Tampering with the Well-Tempered Clavier: Effects of Cue Manipulations on Conveyed Emo-tions in Real Music

Abstract

Music is closely tied to emotion: Musicians aim to convey emotions to their audience, and listeners perceive emotions in the music they listen to. The present study investigates the musical vocabulary that is used to convey emotions. It attempts to overcome the limitations of previous work, which had to compromise between authentic stimuli and experimental manipulation. In a replication and expansion of a study by Battcock and Schutz (2019; BS19), mode, tempo and pedal use were manipulated independently in four performed excerpts from J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC1). 51 listeners were asked to rate the conveyed valence and arousal of the original and the manipulated excerpts. Changing the mode to major led to more positive valence and increasing the tempo led to higher arousal compared with the original performances. No significant effect of removing the pedal was observed. The present study mostly confirms previous research on music and emotion, while ensuring both high ecological validity and experimental control simultaneously. The findings are discussed in the context of a lens model of emotion communication in music, in which the emotional effects of the cue manipulations can be explained by a combination of symbolic and psychophysiological processes of emotion decoding.