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The emotional meaning of harmonic intervals

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Abstract

The present study reexamines the hypothesis that there exist emotional attributions specific to simple musical elements. In Experiment 1, groups of participants, with varying musical expertise, rated the emotional meaning of four natural intervals heard as two harmonic sine waves. In Experiment 2, the higher tone was kept constant at an octave above the low tone used in Experiment 1, while the lower tone was constant. Attributions for each interval were positively correlated from one experimental session to another; despite the intervals differed in terms of their component pitches. Musicians gave the most reliable choices of meaning. In a third experiment, participants rated the emotional meaning of various unfamiliar ethnic melodies with expressions describing the intervals’ meaning based on the results of Experiment 1 and 2. There were distinct profiles of emotional meanings for each melody and these coincided with the meaning of intervals that constituted the surface and deep structure of each melody. The intervallic structures (i.e., the main intervals of the tunes) and respective chords for each melody were also presented aurally and participants’ ratings showed similar emotional profiles for these when compared to those of the melodies themselves.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Stig Roar Mathisen, at the Tromsø Music Academy, for recording all the intervals used in the study, and to Henning Oelmann, PhD for his useful comments at various stages of this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway

    Hella Oelmann

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, 1094 Blindern, 0317, Oslo, Norway

    Bruno Laeng

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  1. Hella Oelmann
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  2. Bruno Laeng
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Correspondence to Bruno Laeng.

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Oelmann, H., Laeng, B. The emotional meaning of harmonic intervals. Cogn Process 10, 113–131 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-008-0217-z

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