Why Does Music Express Only Some Emotions? a Test of a Philosophical Theory

Abstract

Two experiments empirically tested a philosophical theory propounded by Kivy (1980, 1990) and Putnam (1987) about what distinguishes emotions that can or cannot be readily expressed by music (“musical relevance”). A unidimensional scaling was performed for 183 emotion terms. Four subsets of 17 words were extracted, the subsets being positively valenced, musically relevant, positive irrelevant, negative relevant, and positive irrelevant. The musical relevance of each word was judged directly by college professors, and indirectly by students, using a sentence frame methodology. The results favored the theory that musically relevant emotions are ones that are general, mood based, and do not require conscious knowledge of the causal source.