The “sound of music” versus the “essence of music”: Dilemmas for music-emotion researchers (Commentary)

Abstract

Potential relationships are explored between contemporary music-emotion science and social and economic trends within dominant industrialised cultures. These trends are argued to have the effect of attempting to degrade those elements of the musical experience which are individual, personal, complex, subtle, unreplicable; whilst accentuating those elements which are communal, public, simple, plain, and replicable. A review of the findings reported in the papers in this special issue demonstrate that factors attributable to individual music events and individual listeners, along with the beliefs and attitudes which listeners bring to the experience, are crucially important in determining the nature and level of emotional response to the music. Any apparently firm statement regarding the emotional effects of music have to be hedged with so many caveats and qualifications as to significantly hinder the prospects for formulaic commercial exploitation of these findings.

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