Harmonic Expression in a Stylistic Frame

Abstract

This dissertation investigates whether U.S. listeners are sensitive to musical harmonic style, in terms of being able to make consistent genre and emotion associations to the typical harmonic vocabularies of different styles of music. Research in music cognition rarely takes into account different styles of harmony, either privileging Western classical style or presenting harmonic stimuli to participants without any discussion of the stylistic characteristics that shape them. In three behavioral experiments, this project investigates four research questions: (1) Can listeners identify different styles of harmony based on harmonic cues alone? (2) Can different styles of harmony be perceived as expressive of specific emotions? (3) What is the effect of musical training, familiarity and preference for different genres on these processes? (4) To what extent is timbre a more reliable cue than harmony when it comes to genre and emotion identification? These questions were pursued by creating stimuli that isolated the harmonic and timbral characteristics of 5 styles: classical, country, hip-hop, jazz and pop-rock, and presenting them to participants who were asked to associate them to genre labels and a set of emotion terms. The results suggest that, while timbre is a more salient cue of musical genre, style of harmony can still be consistently associated to the predicted genre labels at above-chance levels. It was found that specific styles of harmony and of timbre can be consistently associated with certain emotions, and that style of harmony affected perceptions of emotional valence much more so than timbre, while timbre affected perceptions of energy more intensely. The effects of musical training and listening habits on these results were small to null. Overall, these results present novel evidence for the expressive potential of harmonic style, and encourage music cognition and theory to widen the stylistic scope of what the study of musical harmony means.