Influence of timbre on emotions and recognition memory for music

A basic issue about music as an emotive language concerns whether music produces emotional changes in listeners, (the "emotivist" position) or simply expresses emotions that listeners recognize in the music: the "cognitivist" position. Several studies have evidenced that timbre dimension, or source cuing (Radvansky and Potter 2000) is an important element in the perceptual processing and we suppose that listeners’ memory performances may be influenced by timbre characteristics (Padova, D’Ausilio, Jeric and Olivetti 2003, Radvansky et al. 1995; Radvansky and Potter 2000). The aim of this study is to investigate how timbre changes influence listeners' emotional responses and the recognition memory performance. We used 24 musical stimuli organized into 2 categories according to the presence/absence of tonality or salience intending salience as the redundancy of a single parameter using temporal or pitch patterns easly perceived. Each stimulus was presented in three instrumental versions were presented:piano, flute and an hybrid timbre. The hybrid timbre was created crossing attack phase of a piano with the phase pattern of the flute. Subjects were asked to identify which of 2 melodies, a target and a distractor, was heard previously. On one half of the trials, the target and the original melodies were in the same timbre and the distractor was in a different timbre. For the other half of the trials, the distractor melody was in the same timbre as the original one and the target melody was in a different timbre. An emotional evaluation of stimuli was also asked: subjects were asked to select one or more of the emotions suggested in Russell’ model (1987) and for each emotions they chose to identify the intensity (Likert scale 1-3). 160 university students (musicians and no musicians) participated in the experiment. Results suggest that timbre influences recognition memory and emotional responses. Musical training, genre, and presence/absence of tonality/salience also influence subject’s performance. In particular we observed that timbre changes influence subject’s performances with NS-T and do not with NT-S stimuli, subjects performances are worse when hybrid sound is presented and that hybrid and piano’s sound, more than flute’s one, arouse emotions that we can define as “negative”. In general results suggest that subjects considered the sound’s attack phase relevant in memory task but do not in emotional evaluation. Thanks to the “new music” or electroacustic music, the possibilities of creation and control of sound are increased, helping the comprehension of processes of music perception so as the possibilities of manipulating timbre feature. This study could help contemporary musicians in the compositional phase by suggesting the proper timbre according to the message they want to convey. The comprehension of timbre perception could be also useful to other figures than musicians or psychologists, while the comprehension of the cognitive features of that process could be implemented in several domains, such as rehabilitation programs for disabled people and composing education.