Background Research

Psychological Background Information

Music, deriving from the Ancient Greek term mousa, meaning muse; is an art form based
around the organization and arrangement of sound and silence in space and time, with use of
elements such as melody, pitch, timbre, harmony, rhythm, tempo and dynamics (Music.). Music, said
to date back to the beginning of human existence, can be traced back as far as cave paintings
depicting people dancing. The earliest musical instruments are said to be 40,000 years old (Orford).
This brings us to ask the question, what is the purpose of music? The purpose of music varies from
artist to artist and has developed over the ages due to preference change, and cultural and religious
importance. The primary purpose of music is to entertain, however it is also to communicate. In 1400
a common western music style was polyphony, it was used to reflect god's mind by mimicking the
movement of the universe and the orbit of planets around the sun. It consisted of a collection of
independently moving voices. By the 1600s opera was introduced. It used harmony to follow the
emotional paths of man. By the mid 1700s, the age of Beethoven, Mozart and Bach, music had taken
so many new paths, for the purpose of communicating nationalism, new found freedom and emotion.
Currently music is used for a variety of reasons, such as story telling, expressing emotion or sending a
message (Thomas).
According to Dr. Hauke Egermann, a Belgian music psychologist, there are four main methods
in which humans identify emotions from music. The first method is called learned association and
relates to learning to associate musical patterns with certain emotions based on cultural standards.
For example associating features from a happy song you heard in a movie or tv show to other songs
and recognizing them as happy. Similar to the theme song from the tv show 'Friends' (Egermann).
Another method includes musical expectations. This is based on learning styles and patterns
in music, a figurative log book of how certain musical patterns play out, built up through experience.
Probabilities of patterns and syntax in a song. An example of this occurrence is when you are listening
to a song for the first time and yet you are still able to anticipate the next move. This creates
expectations. The anticipation of something you enjoy may lead to pleasure, where music that is
unpredictable and has unfamiliar patterns may lead to tension, surprise or arousal (Egermann).
Expressive Emotional Movement refers to the association of musical elements to human
behaviours related to certain emotions. Characteristics of a happy person include moving quickly,
being louder, having a lighter, brighter tone and higher pitch to their voice. Similarly music that is often
perceived as happy usually has a faster tempo, is louder, is higher pitched and has a lighter tone.
However the behaviour of someone who is sad is often slower, they're often quieter and their voices
are often lower in pitch with a dull tone. This is the same for sad music (Egermann).

The final method discussed by Dr. Egermann is activating sound. When emotions are felt it
activates the sympathetic nervous system and affects the production of sound by means of vocal
musculature. This causes sounds made by someone who is happy to be higher in pitch and similarly
those listing to a happy song can recognize these traits, sympathize and feel happy too (Egermann).