Musical emotions

According to economic statistics, music is a market more developed than the pharmaceutic industry. Musical practices have a huge importance in any kind of society, as well called industrial than called traditional. How music give emotions, is the question asked in cognitve psychology, wich took care for a long time about treatment of musical informations by the brain. Music create psychological and physiological states that surpass sounds or sonorous architecture composing the music.

Perception of Music is not only subjective
A common wrong idea would that the perception of music is only subjective and depends only of the person listening (own experiences, associations of ideas, events, tastes...). Indeed, during a concert, if this idea was right, some would cry, other laugh... Nobody never seen that of course. Because, a musical work have an enough strong expressive architecture for impose the same feeling to many different persons listening it.

This power of creating common emotions, confer to music a strength of social cohesion, essential in almost all Cultures of the World.

An experience
Per exemple, this experience is very interesting: On a computer, an ideogram is shown to a person who don't know it's real meaning (in chinese or japanese). This person must look the ideogram. The first music broadcasted is sad. After, it's asked to this person to say if ths ideogram is sad or happy (if this ideogram evokes sadness or happiness). In a second time, the same ideogram is show on the screen but the music brodcasted is happy. The same question is asked about the ideogram. For the different persons who done this test, when the music is happy, the ideogram is happy, when the music is sad the ideogram is sad. This experience demonstrates the possibility of the music to create the same emotion in different listeners. This experience is a bit the same than the Koulechov effect in film theories. Lev Koulechov demonstrated that the editing is the meaning of a movie. He done a short movie : a man is looking the camera, he is inexpressive. After this first sequence, a bowl of soup is filmed, the first sequence is repeated, but a woman is filmed after, and then the first sequence is repeated again, but a coffin is filmed. So, the sequence of the man is always the same. But audience will say that the first man was hungry, the second one is in love, and the last one is sad... Associations of ideas and pictures create new meanings. For music, is it's influence on feelings that change the perception. The experience shows the same results, done three weeks after with the same persons.

Physiological effects
Analysis of physiological answers to the music is an other way to understand its effects. Goose skins, shivers...

To be continued...

--Saskia Levy 02:03, 24 November 2008 (UTC)