Perceptions of happy and sad music may not be universal across cultures, new research finds
Researchers repeated the musical experiment with a group of musicians and a secondary group of non-musicians in Sydney, Australia. They then compared the emotional perceptions and preferences for major or minor harmonies and chords across all the study’s participants.
The results revealed the Australian-based participants had a clear preference for major melodies and chords being perceived as happier. The PNG participants with some exposure to Western music had a less decisive preference for major being happier than minor; however, the PNG participants with minimal exposure to Western music exhibited no detectable association with major chords and an emotional perception of happiness.
Co-author Dr Andrew Milne, Senior Research Fellow in Music Cognition and Computation with the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development says differing emotional perception of music, commonly thought to be a universal response to major and minor keys, may be due to familiarity and conditioning within western culture.
“Music is such a vital part of most cultures and features heavily in our everyday lives. It underscores milestone moments such as celebratory events like birthdays and weddings, while at sombre events like funerals music has the power to move us, evoke memories or bring us to tears,” said Dr Milne.
“Every movie or TV show we watch is also underscored with a soundtrack to accompany emotional scenes. Typically, major chords are used in happy and upbeat scenes, while minor chords commonly convey a sense of unease and sadness.”“This associative conditioning throughout our lives may be one reason both musically trained and non-musicians from western culture identify major keys as happier, while those with minimal or limited exposure to western music and culture have weaker associations, or none at all,” he said.
“The higher your familiarity, the more likely you are to experience these types of responses. However, our results cannot exclude the possibility that those without any familiarity with major and minor music may also perceive major as happy and minor as sad,” said Dr Smit.
The study, Emotional responses in Papua New Guinea show negligible evidence for a universal effect of major versus minor music, was published in the PLOS ONE journal.
Press release from the University of Konstanz
