Researchers have surveyed more than 2,500 people in the United States and China about their emotional responses to these and thousands of other songs from genres including rock, folk, jazz, classical, marching band, experimental, and heavy metal.
The upshot? The subjective experience of music across cultures can be mapped within at least 13 overarching feelings: Amusement, joy, eroticism, beauty, relaxation, sadness, dreaminess, triumph, anxiety, scariness, annoyance, defiance, and feeling pumped up.
“Imagine organizing a massively eclectic music library by emotion and capturing the combination of feelings associated with each track. That’s essentially what our study has done,” says lead author Alan Cowen, a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.
“We have rigorously documented the largest array of emotions that are universally felt through the language of music,” says study senior author Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology.
Music and Emotions Across Cultures
While both US and Chinese study participants identified similar emotions—such as feeling fear hearing the Jaws movie score—they differed on whether those emotions made them feel good or bad.“People from different cultures can agree that a song is angry, but can differ on whether that feeling is positive or negative,” says Cowen, noting that positive and negative values, known in psychology parlance as “valence,” are more culture-specific.
Furthermore, across cultures, study participants mostly agreed on general emotional characterizations of musical sounds, such as angry, joyful, and annoying. But their opinions varied on the level of “arousal,” which refers in the study to the degree of calmness or stimulation evoked by a piece of music.
For the study, more than 2,500 people in the United States and China were recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk’s crowdsourcing platform.
First, volunteers scanned thousands of videos on YouTube for music evoking a variety of emotions. From those, the researchers built a collection of audio clips to use in their experiments.
Getting Pumped up or Feeling Down
Using statistical analyses, the researchers arrived at 13 overall categories of experience that were preserved across cultures and found to correspond to specific feelings, such as being “depressing” or “dreamy.”To ensure the accuracy of these findings in a second experiment, nearly 1,000 people from the United States and China rated over 300 additional Western and traditional Chinese music samples that were specifically intended to evoke variations in valence and arousal. Their responses validated the 13 categories.
Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” made people feel energized. The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” pumped them up. Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” evoked sensuality and Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s “Somewhere over the Rainbow” elicited joy.
Cowen and Keltner previously conducted a study in which they identified 27 emotions in response to evocative YouTube video clips. For Cowen, who comes from a family of musicians, studying the emotional effects of music seemed like the next logical step.