Music Improvisation and Instinctive Emotional Responses (2010)

Undergraduate: Anthony Mazzella

Faculty Advisor: Stephen Anderson
Department: Music

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Through the use of a specific musical stimulus, an explicit emotion can be conveyed to a listener regardless of their experience in music. This explicit emotion is originally initiated by the composer through the use of particular chord changes, then improvised and enhanced upon by a performer, and subsequently internalized and identified by a listener. The emotions selected for this experiment include happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. These were determined to be the six basic human emotions (Ekman 1979) as they are universally recognized via facial expressions across age and culture barriers. This experiment parallels those done previously, with the exception of facial expressions which are replaced by musical intuition. The results suggest that there is little discrepancy between one’s level of formal musical training and their ability to identify emotion through music. Furthermore, some of the emotions listed above, such as sadness (83% accuracy), are suggested to be conveyed more accurately than others, such as disgust (11% accuracy).