George Athanasopoulos (Durham University)
Emotion perception in music: cross-cultural similarities and differences

Is it true that tribes in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa perceive 1980s thrash metal to convey more happiness than Figaro’s Aria from the Barber of Seville? Or, that the minor mode may express joy at a greater degree than its major counterpart? This presentation will focus on how the emotional experience of music is affected by the cultural background of the listener, by highlighting results collected from the United Kingdom and NW Pakistan. Using a methodological approach which combines ethnographic fieldwork with music psychology, it will be demonstrated how specific sonic elements affect the way that listeners comprehend expressed emotions in human voice recordings, real music samples, and artificial stimuli. Results indicate that, although commonalities certainly exist across cultures in how emotions in music are perceived, there are also significant variations in how these are understood. Apart from the empirical data collected on-site, interviews with the participants reveal how harmonic organization in music conveys much more than basic emotions, how musical genre labels have very little meaning outside their cultural reference, and how (almost) everyone seems to be repelled by roughness.

George Athanasopoulos (Durham University) is a researcher in cognitive ethnomusicology. His work focuses on the cross-cultural perception of music. He has conducted fieldwork in the United Kingdom, Greece, Japan, northwest Pakistan and Papua New Guinea. His work has been funded by the Marie Curie Foundation/COFUND, the Sasakawa Foundation, the University of Edinburgh, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (I.K.Y.) and the Onassis Foundation. His research has been published in PLOS ONE, the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Psychology of Music, Musicae Scientiae, Music and Science, and Empirical Musicology Review.

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