Is it Happiness? Is it Sadness? No, It’s Anger Actually.

The cross cultural perception of anger in music decoded.

Often times, we believe we have a strong grasp of emotions. As a result, we think we can understand the emotions of others. Yet, emotions are subject to human error in interpretation. From a sender of a message (encoder) to the receiver (decoder) there is potential for noise to disrupt understanding. In this context, noise refers to any external or internal stimuli, such as physical noise or one’s judgments on message comprehension.

Source: Pixabay-GDJ

Despite the effect of noise, there is a common agreement on the 6 basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, and surprise (Ekman & Cordaro 2011). These emotions are often identified visually but how about auditory? In the following music video below can you identify the emotions shown?

If this task was somewhat difficult then you would have a similar experience to participants in the “perception of basic emotions in music study”(Argstatter 2015). Participants from various cultural backgrounds were given samples of music from regions different from their native culture. Afterwards, they tried identifying the basic emotion that matched the music. Overall, all groups had a hard time distinguishing the emotions. Specifically, anger and fear were the hardest to pinpoint. From this study, Argstatter claimed that the basic emotions in music were limited to happiness and sadness (Argstatter, 2015; Susino & Shubert, 2017).

The combination of a person’s background and prior experiences reflect the difficulties in music perception. This is the noise that makes understanding of emotions complex. Several studies have discussed the differences of cultural portrayal and comprehension of anger.

However, several theories have tried to explain this effect. Each have its strengths and weaknesses that help explain anger decoded in music.

1. The cue-redundancy model

• The understanding of emotion in music is dependent on “psycho-physical and culture specific cues” (Susino and Schubert, 2017). Despite the differences of music culture, emotions can be deciphered through these cues: tempo and complexity (Susino and Schubert, 2017; 1999 pg 45.)

2. Dialect Theory

• Similar to dialects present in different languages, cultural cues act as a dialect in music communication( Laukka et al. 2013). People versed in the specific cultural cues will easily encode and decode music. Meanwhile, people unfamiliar will have difficulty with these actions (Susino and Schubert, 2017).

3. Uncertainty Avoidance

• - “the extent to which a society feels threatened by uncertain and ambiguous situations and tries to avoid these situations” (Hofestede,1980 pg.45). People within the same culture will act in a way that is normal to their society. As a result, cultures that do not express anger as often will not be seen to have music that conveys anger.

In response to these theories and several others, the Stereotype Theory of Emotion in music was created. The theory suggests that differences in musical understanding is from stereotypes in psycho-physical cues. From these cues, people develop a stereotyped idea of a culture’s music.

Source: Susino and Shubert (2017)

According to the graphic, music is encoded by the sender. Yet, the overlap of psycho-physical cues and culture specific cues impact the emotion decoded. If the message is understood with psycho-physical cues without cultural stereotypes then the message is correctly decoded. In contrast, relying only on culture specific cues helps reinforce stereotypes. The emotion is decoded incorrectly. The theory helps fill the gaps about variability in music perception. However, there is not extensive research on the theory. Thus, more research is necessary in the future. As well as, the theory being applied to other basic emotions.

One thing is certain, perception affects our thoughts. Our thoughts makes our beliefs. Anger is hard emotion to capture and understand. Next time, if you hear a song from a different culture, try to understand the emotion conveyed. Like the people of Metropolis assumed, it’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s actually Superman.

Sources:

Argstatter, H. (2015). Perception of basic emotions in music: Culture-specific or multicultural? Psychology
of Music. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/0305735615589214

Ekman, P., & Cordaro, D. (2011). What is meant by calling emotions basic. Emotion Review, 3(4),
364–370.

Hofstede, G. (1980). Motivation, leadership, and organization: Do American theories apply abroad?
Organizational Dynamics, 9(1), 42–63.

Laukka, P., Eerola, T., Thingujam, N. S., Yamasaki, T., & Beller, G. (2013). Universal and culture-
specific factors in the recognition and performance of musical affect expressions. Emotion, 13(3),

434–449.

Susino, M., & Schubert, E. (2017). Cross-cultural anger communication in music: Towards a stereotype theory of emotion in music. Musicae Scientiae, 21(1), 60–74.