The Influence Of Musical Structure On Emotional Expression

Abstract

The expressive qualities of music have been a matter of discussion by philosophers and music theorists ever since antiquity and, more recently, by music psychologists. Many kinds of expression have been proposed, but expression of emotion is undoubtedly the most frequent. Likewise, most empirical research has focused on emotional expression in attempts to find out, on the one hand, which emotions can be reliably expressed in music (reviewed in Gabrielsson & Juslin, in press) and, on the other hand, which factors in music contribute to the perceived emotional expression. The latter refer to factors in the composed musical structure represented in the musical notation, such as tempo, loudness, pitch,mode, melody, rhythm, harmony, and various formal properties. While it is a popular conception, and sometimes perhaps true, that composers express their present feelings in their compositions (cf. Cook & Dibben, this volume; Simonton, this volume), a more plausible view is that composers try to use various structural factors in order to achieve certain intended expressions, different in different works, with little or no direct connection to their present feelings. ‘A composer .