A multi-dimensional study of the emotion in current Japanese popular music

Abstract

Musical psychologists illustrated musical emotion with various numbers of dimensions ranging from two to eight. Most of them concentrated on classical music. Only a few researchers studied emotion in popular music, but the number of pieces they used was very small. In the present study, perceptual experiments were conducted using large sets of popular pieces. In Experiment 1, ten listeners rated musical emotion for 50 J-POP pieces using 17 SD scales. The results of factor analysis showed that the emotional space was constructed by three factors, ``evaluation,'' ``potency'' and ``activity.'' In Experiment 2, three musicians and eight non-musicians rated musical emotion for 169 popular pieces. The set of pieces included not only J-POP tunes but also Enka and western popular tunes. The listeners also rated the suitability for several listening situations. The results of factor analysis showed that the emotional space for the 169 pieces was spanned by the three factors, ``evaluation,'' ``potency'' and ``activity,'' again. The results of multiple-regression analyses suggested that the listeners like to listen to a ``beautiful'' tune with their lovers and a ``powerful'' and ``active'' tune in a situation where people were around them.