Welcome back to the last of these modules. And today we're gonna talk about music, emotion, and a little bit about cultural differences. And let's begin by talking about emotion, and this will be lesson 1. And of course we're all familiar with what emotion is. Here are six characteristic emotions expressed in the faces of different individuals. Anger, sadness, happiness fear, disgust, surprise. And I said at the beginning of the course that emotion was perhaps the essence of music, and, in a sense, why we like it. It generates in us, when we hear music, an emotional response of some sort, and that's obviously part of our attraction to it. And the question is, why is that? Why is that? How does emotion get conveyed in music? Before we get to that, let's talk a little bit about the difficulty people have in thinking about emotion. And by people I'm really talking about cognitive neuroscientists who are trying to study emotion in some neuroscientific way. And I think you can see from this diagram, which is one of the ways in which people categorize, or neuroscientists, cognitive neuroscientists categorize emotion, that it's kind of a messy business. So a typical way of categorizing emotions is in terms of their valence, which is on this axis, and valence means whether the emotion elicits in us a positive or a negative sense, an attractive sense or an unattractive sense. The other axis here is arousal. And arousal just means the state of bodily activity, or potential bodily activity, that defines being in that emotional condition. So on the one hand you can be sleepy, tired, droopy. On the other hand, you can be astonished, alarmed, afraid. And these axes of valence and arousal are a typical way of categorizing emotion for a neuroscientist. But you can see that there is a problem here, and it's a problem that's very much present in trying to deal with this issue in music. In that there are a whole bunch of different emotions that are positive, and there are a whole bunch of different emotional states that are negative, whose valence is in that sense opposite. So how is one to deal with that? How are the subtleties of emotion going to be expressed in music and how can they be studied in that way, when the cognitive neuroscientists who are studying emotion have a lot of difficulty themselves even in categorizing emotions, in a way that allows a simple straight forward analysis? There are techniques, of course, for doing this in psychophysics, in the way in which cognitive neuroscientists study emotion. You're probably familiar with the general idea of a polygraph, a lie detector, which is a series of physiological assessments of your bodily state. Your galvanic skin response, which is a measure of the sweatiness of your palms, for example, your heart rate, your breathing rate, your blood pressure. All of these are measures that are straightforward measures that characterize different emotional states. But they don't track very readily to these varieties of emotions that we're all familiar with, and that are evident in the facial expressions of these individuals. This brings me back to the point of how music conveys emotion. So these individuals, I presume, are actors, and actors are conveying the emotional states that you see listed here by their facial expressions. So, if they're good actors, you are very aware of the emotional state that they're in. And you respond to it by association when you watch a good movie, for example, and the actor is conveying an emotion, you respond to it. And the crowd in the movie theater brings out their Kleenex when the heroine dies, or whatever it might be, the emotion's conveyed in that way by imitation. So emotion conveyed by imitation is not limited, of course, to facial expressions, although that's an obvious way in which it happens. Imitation can be conveyed by not only the polygraphic measurements that I just talked about but also other aspects of your demeanor. Your bodily state, are you in a slumped over state that suggests a low state of arousal or one of the emotions associated with that, or are you in a lively state that's associated with quite different emotions? So there are a whole variety of ways in which an actor or any of us can convey emotion in the normal course of social interactions. But these are generally speaking imitative. We imitate, either by conscious acting, or just by the condition that we happen to be in. We imitate by bodily expression, facial expression, the way in which we walk, are we walking slowly, shuffling, or are we walking in a lively peppy manner? All these things convey the emotion, and it makes good sense that music would be conveyed in the same general way. And indeed this seems to be the case as I mentioned before. So here again is this snippet of the Beethoven sonata that I showed you in an earlier module, and I made the point then, and I just reiterate it now, that there are a variety of aspects of the music, and you can see that these aspects are all ways of conveying emotion. So the music has an intensity. It's played loudly or softly. The music has a tempo. It's played rapidly or slowly, as in a dirge. The music has a rhythm. It has a slow, steady rhythm that's subdued, or it has a rapid, syncopated rhythm with a whole variety of variations that indicate states of excitement. So all of these are imitative. They basically imitate the emotion in that music, in that state, would have. So what's left out here so far, is the tones employed. This is of course what we've been talking about in the main. And the extension of these imitative, rather obvious, imitative ways of conveying emotion in music through intensity, emotion, and rhythm extend to the tones employed, and that's what we're gonna be talking about today. So to get across an emotion in music, the idea would be that you do that by imitating the tones that are used in the emotional state in speech and vocalization. Again, it doesn't have to be lexical speech, it can be any vocalization that has tonality, as we've discussed before. So the theme that I'm gonna turn to now is how tones are used to express emotion by imitating the emotional state and the effect of that emotional state on the vocalization that an individual is expressing.
