Perception of affect in unfamiliar music

Abstract

This thesis comprises a body of work that investigates affect perception of unfamiliar music, with a focus on both the role of potentially culture-independent psychoacoustic features that are intrinsic to a musical signal (e.g. roughness, harmonicity, spectral entropy, and average pitch) and extrinsic culture-dependent features (e.g. familiarity through exposure and evaluative conditioning). Much previous research in music perception has suggested that extrinsic features are of more importance than intrinsic features, but has not systematically tested the impact of intrinsic features on responses to unfamiliar music. The thesis discusses four experiments conducted to test the role of the above mentioned features using musical stimuli that are unfamiliar to participants. By using musical stimuli that are unfamiliar to participants, additional evidence can be provided for the cultural- independence of the tested intrinsic features. In order to achieve this unfamiliarity, two approaches were used. The first approach examined affective responses to chords from the unfamiliar microtonal Bohlen-Pierce system in Western listeners, the second approach tested affective responses to Western musical harmony in remote villages in Papua New Guinea, with varying levels of familiarity with Western music. The results of the listening experiments using Bohlen-Pierce suggest that the tested underlying culture-independent psychoacoustic features consistently impact affective rat- ings more strongly than do the experimentally manipulated culture-dependent factors of familiarity and evaluative conditioning. The results from the cross-cultural experiment suggest a strong role of familiarity on valence ratings of Western cadences and melodies. In summary, by using unfamiliar music (through the use of an unfamiliar microtonal system or through cross-cultural research) we can show that, in addition to extrinsic culture-dependent features, intrinsic features are fundamental for affect perception in music.

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English