Muzik Pengaruhi Emosi Anda

Muzik Mampu Ubah Emosi Anda

Influence of Tempo and Rhythmic Unit in Musical Emotion Regulation

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971092/

 

Abstract

This article is based on the assumption of musical power to change the listener's mood. The paper studies the outcome of two experiments on the regulation of emotional states in a series of participants who listen to different auditions. The present research focuses on note value, an important musical cue related to rhythm. The influence of two concepts linked to note value is analyzed separately and discussed together. The two musical cues under investigation are tempo and rhythmic unit. The participants are asked to label music fragments by using opposite meaningful words belonging to four semantic scales, namely “Tension” (ranging from Relaxing to Stressing), “Expressiveness” (Expressionless to Expressive), “Amusement” (Boring to Amusing) and “Attractiveness” (Pleasant to Unpleasant). The participants also have to indicate how much they feel certain basic emotions while listening to each music excerpt. The rated emotions are “Happiness,” “Surprise,” and “Sadness.” This study makes it possible to draw some interesting conclusions about the associations between note value and emotions.

Keywords: emotion regulation, music, note value, tempo, rhythmic unit

1. Introduction

Brain structures and networks related to music processing of many kinds, including music perception, emotion and music, and sensory processing and music, have been discovered by psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists (Hunt, 2015). Recently, there has been an increase of research that relates music and emotion within neuropsychology (see e.g., Peretz, 2010). Many studies in neuropsychology and music have investigated reactions to specific musical cues (Koelsch and Siebel, 2005), such as melody (Brattico, 2006), harmony including basic dissonance-consonance (Koelsch et al., 2006), modality in terms of major-minor (Mizuno and Sugishita, 2007), rhythm (Samson and Ehrlé, 2003), and musical timbre (Caclin et al., 2006).

This article follows the findings on the assumption of the power of music to regulate the listeners mood (Fernández-Sotos et al., 2015). Indeed, emotion regulation through music is often considered one of the most important functions of music (Saarikallio and Erkkila, 2007). The two experiments presented in this paper are part of a project named “Improvement of the Elderly Quality of Life and Care through Smart Emotion Regulation” (Castillo et al., 2014b, 2016; Fernández-Caballero et al., 2014). The project's general objective is to find solutions for improving the quality of life and care of aging people who wish to continue living at home with the aid of emotion elicitation techniques. Cameras and body sensors are used for monitoring the aging adults' facial and gestural expression (Lozano-Monasor et al., 2014), activity and behavior (Castillo et al., 2014a), as well as for acquiring relevant physiological data (Costa et al., 2012; Fernández-Caballero et al., 2012; Martínez-Rodrigo et al., 2016). By using advanced monitoring techniques, the older people's emotions should be inferred and recognized. On the other hand, music, color and light are the proposed stimulating means to regulate their emotions toward a “positive” mood in accordance with the guidelines of a physician.

This paper introduces an initial step of the project that focuses on specific musical cues related to note value. Note value is the duration of a note, or the relationship of a note's duration to the measure. To sum up, the current paper introduces some hints in the projects overall aim to investigate the listeners changes in emotional state through playing different auditions that have been composed under defined parameters of note value. This way, it will be possible to conclude if and how the analyzed musical cues are able to induce positive and negative emotions in the listener.

In this sense, the article describes a couple of experiments that are aimed at detecting the individual influential issues related to two basic components of note value, that is, tempo and rhythmic unit. Tempo (time in Italian) is defined as the speed of a composition's rhythm, and it is measured according to beats per minute. Beat is the regular pulse of music which may be dictated by the rise or fall of the hand or baton of the conductor, by a metronome, or by the accents in music. On the other hand, a rhythmic unit is defined as a durational pattern that synchronizes with a pulse or pulses on the underlying metric level.

Tempo and rhythm have been studied in many previous works as broad concepts. As far as we know, it is the first time that tempo and rhythmic unit are studied as intrinsic parameters of note vale. In this paper, the individual influence of tempo and rhythmic unit are experimentally studied. In addition, from the results of both experiments carried out, the two parameters are related in their emotional influence. Lastly, this article established a basis for future study of the combined effect of both parameters.

 

 

6. Conclusions

This article has described the first steps in the use of music to regulate affect in a running project denominated “Improvement of the Elderly Quality of Life and Care through Smart Emotion Regulation.” The objective of the project is to find solutions for improving the quality of life and care of aging adults living at home by using emotion elicitation techniques. This paper has focused on emotion regulation through some musical parameters.

The proposal has studied the participants' changes in emotional states through listening different auditions. The present research has focused on the musical cue of note value through two basic components of the parameter note value, namely, tempo and rhythmic unit to detect the individual preferences of the listeners. The two experiments carried out have been discussed in detail to provide an acceptable manner of using both parameters to be able to understand how to move from negative to positive emotional states (and vice versa), which is one key of our current project.

The results obtained in relation to tempo and its influence on emotional perception are in line with previous research works. The results confirm that tempo clearly determines whether music sounds sad or happy. Moreover, Stressing, Expressive and Amusing are the words gotten from a high tempo, whilst the opposite terms Relaxing, Expressionless and Boring are obtained for a low tempo. This suggests that the tempo modulates the arousal value of the emotions. On the other hand, the effect of rhythmic unit, which has not been studied in musical emotion regulation, has shown significant outcomes in the same direction than tempo. Indeed, sixteenth notes and 150 bpm are closely related, as well as 90 bpm and whole and half notes.

Lastly, the paper has established a basis for future study of the combined effect of both parameters so to provide a finer tuning of the emotion regulation capabilities of the proposed system.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971092/

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