Listening to music prompts strong emotional reactions in the listeners but relatively little research has focused on individual differences. The results show that the emotive valence of major and minor is strongly associated with exposure to Western-influenced music and culture, although we cannot exclude the possibility of universality. For melodies, there is strong evidence that greater happiness was reported for those with higher mean pitch (major melodies) than those with lower mean pitch (minor melodies) in only one of the three PNG communities and in both Sydney groups. Bayesian analyses show that, for cadences, there is strong evidence that greater happiness was reported for major than minor in every community except one: the community with minimal exposure to Western-like music. The experiment was repeated by 60 non-musicians and 19 musicians in Sydney, Australia.
One hundred and seventy participants were presented with pairs of major and minor cadences (chord progressions) and melodies, and chose which of them made them happier. Here, we report an experiment conducted in a remote cloud forest region of Papua New Guinea, across several communities with similar traditional music but differing levels of exposure to Western-influenced tonal music. Yet, how pitch and harmony affect our emotions, and to what extent these effects are culturally mediated or universal, is hotly debated. In Western cultures, emotive valence is strongly influenced by major and minor melodies and harmony (chords and their progressions). Music is a vital part of most cultures and has a strong impact on emotions.
We conclude that music evokes emotions through mechanisms that are not unique to music, and that the study of musical emotions could benefit the emotion field as a whole by providing novel paradigms for emotion induction. Thus, we argue that the new framework may guide future research and help to resolve previous disagreements in the field. We show that failure to control for the underlying mechanism may lead to inconsistent or non-interpretable findings. By synthesizing theory and findings from different domains, we are able to provide the first set of hypotheses that can help researchers to distinguish among the mechanisms. We propose that these mechanisms differ regarding such characteristics as their information focus, ontogenetic development, key brain regions, cultural impact, induction speed, degree of volitional influence, modularity, and dependence on musical structure. Here, we present a novel theoretical framework featuring six additional mechanisms through which music listening may induce emotions: (1) brain stem reflexes, (2) evaluative conditioning, (3) emotional contagion, (4) visual imagery, (5) episodic memory, and (6) musical expectancy. Specifically, researchers have studied musical emotions without regard to how they were evoked, or have assumed that the emotions must be based on the "default" mechanism for emotion induction, a cognitive appraisal. We argue that the study of musical emotions has suffered from a neglect of underlying mechanisms. Yet, the notion of musical emotions remains controversial, and researchers have so far been unable to offer a satisfactory account of such emotions.
Research indicates that people value music primarily because of the emotions it evokes.