A cross-cultural investigation of the perception of emotion in music: Psychophysical and cultural cues

Studies of the link between music and emotion have primarily focused on lis teners' sensitivity to emotion in the music of their own culture. This sens itivity may reflect listeners' enculturation to the conventions of their cu lture's tonal system. However, it may also reflect responses to psychophysi cal dimensions of sound that are independent of musical experience. A model of listeners' perception of emotion in music is proposed in which emotion in music is communicated through a combination of universal and cultural cu es. Listeners may rely on either of these cues, or both, to arrive at an un derstanding of musically expressed emotion. The current study addressed the hypotheses derived from this model using a cross-cultural approach. The fo llowing questions were investigated: Can people identify the intended emoti on in music from an unfamiliar tonal system! If they can, is their sensitiv ity to intended emotions associated with perceived changes in psychophysica l dimensions of music! Thirty Western listeners rated the degree of joy, sa dness, anger, and peace in 12 Hindustani raga excerpts (field recordings ob tained in North India). In accordance with the raga-rasa system, each excer pt was intended to convey one of the four moods or "rasas" that corresponde d to the four emotions rated by listeners. Listeners also provided ratings of four psychophysical variables: tempo, rhythmic complexity, melodic compl exity, and pitch range. Listeners were sensitive to the intended emotion in ragas when that emotion was joy, sadness, or anger. Judgments of emotion w ere significantly related to judgments of psychophysical dimensions, and, i n some cases, to instrument timbre. The findings suggest that listeners are sensitive to musically expressed emotion in an unfamiliar tonal system, an d that this sensitivity is facilitated by psychophysical cues.