Emotional Reactions to Music and Musical Emotions

The topic of human emotions is very complex. Every person has an individual capacity for cognition, responsiveness, and perception of music. The cognitivists believe that the listeners can perceive emotions by experiencing a specific emotion. Emotivists believe that listeners can and do actually experience emotions induced by the music. Emotions are simply defined as mood and affect, but looking closer at brain fusion, we can clearly see there is more involved. The brain controls the autonomic nervous, reticular activating, and limbic systems. The human memory is encoded, and each event changes our brains microscopically, making us who we are. Memory has also been defined as a mode of functioning. Our emotional experiences are captured through either short-term memory or long-term memory. Our brain is also capable of chunking information for memory. Chunking is a process where the brain groups 3-4 items that are related to be retained. Within music, our brains take music groupings of 3-5 notes and place them together to learn and understand the piece. Schemas are described as implicit memory. Making schemas explicit is one of the goals of studying music. Two prominent theories of musical memory are the Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM) and the Cue Abstraction theory of Deliege. GTTM is a hierarchical theory of tonal music and involves four different types of memory reduction: segmentation analysis, metrical analysis, time-span reduction, and prolongational reduction. Cue-Abstraction theory is a general range of music. In Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, Sacks discusses his interaction with one of his post-encephalitic patients, Hester. Hester had no emotional responses to anything, including music. Another patient named Magda stated, “I ceased to have any moods. I ceased to care about anything. Nothing moved me, not even the death of my parents. I forgot what it felt like to be happy or unhappy. Was it good or bad? It was neither. It was nothing,” (Sac, ks page 335). In conclusion, emotions and music are continuously intertwined, and to evoke emotions, there needs to be outward emotional responses to stimuli. A good question to consider at the end of this post is: Have you ever used mental rehearsal as a strategy for learning in your specific field of study? What were some of the advantages and disadvantages of your approach?