Affection of Music towards Emotion - Essay Example

Affection of Music towards Emotion Music has been an important element in my life ever since I learnt instruments when I was in primary school. As a child, I loved listening to the French instructional program series. Even though I did not understand a single word, yet I was always enthralled not because of the thrill of the human speech sounds, but because of the music they accompanied. Just speech sounds did not inspire me unless they are enhanced and lent meaning to by the music. The importance of music can be estimated from the fact that it is music through which we wake up at the turn of our alarm clocks, we listen to music while driving to work to get in the high mood as well as on our way back from work to home to regain the lost energy and recharge ourselves. Since my early childhood, I have found music very interesting. The melody being played can be different while playing with distinct emotions, from my experiences. Also, throughout the continuous observation of pianist playing rhythm of music with different speed and emotion which affect the listeners’ emotion also (Hazel, 2010), I found that the link between music and emotion is absolutely captivating. Music is a very important feature in all sorts of industries ranging from film industry to advertising and marketing. Its power to cause emotional effect and enhance viewer arousal makes it widely useable. Previous research that has attempted to study the effect of music on behavior and emotions has generated mixed results. Music emanating from any source has the power to give us chills and make us cheer up or cry. Music not only affects our mood, but the emotional appeal produced by music is so overpowering that it also affects the way we see visual images. In an experiment done by Joydeep Bhattacharya and Nidhya Logeswaran from the University of London, 30 people were exposed to a series of sad or happy musical excerpts (Changizi 2009). After they had listened to the snippets, the research participants were shown a face’s photograph. Some research participants were given the photograph depicting the smiling face of a person whereas other research participants were provided with a photograph depicting a neutral or sad face. When asked to rate the face’s emotional content upon a 7-point Likert scale in which 1 stood for ‘extremely sad’ and 7 stood for ‘extremely happy’, the researchers found strong impact of the excerpts listened to previously upon the faces’ emotional ratings by the research participants. Happy music exaggerated the happy appeal of the face in the photograph and sad music made the sad appeal of the face even sadder and the researchers observed a similar effect for the neutral faces. The conclusion that can be drawn from this experiment is that emotions produced by music are cross-modal in effect and have the tendency to transcend from the sensory system to other systems. Advertisers use music to enrich their messages. Music is arguably the single most emotionally stimulating element in the entire commercial. Music plays the role of a potential peripheral cue that successfully escorts the audience from the normal to an emotional state. The notions of peripheral and central processing are suggestive of the fact that such peripheral cues as music may lead the audience to an affirmative and approving attitude with respect to the advertisement and successively, transfer and direct the very positive attitude towards the brand (Stout & Leckenby 1988). Music is used as a persuasive tool to stimulate the mood of the audience to make them think in the direction desired or intended by the producers of a commercial, drama, song, or movie. Producers indirectly tell the audience to think in a certain way by playing a certain kind of music in the background while a scene is projected on the screen. For example, when soft and sweet music is played in the background of a young lady caressing her hair sitting all alone on the screen, the audience is made to think of the beauty of youth, the delicacy of a young lady, and the purity and sweetness of love. However, when the same scene is displayed with a bad music getting louder and louder, the audience is made to think that the young lady is thinking about suicide and would commit suicide when the music reaches its peak note. These tactics are particularly used to create the effect of horror in the horror movies; when a child is walking step by step downstairs into a deserted dark basement, the music gets louder with every step the child takes till it reaches its peak, thus making the audience expect something bad to happen to the child right there and then, and then suddenly the music bombards and there is either the calamity or a surprise in disguise. These reactions in the audience partly originate in the indirect influence of music on the emotional responses and feelings of the audience. Zimny and Weidenfeller (1962) determined the presence of a relationship between music and the listeners’ emotional response as the researchers found that exciting music increases the subjects’ emotional response by changing their heart rate and skin response, that are considered as emotional response’s two different physiological manifestations. Gabrielsson and Juslin (1996) gathered data from 9 professional musicians’ performances. The musicians performed short melodies incorporating the use of a variety of musical instruments while the listeners were required to rate their emotional expression and note down their physical characteristics. The research concluded in the findings that the emotions of musicians can affect the listeners which means the performing of surprising rhythms by the musicians affected the musical emotion. This means that music is not only connected to the listeners but also to the musicians themselves. Messages embedded in and conveyed through the music have a stronger affective influence on the listener than cognitive. For example, the anxiety level of a listener is decreased upon hearing music that is calm and sedate. The major and minor modes of the structural elements of music have a happy and sad effect on the mood of the listener. Studies have found music to directly influence the behavior of the customers at the very time of purchase. In an experiment, variations in the background music played in a store significantly impacted the amount of money spent on shopping by the customers, the pace of customers’ shopping behavior, and the amount of money spent beyond the original expectations of the customers (Milliman, l982). In ‘Music: A Link between Cognition and Emotion’ by Carol L. Krumhansl, Krumhansl (2002) asserts that emotion in music comes from the personal experiences of the very person who plays the music. In ‘Investigating Emotion with Music: An fMRI Study’, Koelsch et al. (2006) have found that the types of music influence the brain in such a way that it generates the feelings of happiness and sadness using the data contained in the brain. Lastly, in ‘The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music’ by Jenefer Robinson, Robinson (1994) says that the expression of music is related to the arousal of emotion in the listener. The purpose of my research was to find out the connection between music and emotion. In this research project, I was particularly interested in finding out the effect of emotion on a musician’s ability to play music and the effect of musical notes on the emotions of the listeners. In addition to that, I was also interested in finding out the relationship between the emotional effect on the listeners and the categories of music that they listen. In order to find answer of this question, I carried out a survey to find out the categories of music people listen when they have different emotions. For this, I asked this question from a group of 20 different people of different age groups and backgrounds. The reason why I took the information from so diverse research participants was that I wanted to have as much variation in them as possible. This would allow me to have the perception of people from all sorts of cultures and backgrounds. This was also important because music has different cultural manifestations and music of the East is considerably different from the music of the West. Likewise, classical music is very much different from the modern and pop music. Moreover, I consulted a variety of literary sources to deepen my knowledge of music. For example, I looked into ‘Music, Emotion, and Autobiographical Memory: Theyre Playing Your Song’ written by Mathew D. Schulkind to have a clear understanding of music on the self-emotion and affects. Furthermore, I carried out a deep study of the journal article ‘Emotional Expression in Music Performance: Between the Performer’s Intention and the Listener’s Experience’ written by ALF Gabrielsson and Patrik N. Juslin to develop a thorough understanding of the effect of the intentions of a musician upon the sort of music he/she produces as well as on the emotions of the listeners. It took me a total of 4 weeks to do the survey and research the journal articles that I mentioned above in the first 2 weeks. For the last 2 weeks, I compiled all the data and research together and generated how musical emotion affects players and listeners. After 4 weeks of continuous research and getting the data together, I was able to find out the results. As I was hoping to find out how emotions affect the feeling of music and how the inner mind of the listeners appeals to respond to the various types of music; from this research, I have strengthened my knowledge of and curiosity towards music and its amazing connection with emotions. Gathering all the information I found so far, I reach the conclusion that music has a great influence on our everyday life as well as our emotions. Hazel (2010) carried out research to find out the distribution of tones in 7500 western classical melodies in both major and minor keys. The findings of the research revealed that major key and minor key of music do affect the feeling of the music, while major keys tend to have an excited emotion and minor keys tend to have blue feelings. The research also led to the conclusion that the rhythm of music also has huge influence on music. For example, fast and loud melody represents happiness while slow and quiet represents sadness. I used this article to find out the effect of rhythm and speed on the feeling of music. Krumhansl (2002), at the Department of Psychology in Cornell University, collected data based on the interplay of different musical instruments. Findings of the research showed that music cognition and music emotion are closely linked, and that musical emotion changes when the intensity and quality of the music changes. Krumhansl (2002) showed how the structure of music is related to dynamic aspect. Moreover, Krumhansl (2002) showed how the background and experiences of the musicians can affect the emotions that listeners gather from the musicians’ perspective. This finding led me to the conclusion that musicians’ own experiences can affect the feeling of musical expressions. It is very important to have this information for supporting emotional changes in music. Some of the categories of music that I found as a result of my research were classical, jazz, and pop. Music can also be categorized into the types of musical instruments that are used to produce music. Such types of music include but are not limited to tabla music, violin music, piano music, and guitar music. Music can be broadly classified into slow music and fast music. Most of the modern music belongs in the second category i.e. fast music. My research led me to the conclusion that music has a very strong effect on the emotions of the listeners. The effect is so strong that the mood of a sad person can be improved by making him/her listen a happy musical piece. The reason why we find romantic music being played in restaurants and dining rooms is that they have a romantic appeal and have an enlightening effect on the mood. I also found out how music is used in advertising, commercials, and soaps to guide the emotions of the audience. I learnt that retailers and shops also use music to influence the purchasing decisions of the customers. This is the reason why we find latest songs played in the background in the fast food restaurants like McDonalds and KFC. References Changizi, M 2009, Why Does Music Make Us Feel? Scientific American, [online] Available at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-music-make-us-fe/ [Accessed 8 April 2015]. Gabrielsson, A, and Juslin, PN 1996, Emotional Expression In Music Performance: Between The Performers Intention And The Listeners Experience, Psychology of Music, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 68-91. Hazel M., 2010. Songs in the key of life: What makes music emotional? New Scientist, [online] Available at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18367-songs-in-the-key-of-life-what-makes-music-emotional.html#.VSXNe_QSiKY [Accessed 8 April 2015]. Koelsch, S. et al. 2006, Investigating Emotion With Music: An Fmri Study, Human Brain Mapping, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 239-250. Krumhansl, CL 2002, Music: A Link Between Cognition And Emotion, Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 45-50. Milliman, RE 1982, Using background music to affect the behavior of supermarket shoppers, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 46, No. 3, pp. 86-91. Robinson, J 1994, The Expression And Arousal Of Emotion In Music, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 52, No. 1. Schulkind, MD, Laura KH, and David, CR 1999, Music, Emotion, And Autobiographical Memory: They’Re Playing Your Song, Memory & Cognition, Vol. 27, No. 6, pp. 948-955. Stout, PA, and Leckenby, JD 1988, Let the music play: music as a nonverbal element in television commercials, In S. Hecker, and DW, Stewart (Eds.), Nonverbal Communication in Advertising, (pp.207-233), Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Zimny, GH, and Weidenfeller, EW 1962, Effects of Music upon GSR of Children, Child Development, Vol. 33, pp. 891-896. Read More