2009/01/01 by Vladimir J. Konečni · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Computer Science · Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Neuroscience and Music Perception #Music and Audio Processing #Musicology and Musical Analysis #Sadness #Mode (computer interface) #Major and minor #Counterintuitive #Psychology #Minor (academic) #Prosody #Cognitive psychology #History #Linguistics #Epistemology #Social psychology #Philosophy #Humanities #Computer science
paper · pdf · doi:10.18061/1811/36604
openalex publication_date 2009/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
The work of The fact that the authors' explanation in terms of the emotional similarities of the minor mode with the Sturm und Drang attributes (other than "sadness") is not wholly convincing in music-historical terms does not diminish the importance of the finding. However, there is still no resolution of the central psychological conundrum of why the minor mode is generally associated with "sadness." And it is unclear why the authors drew on speech prosody rather than human emotion-driven and emotion-expressing movement for their tempo observations. There are other aspects of the data that require further exploration. One is the differential distribution of the associations of various tempo markings with mode across the periods of the common-practice era. Another is the 3 : 1 preponderance of allegro over adagio in the authors' search of 50,000 tracks in the ClassicsOnline.com database and the possibility that this ratio is a partial consequence of the psychological implications of the sonata form that were intuitively understood and used by composers.