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The Arts

Music & Emotion

Why do we feel emotion when listening to music? Ben Ushedo goes beyond emotivist and cognitivist approaches to answer this intriguing question.

“Music can make me feel tense or relaxed; it can disturb, unsettle me, and startle me; it can calm me down or excite me…”
Jennifer Robinson, ‘Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music’.

What do music and religion have in common? Like religion, everybody seems to feel qualified to have an opinion on musical taste. The question which this essay addresses is, how is it that music is sometimes able to influence the moods of listeners, generating emotions? The answers proffered to this question are legion, but here they will be approached, in broad strokes, from two perspectives, cognitivist and emotivist. Arguments deriving from both points of view will be critiqued and evaluated to show that music has elements requiring us to go beyond mechanical rules of thumb in understanding musical experience and our subsequent taste and value judgements.

Dispassionate Listening

Cognitivist theory holds that the experience or interpretation a particular musical sound engenders is a result of a conscious process of inference.

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