theorists (e.g., Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988) who characterize the cogni-
tive substrate of all emotion in terms of the violations of various classes of
expectations.
These strands of work lead toward the following set of working hypotheses
about the vast central bulk of the world’s music:
- One major function of music is to suggest or mediate a range of emo-
tional responses. - Common musical structures have particular perceptible properties that
support the patterns of expectation underlying such emotions. - Expression in musical performance has the effect of making these struc-
tural features more prominent, and thus of heightening the emotional
response.
24.5 The Roots of Musical Expertise
At the beginning of this chapter, I asked whether all aspects of musical exper-
tise have anything in common. By a rather circuitous route I now come to a
proposed answer, which is that the yinvolve apprehension and use of the
structure–emotion link. At whatever level, and for whatever activity, what
makes the behaviormusically, as opposed to technicall yor perceptuall y, expert
is its manifestation of this link. I take it as axiomatic that emotions do not have
to be learned (although the yma ybe refined and differentiated through experi-
ence). The yare part of the ‘‘expert s ystem’’ with which we are born. So what
must be learned is how to apprehend those features of musical structures that
can be mapped onto and therefore evoke our existing emotions.
Hevner’s (1936) pioneering work showed that adult members of a culture
generall yagree on the emotional characterization of a passage of music, in that
the ytend to select similar adjectives to describe it (e.g., majestic, gloom y,
playful). Gardner (1973) has shown that this ability develops through child-
hood, with younger children able to use only rather crude descriptions (such as
‘‘loud’’ or ‘‘jumpy’’). It is, of course, possible that particular kinds of music have
come to acquire conventional meanings b yroutes that do not involve the lis-
tener’s own emotions. Laborator ystudies of people’s abilities todescribemusic
do not show how these abilities were acquired.
Direct observational studies of children’s emotional responses to music have
been rare. Moog’s (1976) studies showed that preverbal infants could demon-
strate quite strong expressions of delight or fear on hearing music. The avail-
able evidence suggests that tone qualit yis the aspect of music that elicits the
strongest earl yreactions. Smooth, treble-register sounds seem to elicit the
strongest reactions of attention and pleasure. Most children below the age of 5
years seem not to be particularly interested in unpitched rhythms and seem not
to differentiate emotionall ybetween music pla yed in conventional harmon y
and that played dissonantly.
As children grow older, it is less eas yto record emotional responses b ydirect
observation. Socialization leads to significant suppression of direct emotional
expression. An alternative approach that I have been pursuing (Sloboda, 1989)
is to ask adults to recall musical experiences from the first ten years of life. The
576 John A. Sloboda