Revealing Universal and Cultural Origins of Music Induced Affect

This project investigates how emotions are expressed, perceived, and understood in music across cultures. Drawing from cognitive ethnomusicology, psychology, and cultural anthropology, it challenges the assumption that musical emotions are universally understood and explores connections between cultural encoding and cognitive decoding in musical emotional communication. The core research question is: How do listeners from diverse cultural backgrounds perceive and interpret emotions in music not native to their own traditions? This question is especially urgent in our globalised world, where music frequently transcends its original cultural context and functions as a medium for cross-cultural dialogue, identity negotiation, and emotional expression.
The research is structured in distinct phases. The first phase involves piloting audio stimuli with musicians and listeners from contrasting musical cultures—including Western classical, East Asian, and Indigenous traditions—in order to assess how they experience emotions in music. In-depth interviews will further illuminate how emotional expression is culturally framed and valued. The second phase employs empirical methods, including behavioural experiments and psychoacoustic analyses in fieldwork locations around the world. Participants from different cultural backgrounds will listen to selected musical excerpts and report perceived emotions. The study will control for variables such as musical training, language, and cultural exposure, allowing for robust cross-cultural comparisons. This will generate data on emotion perception patterns and their relation to acoustic features such as tempo, mode, timbre, and ornamentation. The third phase synthesises findings to develop a theoretical model of transcultural emotion in music. This model will articulate how cultural schemas, perceptual affordances, and individual experience interact to shape emotional interpretation. It will be informed by recent developments in affective science, particularly the appraisal theory of emotion and enactive cognition.
The project’s innovative character lies in its integration of cognitive and ethnographic methodologies to investigate a topic often siloed within either the sciences or humanities. Findings will have broad implications for musicology, psychology, and intercultural communication. The project will culminate in scholarly publications, public workshops, and a digital platform showcasing cross-cultural emotional responses to music. By illuminating how people feel through music beyond cultural borders, we aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of human emotionality, enrich debates on universality and cultural particularity, and support efforts to foster empathy and intercultural dialogue through the arts.