Tracking musical emotion transfer from composers to listeners within a cross-classified social framework

Thesis

The role of emotion and social relations in the creation and curation of the arts is vital across cultures and remains an area of great interest in the psychological literature. Whilst interpersonal emotion transfer is well attested (Parkinson, 2011, 2019), less studied is the emotion transfer that can take place through creative expression and arts media without direct contact between persons. Of all the arts, music is recognised to be a particularly effective medium for capturing and conveying emotion between its creators and consumers (Juslin, 2013, 2019). As a result, the music industry is one of the largest and most lucrative among the arts. The actual process of transmitting emotions and intentions is, however, both fundamental to cultural life and fundamentally understudied in psychological science. Much empirical literature has been dedicated to the affective experiences of music listeners, but considerably less attention has been given to composers and their expressions of intention and emotion. The present thesis is thus the first empirical investigation of whether listeners’ affective experiences can be predicted by composers’ affective states and intentions. To conduct this research, I adapted and applied to the musical context experimental paradigms previously developed to examine emotion transfer and inspiration ‘contagion’ in visual art (Pelowski et al., 2018) and creative writing (Thrash et al., 2010, 2017) to understand better what I have called ‘musical emotion transfer’ (MET) from composer to listener. This research is divided into four studies that examine qualitative interview data from composers about whether and how they engage with emotion in their music (Study 1), composers’ individual differences as well as composition-specific affective and creative states (Study 2), expert ratings of composers’ original compositions along evaluative appraisal dimensions (Study 3), and naïve listeners’ traits and state affective responses to composers’ original compositions (Study 4). The results show that composers’ intended and incidental affective states significantly predict listeners’ affective responses to their music, consistent with the mainstream expressionist view of composition as described in the musicological literature and by composers themselves. These findings also explore how specific musical elements are used to effect the transfer of different core dimensions of affect as well as how individual differences of both composers and listeners moderate MET. Finally, the combined predictive utility of these effects for listener sharing intentions along with liking and valuing suggests that MET plays some role in cultural transmission and evolution. The applications of such a social model of MET are discussed in contexts as diverse as ritual, medicine, and marketing with far-ranging implications for what it means ‘to compose music’ and the fundamental importance of human affective expression in the creative process.

Authors: Varga, PJ

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-yrz741qqg
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: musical emotion transfer; inspiration; music listeners; composers; social emotions; expression
• Subjects: Psychology, Experimental; Emotions in music; Interpersonal relations