Stephen’s question “Do musical-emotional associations vary across cultures?” is difficult to address. As discussed in class, there are six distinct universal emotions. These emotions are happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, and anger. Each of these universal emotions are expressed in the same way physically by each individual experiencing it. For example, happiness is usually expressed by means of a smile and sadness is usually expressed by means of a frown. Seeing these expressions on people’s faces is universally understood regardless of culture and language which tend to be barriers for some understandings. Taking on Stephen’s question about musical-emotional associations from Kivy’s perspective, I believe that the answer would be no, musical-emotional associations do not vary across cultures because every culture physically manifests the emotions in the same way. Kivy’s main argument in the essay we read most recently in class addressed the ability for music to portray specific emotions by possessing qualities which are similar to those that humans possess when they are experience the particular emotion. From this perspective, the emotional music comparison is based solely off of observable characteristics such as body language. Body language of individuals expressing a particular emotion tends to be the same for all cultures because the emotions themselves are universal. What are some arguments for the opposing perspective where musical-emotional associations do vary across cultures? Also, how would emotions which are not considered to be universal be expressed differently from culture to culture?
Small point of contention-- In Ekman's research there were some cultures who did not recognize all of the facial expressions. The inhabitants of Papa New Guinea for example, were unable to discern between surprise and fear, as culturally there was no call for surprise without fear.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I was thinking of more nuanced signals of emotions, such as minor chords sounding 'sad'.
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