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Emotional Responses During Music Listening

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Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to summarize and present the current knowledge about music and emotion from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Existing emotional models and their adequacy in describing emotional responses to music are described and discussed in different applications. The underlying emotion induction mechanisms beside cognitive appraisal are presented, and their implications on the field are analyzed. Musical characteristics such as tempo, mode, loudness, and so on are inherent properties of the musical structure and have been shown to influence the emotional states during music listening. The role of each individual parameter on emotional responses as well as their interactions is reviewed and analyzed. Different ways of measuring emotional responses to music are described, and their adequacy in accounting for emotional responses to music is discussed. The main physiological responses to music listening are briefly discussed, and their application to emotion recognition and to emotion intelligence in human–machine interaction is described. Music processing in the brain involves different brain areas and several studies attempted to investigate brain activity in relation to emotion during music listening through EEG signals. The issues and challenges of assessing human emotion through EEG are presented and discussed. Finally, an overview of problems that remain to be addressed in future research is given.

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Trochidis, K., Bigand, E. (2014). Emotional Responses During Music Listening. In: Miranda, E., Castet, J. (eds) Guide to Brain-Computer Music Interfacing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6584-2_6

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