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9. Emotional Responses:
Arousal Mechanisms
Patrik Juslin has developed a framework for emotional arousal of music. He has identified eight distinct mechanisms that in some way invokes emotion in us when we listen to music, corresponding to the letters in the acronym BRECVEMA. From a philosophical perspective many of these lie quite far outside the domain of the music itself and instead draw much more on the listeners subjective circumstances, so they have historically not been investigated much. However, I believe they are all correct and that it is important to make the mechanisms and the differences between them more known in order to prevent misunderstanding. Juslin makes very compelling arguments for each mechanism as well as their position in an order that corresponds to how early each mechanism evolved with the human brain throughout evolution. It starts with our oldest brain reflexes that we share with other animals and goes toward the most recent parts of the brain that makes us human. I will not go through them in detail in this philosophical framework, only mention each briefly. The ones that are most important for a philosophical account of how music works from music’s perspective are the C, M and A.
Music-Dependent Mechanisms
We have actually already seen the essence of properties that gives rise to the C, which stands for Emotional Contagion, in the last chapter. There we only looked at what emotions we could perceive in music and identified five basic emotions. Here we basically add the psychological mechanism of becoming “infected” with one emotion when perceived within another entity, be it human, animal or piece of music. It’s important to state that this is only one mechanism of arousing emotion among others, not the only one. For example, it may be a key mechanism to explain how we feel happy when listening to “happy music,” but it might not be sufficient to explain why we enjoy listening to “sad music.” This is the notorious philosophical “sad music problem,” and for more extensive discussions on it see Juslin 2019: 499-504 and Davies 1994: 307-20. The essence of this mechanism also shows up in Davies’ work as what he calls the “mirroring response” (Davies 1994: 279). That way of framing it entails a bigger role of our consciousness, even if the “response” is of a more automatic and not intentional sort.
Musical Expectancy is an effect of music working on the Structural level which we will see in the next chapter 10. Chapter 11 then goes through the valance of that structure of what it means when we listen to it consciously. The mechanism of Musical expectancy goes hand in hand with that meaning, only framing it from the perspective of how we form expectations of how the music will continue based upon its previous statements, and how the music then fulfills or violates those expectations. Leonard B. Meyer was the first to introduce this way of conceptualizing music with the help of Gestalt psychology in his hugely influential treatise “Music and Emotion” in 1956. He describes our response to music in terms of expectations, ambiguity, uncertainty and surprise, and connects musical meaning to those responses. We will come back and look closer at this in the next chapter. However, Juslin is skeptical that the mechanism actually causes emotional arousal in listeners rather than just being a system of perceiving emotion or purely musical properties within music (“qualia”). This system, a ”sonic play,” would instead be a more cognitive result of an attentive, focused way of listening to music, which we are concerned with in our framework. The conflict can be consolidated if Meyer is taken in a more general sense than purely for emotional response. In Meyer’s own words:
“Once it is recognized that affective experience is just as dependent upon intelligent cognition as conscious intellection, that both involve perception, taking account of, envisaging, and so forth, then thinking and feeling need not be viewed as polar opposites but as different manifestations of a single psychological process. There is no diametric opposition, no inseparable gulf, between the affective and the intellectual responses made to music.” (Meyer 1954: 39)
Finally Aesthetic Judgement was added as the final part to the BRECVEMA framework and includes a very conscious way of emotion-invoking. When we evaluate music in relation to our own preferences, we will experience a range of emotions following that evaluation. And to make it really difficult there is also a range of sources of preferences, some of which overlap with the other arousal mechanisms as well! (like perceived expression and emotion arousal)
All Mechanisms
A short introduction of the other mechanisms follows here, with quotations from Juslin (2019: 259-60):
Brain Stem Reflex: “a hardwired attention response to subjectively “extreme” values of basic acoustic features, such as volume and speed.” We have a deep system in our nervous system on a special line for our attention for such extreme events. The feeling of awe before something great, if only in scope (meaning volume for music), like the ending pounding chords of a Beethoven symphony, definitely connects to this basic instinct.
Rhythmic Entrainment: “a gradual adjustment of an internal body rhythm, such as heart rate, towards an external rhythm in the music.” As stated in chapter 7, I’m hesitant about a strong version of this mechanism, but am willing to accept a weaker one.
Evaluative Conditioning: “a regular pairing of a piece of music and other positive or negative stimuli leading to a conditioned association.” This mechanism technically lies outside of the music itself. It charges music with an emotion depending on the external circumstances in which we are exposed to it, but that emotion will nevertheless be real and potentially powerful. For example listening to a certain type of music while hanging out with friends regularly in a period of our lives could condition us so that the same music will invoke the same emotions from those social situations even when they are not present. It doesn’t even have to be social situations – as long as an emotional valence is present in a situation (for whatever reason) and music is regularly paired with that situation, the valence could attach itself to the music alone, as it were.
Contagion: “an internal “mimicry” of the perceived voice-like emotional expression of the music.” See above.
Visual Imagery: “inner images of an emotional character conjured up by the listener through a metaphorical mapping of the musical structure.” In chapter 13 we will see how extra-musical context can act as guidance for our imagination to go in certain directions, and an emotional effect from that will depend on this mechanism. The imagination is free to go where it wants to even without special triggers, but it will use the same mechanism.
Episodic Memory: “a conscious recollection of a particular event from the listener’s past that is “triggered” by the music.” This seems very similar to Evaluative conditioning, but it concerns a specific memory rather than only a general emotional response. The emphasis is on episodic memory which is different from both the conditioning we saw earlier as well as semantic memory (Juslin 2019: 317). It works more effectively the stronger the emotional value is of the memory. Both Evaluative conditioning and Episodic memory account for how previous exposure to certain music informs and forms our feelings for it presently and are thus concerned more with the listener and the situation rather than the actual music itself, even if they are both some of the most common and powerful ways people respond to music in everyday life.
Musical Expectancy: “a response to the gradual unfolding of the syntactical structure of the music and its expected or unexpected continuations.” See above.
Aesthetic Judgement: “a subjective evaluation of the aesthetic value of the music, based on an individual set of weighted criteria.” See above.