Song & Emotion

 

When we treat sexual selection we shall see that primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably used his voice largely, as does one of the gibbon-apes at the present day, in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing; we may conclude from a widely-spread analogy that this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes, serving to express various emotions, as love, jealousy, triumph, and serving as a challenge to their rivals.

---- Charles Darwin (1871)

 

In East Asia, a majority of popular songs deal with the topic of pain and heartbreak caused by romantic relationships. These popular songs typically employ a verse-chorus form. In this form, the chorus contrasts with the preceding verse (or the preceding transition: pre-chorus) in terms of elevated intensity, which is achieved through changes in lyrical content, sound level, pitch level, rhythmic/textual activity, and/or timbral noise (Capuzzo, 2009; Doll, 2011). Further, the chorus, interspersed between the narrative verses, usually presents the musical climax and the lyrical point of a song (Davis, 1984).

We conducted a series of experiments to examine the emotional responses to the entrance chorus in popular songs. In the first experiment, listeners’ skin conductance responses (SCR) were used to estimate their arousal level. The stimuli were the verse-to-chorus progression of fifteen popular songs. As shown in Figure 1, the average SCR amplitude reached a local maximum at the chorus entrance (Tsai et al., 2014). We also used brain-imaging technology to explore the neural correlates of the rewarding processing of the verse-to-chorus progression.

 

SCR_P

Figure 1. The median curve of SCR amplitude and the result of statistical analysis (p values of t-tests comparing the instant SCR amplitudes with the control condition).

 

I also used brain-imaging technology to analyze the cultural impacts on song appreciation. Figure 2 shows the results of functional connectivity analyses (with the seed in the right posterior superior gyrus) in three listeners during exposure to a lyrical song Myth (sung by 紀曉君). This song mentions the fading tradition of the Puyuma (the Pinuyumayan, Peinan, or Beinan tribe 卑南族), one of the tribal groups of the Taiwanese aborigines. Only Puyuma listener’s medial orbitofrontal cortex functionally connected with the right auditory association cortex. Previous studies have found that the medial orbitofrontal cortex is engaged during aesthetic appreciation of low-arousal music (Trost et al., 2012) and responsible for changing decision thresholds that influence whether information should be expressed in an evaluation (Hughes & Beer, 2012). Our pilot study suggests that the cultural background may have modulatory effects on the self-referential mentation during listening to lyrical songs.

 

CG_TSAI

 

Figure 2. The results of functional connectivity analyses in three listeners during exposure to a lyrical song, which mentions the fading tradition of the Puyuma. Only Puyuma listener’s medial orbitofrontal cortex (indicated by the yellow arrow) functionally connected with the right association auditory cortex.

 

REFERENCES

Capuzzo, G. (2009). Sectional tonality and sectional centricity in rock music. Music Theory Spectrum, 31, 157-174.

Darwin, C. (1871). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray. Volume 1. 1st edition.

Davis, S. (1984). The craft of lyric writing. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books.

Doll, C. (2011). Rockin’ out: Expressive modulation in verse–chorus form. Music Theory Online 17/3, http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.3/mto.11.17.3.doll.html

Hughes, B. L., & Beer, J. S. (2012). Medial orbitofrontal cortex is associated with shifting decision thresholds in self-serving cognition. Neuroimage, 61, 889-98.

Trost, W., Ethofer, T., Zentner, M., & Vuilleumier, P. (2012). Mapping aesthetic musical emotions in the brain. Cerebral Cortex, 22, 2769-83.

Tsai, C. G., Chen, R. S., & Yu, S. P. (2014). Analyzing the verse-chorus form: schema shifts and musical rewards in lyrical-slow songs (in Chinese). Research in Applied Psychology, 61, 239-286.

 

[Home]

 

2015© 蔡振家 Chen-Gia Tsai