SAT閱讀文章（社科類）第1篇

This passage is adapted from Patrik N. Juslin, 「What does music express? Basic emotions and beyond.」 ? 2007-2014, Frontiers Media SA.

Few scholars would dispute that music is often heard as expressive of emotions by listeners. Indeed, emotional expression has been regarded as one of the most important criteria for the aesthetic value of music (Juslin, 2013). Music has even been described as a 「language of the emotions」 by some authors (Cooke, 1959). It is not surprising, then, that a number of studies have investigated whether music can reliably convey emotions to listeners, and—if so—what musical features may carry this information.

Note that there are different senses in which music can be said to express emotions. Firstly, a listener could perceive any emotion in a piece of music; and in a nontrivial sense, it would be inappropriate to claim that the listener is 「wrong.」 The subjective impression of an individual listener cannot be disputed on objective grounds. A first way to index emotional expression is thus to accept the unique impressions of individual listeners: Whatever a listener perceives in the music is what the music is expressing—for him or her at least! This is the view adopted by MacDonald et al. (2012).

Several researchers prefer a more 「restrictive」 view on expression, however, which holds that music is expressive of a specific emotion only to the extent that there is some minimum level of agreement among different listeners regarding the expression, presumably because there is something in the music that produces a similar impression in many listeners. Expression thus conceived brings a stronger focus on psychophysical relationships between musical features and perceptual impressions. Thus, a second way to index emotional expression in music is to focus on listener agreement (Campbell, 1942).

The notion of expression does not require that there is any correspondence between what the listener perceives in a piece of music and what the composer or performer intends to express. In contrast, the concept of 「communication」 requires that there is both an intention to express a specific emotion and recognition of this emotion by listeners. Presumably, many musicians care about whether listeners perceive their music the way they intended it. Hence, if we study expressed emotions in terms of communication, we might also index emotional expression in terms of accuracy (Juslin and Timmers, 2010; see, e.g., Thompson and Robitaille, 1992).

Most likely, there are fewer emotions for which there is agreement among several listeners than there are emotions that a single listener may perceive in a piece. Even fewer emotions may be relevant if we consider those emotions that might be reliably communicated from a musician to a listener; that is, where there is an intention to convey an emotional character, which is correctly recognized by a perceiver.

Just as there are many different ways to conceptualize expression in music, there are different approaches that may be adopted to investigate empirically which emotions music can express. One rather simple way to approach the question is to ask music listeners directly. Thus, the table shows data from three different studies in which listeners were asked which emotions music can express. In each study, the subject could choose from a long list of emotion labels. Shown are the rank orders with which each of the top ten emotion terms was selected. As can be seen, happiness, sadness, anger, fear and love, tenderness were all among the top-ten emotions, and this tendency was similar across the three data sets, despite differences in samples (musicians vs. students, various countries) and selections of emotion terms (ranging from 32 to 38 terms). Hence, there seems to be agreement about which emotions are easiest to express in music.