2025/12/15 by Thomas Graves, Tuomas Eerola, Martin Clayton +2 · 2 voices · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Computer Science · Psychology · #Neuroscience and Music Perception #Music and Audio Processing #Emotions and Moral Behavior
paper · doi:10.1177/10298649251385728
Most studies of subjective feeling categories in musical emotion use dimensional or categorical models to describe the different kinds of emotions induced by music. There are several data-driven approaches, of which one example is Zentner and colleagues’ Geneva Emotions in Music Scale (GEMS), which proposes 10 terms which can parsimoniously describe emotional experiences with music. Ethnomusicologists, however, advocate approaches to music and emotion embedded in the cultural concepts of communities, and critiques of psychological approaches as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) throw doubt upon the generalisations of GEMS and similar models due to a generally monocultural participant sample. Such critiques become particularly salient for musical emotion in non-western genres such as qawwālī which have clearly defined affective systems associated with them. This article applies a similar data-driven approach to experiences of musical emotion in qawwālī , the South Asian Sufi music. This article presents two experiments focussing on regular listeners to qawwālī at the shrine of the Sufi Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi. The first experiment seeks to determine which emotion words are most relevant to qawwālī listening by presenting a list of terms for participants to rate, and selecting the terms most often felt with qawwālī . The second compares these emotions using multidimensional scaling (MDS), and uses exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to determine a small number of factors which parsimoniously describe emotional experiences with qawwālī . EFA suggests three factors describing subjective feelings with qawwālī : virtuous feelings, spiritual love and trance.