Music and emotion

Music and emotion concerns how musical sounds express, evoke, and communicate feelings, and how listeners perceive and interpret those feelings.

Musical expectancy: The predictions listeners form about what will happen next in a musical passage. Fulfilled or violated expectations can create tension, surprise, and emotional impact.
Musical expression: The ways musical performance and structure convey qualities associated with emotion. A passage can sound expressive even when its listener feels something different.
Music therapy: The clinical use of music interventions to address health, functioning, or well-being. Therapeutic practice uses music’s emotional and relational effects toward defined goals.
Aesthetic emotions: Emotions experienced in response to artistic form, appreciation, or contemplation. They include responses to music that are not ordinary reactions to real-life events.
Basic emotion theory: The view that a limited set of fundamental emotions has distinctive biological or psychological patterns. It frames debate over whether musical emotions fall into universal categories.
Tension and release: A musical pattern that builds instability or anticipation and then resolves it. This pattern offers a direct route from musical structure to felt emotional change.
Perceived emotion: Emotion that a listener recognizes as expressed by a sound, image, or performance. It separates hearing sadness in music from personally feeling sad.
Film score: Music composed or selected to accompany a film. Film scores guide emotional interpretation and shape responses to scenes.
Paradox of sadness in music: The puzzle of why people can enjoy music perceived as sad. It captures the gap between sadness expressed by music and pleasure felt while listening.
Dimensional model of emotion: An approach that represents emotion along dimensions such as valence and arousal. It offers an alternative to naming discrete emotions in studies of music.

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