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Working Title: IS THERE A POINT TO LISTENING TO MUSIC?: AN OVERVIEW OF THE EMOTIONAL EFFECTIVENESS OF MUSIC

Source: EMOTION AND MEANING IN MUSIC media type="custom" key="26160078"Philosophers, musicians and researchers have long speculated on the emotional response to music for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Leonard B. Meyer’s //Emotion and Meaning in Music// is the most important contribution to this debate. Rather than stating a claim without any substantial evidence, Meyer demonstrates that emotions emerged through the cognitive processing of the music’s elements such as tempo, pitch, rhythm and mode. Indeed, Meyer formulated an analysis based on objective and subjective evidence, which is able to establish true verification. Meyer’s dissertation is at the forefront of connecting musical aesthetics to neuroscience and psychology. “Any discussion of the emotional response to music” said Meyer, former music theorist, “is faced at the very outset with the fact that very little is known about this response and its relation to the stimulus” (p.6). Although in his work, Meyer offers a superfluous amount of evidence based largely on the accounts of philosophers and the psychological changes that are believed to be associated with musical effectiveness. media type="custom" key="26160082"Meyer relies on psychological insights and arguments in order to assert the fact that “the perception of music; namely, the mental attitude of the audience” plays a major role in the emotional response to a piece of music. Ultimately, the goal of this dissertation is “to suppose that the physiological changes observed are a response to the listener’s mental set rather than to assume that the tone as such can, in some mysterious and unexplained way, bring these changes about directly” (p.11). Basically, Meyer is saying that the emotion felt when listening to a musical composition depends on the assessment of the situation. Meyer demonstrates this claim with an example of a falling person: “The sensation of falling through space, unconditioned by any belief or knowledge as to the ultimate outcome, will, for instance, arouse highly unpleasant emotions. Yet a similar fall experienced as a parachute jump in an amusement park may, because of our belief in the presence of control and in the nature of the resolution, prove most pleasing” (p.20) To put it another way, Meyer explains that backgrounds and beliefs are fundamentally responsible for either facilitating or suppressing emotional responses. “//Works Cited//” Meyer, Leonard B. //Emotion and Meaning in Music//. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1956. Google Books. Google, 01 June 2008. Web. 02 June 2014.