Effects and Affects of Timbre
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Effects and Affects of Timbre
By Anonymous Emotive Timbres
December 7th, 2022
Do you listen to music to change your mood? Do you know what song to put on when you’re feeling sad, or when you want to celebrate something? The effect that music has on our emotions is the main reason why most people listen to (or create) music! Now, one of the first things we all learn when we take music lessons, is that the major mode sounds happy and the minor mode sounds sad. Similarly, you can imagine that something that has a very fast tempo may make you feel quite different emotions compared to music that has a very slow tempo. A lot of research has focused on these individual musical characteristics, but relatively few have researched how differences in timbre can change the emotions of the music listener.
In emotion research, an important distinction is made between the emotions that listeners perceive (e.g., something sounds happy), and the emotions that listeners feel (e.g., something makes you happy). In the case of perceived emotions, studies that focused specifically on timbre found that certain instruments are better at expressing certain emotions – you can’t play a sad song on the banjo [note; would have to add more findings here, can’t remember exactly]. Looking in more detail at timbre descriptors, researchers found that … [would have to look this up as well]. These findings are mostly relevant when you are creating music and want to be certain to express or communicate certain emotions.
However, the average listener may be more focused on feeling emotions instead of just perceiving them. A lot of research on felt emotions uses entire musical phrases, because it takes time to feel something, if anything. However, these musical phrases are not only varying in timbre, but also in mode, tempo, melodic phrasing, etc. So, it is quite difficult to isolate the individual contribution of timbre.
Research on the effect of timbre on emotion is relatively limited, and to make it more complicated, not all findings point in the same direction. One reason for this may be that musical emotion is quite a personal, individualized, experience. The emotions that you perceive or feel in response to music is not only dependent on the music, but also you as a person, your history, your personality, or even your mood at that exact moment! Differences in empathy, for example, may determine (the intensity of) your emotional experience. Or your expertise in a certain musical style, or instrument, can make your more or less emotionally sensitive.
In my research I am trying to build bridges by making step-wise comparisons between perceived and felt emotions for short fragments, as well as longer musical phrases that are varying only in timbre, while also taking into account the individual characteristics of each of the participants.