title: The role of emotion in musical improvisation: an analysis of structural features.
abstract: One of the primary functions of music is to convey emotion, yet how music accomplishes this task remains unclear. For example, simple correlations between mode (major vs. minor) and emotion (happy vs. sad) do not adequately explain the enormous range, subtlety or complexity of musically induced emotions. In this study, we examined the structural features of unconstrained musical improvisations generated by jazz pianists in response to emotional cues. We hypothesized that musicians would not utilize any universal rules to convey emotions, but would instead combine heterogeneous musical elements together in order to depict positive and negative emotions. Our findings demonstrate a lack of simple correspondence between emotions and musical features of spontaneous musical improvisation. While improvisations in response to positive emotional cues were more likely to be in major keys, have faster tempos, faster key press velocities and more staccato notes when compared to negative improvisations, there was a wide distribution for each emotion with components that directly violated these primary associations. The finding that musicians often combine disparate features together in order to convey emotion during improvisation suggests that structural diversity may be an essential feature of the ability of music to express a wide range of emotion.
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America.
authors.forename: Malinda J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: McPherson
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America; Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America.
authors.forename: Monica
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lopez-Gonzalez
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America.
authors.forename: Summer K
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Rankin
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America; Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America.
authors.forename: Charles J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Limb
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009146:Music; D055815:Young Adult