beau's blog

Looking for videos of John Butcher on YouTube, I found a performance by Phil Minton and Veryan Weston of an old English folk song called The Cutty Wren. The film is by Helen Petts, who has a bunch of fantastic videos of improvised music on her YouTube channel. Minton’s use of fairly extreme extended vocal technique casts this ancient traditional in an entirely new light. As a good friend said, “You cannot buy that kind of pain.”

The song’s provenance is unclear. In The Singing Englishman, A.L. Lloyd dates it to the peasants’ revolt of 1381. The despair caused by plague and oppression from the upper classes gave the folk songs of the era a rather dark vibe. The wren may be a symbol for the barony or the king or the police, i.e. not a small bird but a person of significant means—which would explain why it’s so difficult to kill, carry, cook, slice, and distribute.

Also possible is a Celtic mythical/religious interpretation, with the wren as a symbolic human sacrifice, cooked in the cauldron of Kerridwen. According to this page, the cauldron of Kerridwen was “the source of immortality and divine wisdom”, and the wren represents the Celtic god Bran, “an oracular hero, a being who linked the outer world with the Underworld”.

The way these two interpretations rub up against each other is fascinating. It seems like the song originally had a ritual, religious function, but was transformed into political commentary after the plague and the poll tax. Minton’s modern, surreal, expressionist solo brings the song into our current political/economic context, turning it into a commentary on globalization, seemingly endless war, widespread voter suppression, the near-nationalization of AIG, the $700,000,000,000 bailout budget, and other economic policies weighted in favor of the super-rich. In this climate, the sacrifice of the cutty wren brings a bit of a tear to my eye.

Sandrine Viellard and company at the Isabelle Peretz Research Laboratory recently published an interesting paper entitled Happy, sad, scary and peaceful musical excerpts for research on emotions. The primary goal of the work described in this paper is the creation of a standard set of musical stimuli for music-emotion research, something like Paul Ekman’s famous collection of photographs of facial expressions. Unlike Ekman, Viellard et al. aren’t demonstrating any kind of universality. In fact, they limited themselves to the genre of Western film music performed on a piano, and they see the primary structural determinants of “tension” in the music as whether or not it is in a major or minor mode and whether or not there is any chromaticism, so the cultural boundaries are fairly constrained indeed.

Simulation theories of emotional understanding posit the recognition of emotion necessarily involves some kind of internal simulation of that emotion. However, these internal simulations don’t necessarily have the same phenomenology as feeling (you can’t see it, but right here I am making a hand gesture to buttress my point!) elicited in a more direct way. The musical examples from Viellard’s library are a good example; they are (deliberately, rightly) cliché, boring, stripped of their expressive qualities. For the most part, I find myself recognizing the emotion I believe the music attempts to convey (with some exceptions, but as a composer I’m not an ideal candidate for this sort of thing), but experiencing nothing like emotion at all. Provisionally, I think this is a good thing. Music which elicits emotion rather than referencing it is slippery, different for different people, dependent upon context, maybe impossible to isolate and bottle. It’s nice to have a collection of musical examples which have been empirically assessed as accurately conveying a basic set of emotions, evocative sterility notwithstanding.

One fact which leaves me a little unsettled, mostly because these clips don’t cause me to experience any emotion, is that subjects performed better on the emotion identification task when they were told to focus on emotional experience instead of recognition:

“A significant effect of Instruction [i.e. the instruction to focus on experience versus recognition], F(1,37)=4.97; p=.032; h=.118, was observed, with a higher rating for the intended emotion in the experience condition (from .82 to .91 across emotional categories) than in the recognition condition (from .76 to .84 across emotional categories).”

I find that result very strange.

Another issue, somewhat less troubling, but still a bit problematic: A forced choice paradigm was used for categorization of the stimuli. For each stimulus, subjects were told to apply as many of the labels “happy”, “sad”, “scary”, and “peaceful” as they wanted, and the best label of those four was determined. Each of the stimuli were composed with one of those labels in mind, and so the intention of the composer was validated by the categorization task, but in a pretty weak way. What if, for example, an additional label had been allowed: “angry”? Would the categorization task then have clustered the stimuli into five groups, despite the compositional intention of conveying one of four emotions? It’d be nice to see a freer labeling procedure, it would make the library much more powerful.

References:

• Vieillard, S., Peretz, I., Gosselin, N., Khalfa, S., Gagnon, L. & Bouchard, B. (2008) Happy, sad, scary and peaceful musical excerpts for research on emotions. Cognition and Emotion, Vol. 22, Issue 4. 720-752.