The Research Networking Day provides a platform to exchange ideas and experiences for students and researchers from different European graduate and postgraduate programmes traversing the fields of audio, arts, media, design and related theoretical disciplines. A yearly initiative co-organised with Humboldt University’s Department of Musicology, the RND sought submissions from students, junior researchers and persons pursuing higher levels of research and studies to present projects and findings connected to the CTM 2017 Fear Anger Love Theme.

Module II Introduction

The second theme module within the 2017 Research Networking Day is hosted by Mats Küssner, a Research Associate in the Department of Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, where his research interests include multimodal perception of music, embodied music cognition, music and emotion, and performance science.

Which Emotions Does Music Evoke? Aesthetic vs. “Everyday” Emotions

Liila Taruffi (Free University Berlin, DE)

Although it appears obvious that music can evoke emotions, the nature of such affective states is yet not so clear. Which emotions are most frequently induced by music? Are these states specific emotions? In this talk, I will present recent behavioural and neuroimaging findings on the multifaceted affective experiences underlying music listening. I will start by examining the dominant emotion models in music research, explaining how they structure and classify emotions. In particular, I will refer to both domain-general (so-called “Discrete” and “Dimensional” models) and music-specific (“Geneva Emotional Musical Scale”) emotion models. I will go on to illustrate findings showing the most (and least) common emotions induced by different types of music. Interestingly, such emotional experiences go beyond the emotions typically captured by the above-mentioned domain-general models, encompassing for example love, transcendence, and wonder. I will then consider similarities and differences between aesthetic and “everyday” emotions. I will focus, in particular, on the phenomenon of enjoyment of negative emotions (fear or sadness) through music, and describe the different mechanisms through which we can take pleasure in music conveying negative affect. The evidence presented in this talk indicates that music can have beneficial emotional effects for both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.

Liila Taruffi is an interdisciplinary music researcher who works at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and aesthetics. Liila’s primary research interests include music and emotion, neuroaesthetics, spontaneous cognition, resting state fMRI and empathy. She has recently submitted her PhD thesis in Psychology of Music at the Cluster “Languages of Emotion” of the Free University in Berlin. In addition to her doctorate, Liila holds BA and MA in Philosophy/Aesthetics from the University of Florence, and an MSc in Music, Mind & Brain from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Embodied Contemplative Practices and Interactive Music

Marcello Lussana (Humboldt Universtity Berlin, DE)

Human movement has become more and more central in today’s music performance, in particular because of an increasing use of interactive technologies that allow the body to generate and control music. In order to better understand this kind of musical expression, we need to understand the body and perception. Embodied contemplative practices (like Qigong or Yoga) have developed a knowledge of the body that can be helpful to understanding human perception: phenomenology and embodied cognition have studied and adopted this knowledge in order to scientifically consider first-hand experiences without reductionism. If the role of the body is so important for interactive music performance, we need to consider and include this perceptual knowledge into interactive music practices. The goal of this doctoral research is to develop an interactive music system that supports and helps the development of specific abilities of embodied contemplative practices: proprioperception, self-observation and introspection.

Marcello Lussana combines his interest in music, philosophy and technology. A focal point of his work is the interaction between music and human movement, where body and computer are connected through a complex understanding of body perception and dedicated interfaces. After completing his Master in Technology and Communication in Torino; he merged his humanist, technological and music interesest by attending the Sound Studies programme at the University of Arts in Berlin (UdK) in 2010. In 2012 he started working together the Motioncomposer project as musical director and got involved in the European project, Metabody2. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Humboldt university in Berlin with professors Jin-Hyun Kim (HU) and Alberto de Campo (UdK). He also produces computer music for audio-visual performances, dance and theater, and was supported by the 2016 SHAPE platform.

Standing Still on the Dancefloor: Emotion, Movement, and Electronic Dance Music

Scott Beveridge (Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden, DE)

Traditional theories on music and emotion are firmly grounded in the classical music repertoire. However, few attempts have been made to modify these theories to fit a modern context. Whereas traditional emotion models rely on music with considerable structural, tonal, and timbral diversity, they do not account for music which is structurally repetitive or homogeneous. Electronic dance music is one such example. This talk discusses how traditional models may be modified to address electronic dance music, the nature of emotional responses, and the acoustic correlates that are associated with particular emotions. In addition it addresses the apparent disparity between emotions perceived and induced in response to electronic dance music, and the importance of movement and dance. In sum it seeks to answers the question of why you might find yourself standing still on the dance floor waiting for “the drop”.

Scott Beveridge completed his doctoral thesis titled, “Emotion Recognition in Western Contemporary Music” in 2011 at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland. He was then awarded a post-doctoral fellowship from the European Research Consortium of Informatics and Mathematics hosted by the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau, Germany. After a short spell as a professor in Scotland, he returned to Germany to take a position at the Institute of Musicians’ Medicine IMM, Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber, Dresden. His research interests include music and emotions, music physiology, and music informatics.