Covering all the emotions in my workshps with music "GEMS": wonder, transcendence, tendern

Robinson, J. and Hatten, R., S. (2012) ‘Emotions in Music’. Music Theory Spectrum. Vol 34(2) pp71-106. JSTOR [online] Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1525/mts.2012.34.2.71.pdf (Accessed 18/01/2017)

My thoughts at reading the introduction of this essay is that, just like in visual art there maybe several levels on which a person experiences music / sound. In other words there is an Abstract to the music a deeper level that operates within us which as is as yet a new to us in our evolution as is the Abstract painting. Do we hear things in the same way as we see things….. Presumably... we do….. we listen for danger…. we listen for water….. in the darkness we listen for our mate of what the elements will bring by daylight. Our first layer is hearing….our second listening…. Then a deeper voice that operates on the within??

It is also of great practical use to have the Geneva scale when one is selecting music to appeal to the senses. Again a well infromed checklist, ensuring that the practice of 'musicpainting' leave no emotional stone unturned. The image created for the

There is a good deal of empirical evidence that music can indeed affect our bodily states, including autonomic nervous system responses (heart and pulse rate, blood pressure, skin conductance, and so on), as well as posture, muscular tension, and respiration. In particular, music affects movement, as in foot-tapping and swaying to the music, and action tendencies (flinching, fistclenching, etc.). It is highly likely, therefore, that music can induce bodily changes that are experienced as emotional feelings. Most of the available evidence concerns the way in which music causes listeners to experience emotional feelings of happiness, sadness, calm, excitement, and anxiety or tension. Some of these effects are probably due to rhythm. The neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel has noted that ‘‘humans are the only species to spontaneously synchronize to the beat of music,’’ and there is evidence from the interaction between mother and newborns suggesting that lullabies may have a calming effect by a process of ‘‘rhythmic entrainment.’’ Juslin and Vastfja ¨ suggest that ‘‘perceived motion in music stimulates self-movement, which through entrainment and its effects on the physiology of the listener’’ evokes an emotional response. Because the happiness, sadness, calm, or excitement induced by music does not seem to be about anything in particular, some have argued that what are aroused are mood feelings rather than emotional feelings strictly speaking. Moods are widely believed to be more global and diffuse than emotions, and not to require anything specific that they are about. Moods can be caused by drugs, fatigue, or the season of the year; hence they do not need to be set off by an appraisal relating to a specific adaptational encounter, such as a specific threat or loss. There is some evidence to support the view that music can arouse moods. First, according to many studies, people do report feeling happy when listening to happy music, sad when listening to sad music, anxious when listening to anxious music, and calm when listening to calm music. And second, psychologists sometimes use music as a ‘‘mood induction procedure’’ and then study its effects on various cognitive capacities. There is good evidence that moods bias the cognitive system, affecting memory, perception, decision-making, and so on.99 For example, people in a sad (or happy) mood are more likely to remember sad (or happy) events and to perceive more sadness (or happiness) in ambiguous faces. Music does apparently have the capacity to arouse moods and to influence people’s memories and perceptions in this way. Moreover, many people think that moods are dispositional states, i.e., states in which we are disposed to enter more specific emotional states. Thus, music that puts me into a ‘‘global’’ sad mood could indirectly induce in me a more specific emotion of sadness in which my sadness is, for example, about a remembered sad event in the past.

After several studies involving the self-reports of large numbers of music listeners, Marcel Zentner and his collaborators 101at the Centre for Affective Sciences in Geneva have proposed nine music-induced ‘‘emotion factors’’: wonder, transcendence, tenderness, nostalgia, peacefulness, power, joyful activation, tension and sadness, which they have christened the Geneva Emotional Music Scale(GEMS).

Each ‘‘factor’’ includes a number of different emotional feelings. For example, ‘‘power’’ includes feelings of triumph, energy, and heroism; joyful activation includes feeling bouncy or animated; ‘‘transcendence’’ includes feelings of spirituality or transcendence. It is interesting to note that—at least, according to self-reports of music listeners—among the emotions detected by GEMS are not only joyful activation, sadness, peacefulness, and tension (which seem to be roughly equivalent to happiness, sadness, calm, and anxiety), but also feelings of tenderness, nostalgia, and triumph. Zentner et al. found that ‘‘frequency ratings of felt musical emotions and everyday emotions differ significantly from each other,’’102 so that nostalgia, for example, occurs far more frequently in response to music than it does in ordinary life. The inclusion of feelings o f tenderness, triumph, and nostalgias paradigmatic musical emotions, however, seems to compound our problem. How can we feel tenderness, or nostalgia, or triumph, without anything to be tender, nostalgic, or triumphant about?

The anterior insula forms a neural conduit between the Mirror Neuron System and the limbic system,...allowing incoming information to be evaluated in relation to the perceiver’s autonomic and emotional state, thus leading to a complex affective or emotional response to the music.... The recruitment of these neural systems in both the agent and the listener allows for a shared affective motion experience (SAME). Thus, the expressive dynamics of heard sound gestures can be interpreted in terms of the expressive dynamics of personal vocal and physical gestures.’’ See Overy and Molnar-Szakacs (2009, 492).