Play it again, Sam: On Liking Music

Abstract

Emotional responses to music are discussed in the context of a constructivist theory of emotion, which postulates evaluative cognitions that generate the quality of the experience, and autonomic (sympathetic) arousal that influences its intensity. Arousal is frequently generated by cognitive, pcrceptual, and behavioural discrepancies. Schema theory is used to describe the listener's knowledge of the complex structure of music. Schemas serve to interpret music as well as to produce expectations about its likely form and progression. When music is discrepant from the listener's expectations (as it often is), the concatenation of arousal and evaluation produces emotional experiences. This theoretical framework guides an interpretation of emotional responses to familiar and (physically) complex music, and suggests ways of understanding structural evaluations as well as effects of music that have their source outside of musical structure.