Judging familiarity and emotion from very brief musical excerpts

In the present study, the gating paradigm was used to measure how much perceptual information that was extracted from musical excerpts needs to be heard to provide judgments of familiarity and of emotionality. Nonmusicians heard segments of increasing duration (250, 500, 1,000 msec, etc.). The stimuli were segments from familiar and unfamiliar musical excerpts in Experiment 1 and from very moving and emotionally neutral musical excerpts in Experiment 2. Participants judged how familiar (Experiment 1) or how moving (Experiment 2) the excerpt was to them. Results show that a feeling of familiarity can be triggered by 500-msec segments, and that the distinction between moving and neutral can be made for 250-msec segments. This finding extends the observation of fast-acting cognitive and emotional processes from face and voice perception to music perception.