groups using music ACQUIRING MUSIC 8. Lifelong musical development 9. Contexts for learning 10. The psychology of music - an overview

The Perception of Structural Stability in Atonal Music: The Influence of Salience, Stability, Horizontal Motion, Pitch Commonality, and Dissonance

Two experiments that investigate the perception of structural stability in atonal music are reported. The first experiment suggests that listeners may hear atonal music in terms of the relative structural importance of events and that listeners9 hearing is greatly influenced by metrical and durational structure. A second experiment reveals that, even in the absence of clear rhythmic, timbral, dynamic, and motivic information, listeners infer relationships of relative structural stability between events at the musical surface. The effects of three main variables (pitch commonality, horizontal movement, and dissonance) and two salience criteria (register and parallelism) are considered. The results indicate that in the absence of a clearly differentiated surface structure, listeners9 judgments of stability are influenced by the dissonance of chords and the horizontal movement of voices. It is concluded that salience (phenomenal accents), voice-leading, and dissonance are potentially important factors in the abstraction of relationships of relative structural importance, and hence to any inference of prolongational structure in atonal music.

What Do We Hear, When We Hear Music?: Music Perception and Musical Material

Theories of auditory event perception have highlighted a distinction between “everyday” and “musical” listening. This paper challenges this account of listening in two ways: first, it extends the notion of source specification to the specification of cultural and compositional categories, and second, it argues that listening to music involves listening to what sounds specify just as much as it involves listening to the acoustic characteristics of sounds. It is argued here that the characterisation of ‘musical’ listening as attending to the acoustic character of sound is a reflection of the prevailing reception ideology of the autonomous art work. This paper reports the results of two empirical studies which provide evidence for the perception of music in terms of categories of musical material (.i.e. what sounds specify). In the first study, participants were presented with triads of musical and everyday sounds presented in conflicting pairings and asked to identify the two that were most similar. In the second study listeners were asked to give commentaries on the sounds. These listening studies showed that while listeners pay attention to the acoustic properties of sounds they are also sensitive to what sounds specify (physical source, physical space and proximity, genre, musical function, performance skill, emotional attributes and social context). The results highlight the way in which listeners privilege particular kinds of specifications, and some of the factors involved in these choices are discussed briefly in relation to a performative theory of musical meaning.

Nature and Nation: National Identity and Environmentalism in Icelandic Popular Music Video and Music Documentary

Many Icelandic musicians have claimed that the Icelandic popular music scene has helped create a new Icelandic identity since the nation gained independence in 1944. This paper examines the character of that identity and its relationship to wider societal concerns in contemporary Iceland, in particular environmental politics and the conflation of nation with nature. This analysis reveals the ways in which popular music and its moving image are shaped by, and the varied responses they offer to, nationalism and globalisation.

Emotion and music: A view from the cultural psychology of music

This paper provides an overview of current thinking in music cognition regarding the perception of emotion in music. A componential view of emotion is adopted, and a variety of routes by which music expresses emotion are presented. Two main questions for future research are identified: first, the extent to which perception and induction of emotion through music is shared cross-culturally, and second, identification of the factors that contribute to the cross-cultural perception of emotion in music. By drawing upon a biologically and ecologically informed perspective this paper aims to identify routes for future research that would enable music cognition research to shed light on the socio-historical variability of emotion perception through music.

Key-Mood Association: A Self Perpetuating Myth

The association of certain keys with specific moods continues to be widespread despite technical evidence that all equally tempered keys are identical. This paper provides experimental results which shed light on this phenomenon. First, approximately three-quarters of participants questioned claimed to have key-mood associations. Second, the key-mood associations held by participants showed a very strong correlation to late eighteenth century associations which attributed brightness to keys with sharps in their key signature and mellowness to those with flats. Third, key-mood associations were proven to be invalid for the modern, equal temperament keyboard; the participants showed no ability to be able to identify mood from key or key from mood and, overall, there was no change in perceived mood of a piece if it was performed in a different key. One reason why the key-mood association myth persists to the present day is the tradition of associating sharp keys with bright and positive moods and flat keys with dark and negative moods, which has been perpetuated by some musical commentators over the past two hundred years. In addition, there are a number of aspects of early musical training which encourage these associations for the sharp and flat keys.

Pulp, Pornography and Spectatorship: Subject Matter and Subject Position in Pulp's This is Hardcore

Sheffield pop band Pulps album This is Hardcore (1998) problematizes media constructions of fame, masculinity, youth and sexuality as self-aggrandizing fantasies. Pornography and glamour function in the album as cyphers for the disparity between fantasy and reality—a disparity fuelled by the media and their highly alienated cultural forms. The albums critique of these fantasies is made both in its subject matter and through the alienated subject position it solicits—a subject position at odds with constructions of macho masculinity as the protagonist in sexual encounters, and with constructions of fame and stardom. Drawing on media theory, I situate the album as part of a more general critique of spectatorship and voyeurism, and of the forms of cultural consumption (including music) which encourage passivity and disengagement.

Investigating the influence of music tempo on arousal and behaviour in laboratory virtual roulette

A number of studies indicate that fast music influences performance in everyday activities including shopping and gambling, but the mechanisms through which this effect is realised are not well understood. This study investigates whether fast tempo music influences gambling via an effect on arousal using a laboratory virtual roulette task. One hundred and forty-four participants played virtual roulette whilst listening to fast tempo, slow tempo or no music. Music tempo alone did not influence betting speed, expenditure or risk-taking. Furthermore tempo did not influence participants’ physiological or subjective arousal levels, nor participants’ opinions of the musical stimuli in terms of liking, familiarity, fit or its ability to aid concentration. Our findings suggest that there are some circumstances under which the effect of music tempo does not operate and therefore provides an insight into the limits of music tempo as an explanation for music effects on behaviour. This study has implications for the way that musical characteristics are operationalised in future research into music’s effects on behaviour.