Specific Emotional Reactions to Tonal Music - Indication of the Adaptive Character of Tonality Recognition

2013

People report that specific emotional reactions accompany the perception of tonal relations during listening to tonal music. These reactions are not restricted only to people living in the Western culture. Different types of tonality which are observed in all musical cultures seem to evoke similarly strong emotional reactions. The emotional response to a tonal sound sequence has been predominantly explained by fulfilling or not the pitch-related expectations of listeners. However, although this model indicates the general mechanism of prediction as the main source of an emotional reaction, it does not explain why the musical pitch-related expectation causes a stronger emotional reaction tha…