Emotional Effects Of Music: Production Rules

Abstract

Abstract It is an ancient, and very pervasive, idea that music expresses emotion. Apart from the copious literature to this effect contributed by composers, musicologists, and philosophers, there is also solid empirical evidence from psychological research, reviewed in chapters of this book (e.g. Gabrielsson & Lindström, this volume; Juslin, this volume), that listeners often agree rather strongly about what type of emotion is expressed in a particular piece. It is also a pervasive belief that music can, at times, actually produce emotion in listeners. The distinction between perception and production is related to the distinction between cognitivism and emotivism proposed by philosophers in their analysis of emotion inmusic (e.g.Kivy 1989).Whereas ‘emotivists’ hold thatmusic elicits real emotional responses in listeners, ‘cognitivists’ argue that music simply expresses or represents emotions. Our view is that it would be premature to prejudge the issue and that both positions may be perfectly appropriate depending on a number of factors outlined below.