Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 80, Issue 3, July 2001, Pages B1-B10
Cognition

A developmental study of the affective value of tempo and mode in music

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(00)00136-0Get rights and content

Abstract

Do children use the same properties as adults in determining whether music sounds happy or sad? We addressed this question with a set of 32 excerpts (16 happy and 16 sad) taken from pre-existing music. The tempo (i.e. the number of beats per minute) and the mode (i.e. the specific subset of pitches used to write a given musical excerpt) of these excerpts were modified independently and jointly in order to measure their effects on happy–sad judgments. Adults and children from 3 to 8 years old were required to judge whether the excerpts were happy or sad. The results show that as adults, 6–8-year-old children are affected by mode and tempo manipulations. In contrast, 5-year-olds' responses are only affected by a change of tempo. The youngest children (3–4-year-olds) failed to distinguish the happy from the sad tone of the music above chance. The results indicate that tempo is mastered earlier than mode to infer the emotional tone conveyed by music.

Introduction

Music appreciation is a complex skill that is usually considered to be a learned ability. It is presumed to derive from formal musical instruction (e.g. music lessons) or, more generally, from long lasting exposure to music. However, several studies over the last two decades have challenged this view by revealing that young children and infants possess many perceptual abilities that are shared with adults (for a review, see Trehub, 1997). For instance, infants as young as 9 months display learning preferences for musical scales (i.e. unequal-step scales) over equal-step scales (Trehub, Schellenberg, & Kamenetsky, 1999) and process consonant intervals better than dissonant intervals (e.g. Schellenberg & Trehub, 1996). Thus, a growing body of evidence suggests that humans are born with predispositions for processing music.

A significant part of music appreciation is mediated by emotional responses. Listeners report these responses as being the primary motivation for listening to music (Pansepp, 1995). Ironically, however, little work has been devoted to emotional responses to music. For instance, when older children show evidence that they can discern happy from sad music (e.g. Cunningham and Sterling, 1988, Dolgin and Adelson, 1990, Terwogt and Van Grinsven, 1991), is this behavior the result of innate predispositions or of a learning process? These questions motivate the present study that focuses on the happy–sad distinction in young children.

Happiness and sadness are basic emotions (for reviews, see Juslin, 1997, Krumhansl, 1997) and are the most reliable and distinguishable musically expressed emotions (e.g. Balkwill and Thompson, 1999, Krumhansl, 1997). Moreover, the major structural determinants of the happy–sad distinction are well identified: tempo (i.e. the number of beats per minute) and mode (i.e. the specific subset of pitches used to write a given musical excerpt). Fast tempi tend to evoke a happy tone, whereas slow tempi tend to evoke a sad tone (Balkwill and Thompson, 1999, Gabrielsson and Juslin, 1996, Gundlach, 1935, Hevner, 1937, Juslin, 1997, Peretz et al., 1998, Rigg, 1937, Rigg, 1940). Similarly, the major mode is associated with happiness and the minor mode is associated with sadness (Hevner, 1935, Rigg, 1937). These relations have recently received empirical support in a study in which both tempo and mode have been independently manipulated in keeping material constant (Peretz et al., 1998).

Although there is compelling evidence that tempo and mode are major determinants of the happy–sad distinction, it is still controversial as to what age children become sensitive to these properties. As far as tempo is concerned, we may hypothesize that infants would display early affective use of it. Indeed, sensitivity to small changes of tempo emerges as early as during the first year of life (Baruch and Drake, 1997, Lewkowicz, 1985, Pickens and Bahrick, 1995). Moreover, tempo, or the rate of events in time, is not limited to music; tempo characterizes many other human behaviors, such as the gate of an individual (or rocking speed). This may explain why tempo is conceived by some scientists (e.g. Drake, 1998) as relying on the operation of an innately determined system. However, sensitivity to tempo has never been assessed through emotional judgments. In contrast, major and minor modes are structural features that are specific to music and hence are likely to be acquired later in life than tempo by exposure to the music of our Western culture. It follows that sensitivity to mode should emerge later than sensitivity to tempo in the developing child. The available data are largely consistent with this prediction. The appropriate use of mode as a cue for distinguishing happy from sad music is not found prior to 7–8 years of age (Gerardi and Gerken, 1995, Gregory et al., 1996, Imberty, 1969; but see Kastner & Crowder, 1990, for an earlier emergence).

The aim of the present study was to assess and compare the relative emergence of sensitivity to mode and tempo via emotional judgments. To this end, the same materials and procedure as adopted by Peretz and collaborators in an earlier study (Peretz et al., 1998) were used here. This method was found to be very effective in assessing the effect of tempo and mode manipulation on the happy–sad distinction. In Peretz et al.'s original study, participants were presented with excerpts drawn from Western music under four conditions resulting from the independent and joint manipulation of tempo and mode. In the ‘tempo condition’ all tempi were set to the median value of the original tempi of all the excerpts so as to neutralize the effect of tempo on emotional judgments. In the ‘mode condition’ the excerpts were transcribed in the opposite mode (from major to minor or vice versa). Finally, in the ‘tempo+mode condition’ both tempo and mode manipulations were applied. A further condition, referred to as ‘original’, was employed in which excerpts did not undergo any modification. The task was to judge whether each excerpt sounded happy or sad. Results showed that both tempo and mode manipulations affected judgments. In the present study, this paradigm was used with adult participants (Experiment 1) whose performance was compared to that of children aged from 3 to 8 years (Experiment 2).

Section snippets

Experiment 1

Since the original study by Peretz et al. (1998) mainly focused on the performance of a neurologically impaired subject (I.R.), experimental conditions were presented in a fixed order and only a few non-impaired participants were considered for comparison. Thus, this first experiment aimed at generalizing the results from Peretz et al. to a larger sample of university students by controlling for potential biases due to the order of presentation.

Participants

Sixty-seven French-speaking children participated in Experiment 2. The sample included six 8-year-olds (four males and two females), eight 7-year-olds (four males and four females) and eight 6-year-olds (four males and four females). As these children were the first to be tested and all exhibited similar patterns of responses, they were grouped together in a single 6–8-year-olds category. There were also 15 5-year-olds (eight males and seven females), 19 4-year-olds (five males and 14 females)

General discussion

The present findings confirm that from 5 years of age, children are able to discriminate between happy and sad excerpts. To do so, 5-year-old children exclusively used information about tempo, whereas 6–8-year-olds, like adults, utilized both tempo and mode. The 3–4-year-old children did not show evidence of mastering such an ability. Altogether the results support the hypothesis that sensitivity to tempo precedes sensitivity to mode, the latter being exploited later than tempo by children to

Acknowledgements

The research was supported by a grant from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada to I.P. We are grateful to Julie Ayotte, Annie Lavoie and Kim Marion for testing children. We particularly wish to acknowledge the insightful and constructive comments of two anonymous reviewers on a previous draft of this paper.

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