Elements of musically conveyed emotion: Insights from musical and perceptual analyses of historic preludes

Abstract

This thesis comprises two manuscripts prepared for scholarly journals. Chapter 2 comprises an article entitled “Exploring Historic Changes in Musical Communication: Deconstructing Emotional Cues in Preludes by Bach and Chopin.”, which examines emotion perception in historic prelude sets by J.S. Bach and F. Chopin. This work connects psychological research on perceived musical emotion to musicological research describing changes in music structure. Using a technique called commonality analysis to deconstruct cues’ individual and joint roles in predicting participants’ perceived emotions, the chapter clarifies how music’s conveyed emotion can differ in compositions from different eras. Chapter 3 comprises an article entitled “Parsing Musical Patterns in Prelude Sets: Bridging Qualitative and Quantitative Epistemologies in Historical Music Research”. This chapter bridges gaps between qualitative and quantitative research on music history through an analytical approach engaging with both fields. Specifically, cluster analyses of Bach and Chopin’s preludes reveal notable differences in the composers’ expressive toolkits, consistent with work from historical and empirical music research. Through a novel analytical framework, the chapter illustrates a method for detecting groups of pieces demarcated by salient musical differences, assessing cues’ importance within these groups, and determining the most influential cue values for each group. Together, these articles provide new insight into the subtle sonic relationships influencing musical meaning and emotion perception.