2021/03/17 by Neta B. Maimon, Dominique Lamy, Maimon, Neta B. +3
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Diverse Music Education Insights #FOS: Biological sciences #Hearing Loss and Rehabilitation #Multisensory perception and integration #Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC) #Neuroscience and Music Perception
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2103.09709
openalex publication_date 2021/03/17 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Western tonality provides a hierarchy of stability among melodic\nscale-degrees, from the maximally stable tonic to unstable chromatic notes.\nTonal stability has been linked to emotion, yet systematic investigations of\nthe associations between the hierarchy of melodic scale-degrees and perceived\nemotional valence are lacking. Here, we examined such associations in three\nexperiments, in musicians and in non-musicians. We used an explicit task, in\nwhich participants matched probe tones following key-establishing sequences to\nfacial expressions ranging from sad to happy, and an implicit speeded task, a\nvariant of the Implicit Association Test. Stabler scale-degrees were associated\nwith more positive valence in all experiments, for both musicians and\nnonmusicians. This notwithstanding, results significantly differed from those\nof a comparable goodness-of-fit task, suggesting that perceived tonal valence\nis not reducible to tonal fit. Comparisons of the explicit and implicit\nmeasures suggest that associations of tonality and emotional valence may rely\non two distinct mechanisms, one mediated by conceptual musical knowledge and\nconscious decisional processes, the other - largely by non-conceptual and\ninvoluntary processes. The joint experimental paradigms introduced here may\nhelp mapping additional connotative meanings, both emotional and cross-modal,\nembedded in tonal structure, thus suggesting how extra-musical meanings are\nconveyed to listeners through musical syntax.\n