beau's blog

This blog has been on hiatus while I work on my Masters thesis. I’m still working on it, but I’m going to try to get in here and at least link to interesting content once in a while.

Here’s a transcription of an excellent talk by Benjamin H. Bratton at Postopolis LA. Though it doesn’t take music or cognitive science as its primary subject, it identifies some cultural currents important to the social and political positions of both fields.

And here’s coverage of some interesting but deeply problematic research regarding the universality of musical emotion. The researchers had subjects who claim never to have heard Western music classify the emotionality of songs by pointing at pictures of faces expressing one of three emotions: happiness, sadness, and fear. I have not yet read the paper, but the media coverage is characteristically enthusiastic and uncritical, using such misleading and awful headlines as Feel-Good Music Feels Good Around the World and Language Of Music Really Is Universal, Study Finds.

Update: Decent coverage of the Mafa music study at Cognitive Daily.

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.

Just read the free executive summary of a report entitled “Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies” prepared by the National Research Council for the Department of Defense. Mostly predictable, but a couple of things stuck out. First is the burgeoning military interest in “culture studies”. It’s a relief to see, even in this roundabout way, the US military’s failure to communicate across cultures acknowledged or addressed. I hope the motive for cross-cultural research isn’t merely tactical, but strategic, foundational and systematic. If the military sees understanding of cross-cultural unversality and difference as simply means to the end of, say, more effective mind-reading, that would miss the point. A glimmer of light: “Conventional social science models based primarily on Western ideas may be challenged by invisible biases.”

Second, the report seems pretty naïve about AI. It jumps from a paragraph about expert systems directly to speculation about “an intelligent machine that uses the Internet to train itself”. The internet, of course, is “by far the closest we have come to a total database of knowledge”. Whoa there, guys.

More coverage at Wired and MetaFilter.