Music:Culture in music cognition
From Arcthon
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_in_music_cognition
- Culture** in music cognition refers to the impact that a person's culture has on their music cognition, including their preferences, **emotion** recognition, and musical memory. Musical preferences are biased toward culturally familiar musical traditions beginning in infancy, and adults' classification of the emotion of a musical piece depends on both culturally-specific and universal structural features.[1][2] Additionally, individuals' musical memory abilities are greater for culturally familiar music than for culturally unfamiliar music.[3][4] The sum of these effects makes culture a powerful influence in music cognition.
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Emotion Recognition
The cue-redundancy model of emotion recognition in music differentiates between universal, structural auditory cues and culturally-bound, learned auditory cues (see schematic below).[2]
Psychophysical cues
Structural cues that span all musical traditions include dimensions such as pace (tempo), loudness, and timbre.[9] Fast tempo, for example, is typically associated with happiness, regardless of a listener's cultural background.
Culturally-bound cues
Culture-specific cues rely on knowledge of the conventions in a particular musical tradition.[2] A particular timbre may be interpreted to reflect one emotion by Western listeners and another emotion by Eastern listeners.[10]
Cue-redundancy model
According to the cue-redundancy model, individuals exposed to music from their own cultural tradition utilize both psychophysical and culturally-bound cues in identifying emotionality.[9] Conversely, perception of intended emotion in unfamiliar music relies solely on universal, psychophysical properties.[2] Japanese listeners accurately categorize angry, joyful, and happy musical excerpts from familiar traditions (Japanese and Western samples) and relatively unfamiliar traditions (Hindustani).[2] Simple, fast melodies receive joyful ratings from these participants; simple, slow samples receive sad ratings, and loud, complex excerpts are perceived as angry.[2] Strong relationships between emotional judgments and structural acoustic cues suggest the importance of universal musical properties in categorizing unfamiliar music.[2]
When both Korean and American participants judged the intended emotion of Korean folksongs, the American group’s identification of happy and sad songs was equivalent to levels observed for Korean listeners.[9] Surprisingly, Americans exhibited greater accuracy in anger assessments than the Korean group. The latter result implies cultural differences in anger perception occur independently of familiarity, while the similarity of American and Korean happy and sad judgments indicate the role of universal auditory cues in emotional perception.[9]
Categorization of unfamiliar music varies with intended emotion.[2][10] Timbre mediates Western listeners’ recognition of angry and peaceful Hindustani songs.[10] Flute timbre supports the detection of peace, whereas string timbre aids anger identification. Happy and sad assessments, on the other hand, rely primarily on relatively “low-level” structural information such as tempo. Both low-level cues (e.g., slow tempo) and timbre aid in the detection of peaceful music, but only timbre cued anger recognition.[10] Communication of peace, therefore, takes place at multiple structural levels, while anger seems to be conveyed nearly exclusively by timbre. Similarities between aggressive vocalizations and angry music (e.g., roughness) may contribute to the salience of timbre in anger assessments.[11]
Complexity
Because musical complexity is a psychophysical dimension, the cue-redundancy model predicts that complexity is perceived independently of experience. However, South African and Finnish listeners assign different complexity ratings to identical African folk songs.[12] Thus, the cue-redundancy model may be overly simplistic in its distinctions between structural feature detection and cultural learning, at least in the case of complexity.
Repetition
When listening to music from within one’s own cultural tradition, repetition plays a key role in emotion judgments. American listeners who hear classical or jazz excerpts multiple times rate the elicited and conveyed emotion of the pieces as higher relative to participants who hear the pieces once.[13]
Methodological limitations
Methodological limitations of previous studies preclude a complete understanding of the roles of psychophysical cues in emotion recognition. Divergent mode and tone cues elicit “mixed affect,” demonstrating the potential for mixed emotional percepts.[14] Use of dichotomous scales (e.g., simple happy/sad ratings) may mask this phenomenon, as these tasks require participants to report a single component of a multidimensional affective experience. [edit]
