Journal Article

Music and movement share a dynamic structure that supports universal expressions of emotion

Casey, Michael, Sievers, Beau, Wheatley, Thalia, Polansky, Larry

2013

Overview

Music moves us. Its kinetic power is the foundation of human behaviors as diverse as dance, romance, lullabies, and the military march. Despite its significance, the music-movement relationship is poorly understood. We present an empirical method for testing whether music and movement share a common structure that affords equivalent and universal emotional expressions. Our method uses a computer program that can generate matching examples of music and movement from a single set of features: rate, jitter (regularity of rate), direction, step size, and dissonance/visual spikiness. We applied our method in two experiments, one in the United States and another in an isolated tribal village in Cambodia. These experiments revealed three things: (i) each emotion was represented by a unique combination of features, (ii) each combination expressed the same emotion in both music and movement, and (iii) this common structure between music and movement was evident within and across cultures.

• Publisher: National Academy of Sciences
• Subject: Affectivity. Emotion / Analysis of Variance / Behavior / Biological and medical sciences / Cambodia / Cluster Analysis / Computer Simulation / computer software / Culture / Emotional expression / Emotions / Experiments / Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology / human behavior / Humans / Models, Psychological / Monte Carlo Method / Movement / Music / Music - psychology / Music cognition / Musical dissonance / Musical expression / Musical forms / Musical modes / Musical perception / Musical rhythm / Musical structure / Personality. Affectivity / Psychological and Cognitive Sciences / Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry / Psychology. Psychophysiology / Social Sciences / Software / United States / villages