In this study, two experiments which related to communication of emotional intention through music played by young children were conducted. In the first experiment 20 kindergarten children played a percussion instrument, the tambourine, improvisationally to induce listeners to feel ‘happiness’, ‘anger’, and ‘sadness’. Their performances were analyzed in terms of the performance length, number of beats, sound level, interval of beats, the rhythm patterns and so on. As a result, it was found that the intended emotions influenced the sound level and the interval of beats. The sound level of ‘anger’ was significantly higher than that of ‘happiness’ or ‘sadness’. The interval of beats in ‘anger’ tended to be shorter than that in ‘sadness’. On the other hand, it was found that emotions did not systematically influence the rhythm patterns. In the second experiment 31 university students were presented the performances of the first experiment and judged those intended emotions. The results revealed that the rates of correct responses for the three intended emotions ranged from 44% to 51%. These rates were all significantly higher than the chance level.

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It is considered that absolute pitch [AP] judgments require the associations between categories of musical pitch and their labels, but the role of phonetic labels on categorical perception has not been investigated well. In this study, absolute pitch identification was tested to examine how the phonetic labels mediate the association between the categorization and pitch. In the ``fixed doh'' solmization, the white key pitches have simple, single syllabic phonetic labels, while the black key pitches do not. Accordingly, phonetic encoding should be different between the white key and black key pitches. In order to clarify the influence of this difference on perceptual representation of pitch categories, this study compared error rates of the white key pitches to the adjacent tones (i.e. white key-or black key pitches). As a result, AP possessors made more errors to the black key pitches than to the white key pitches. Also, AP possessors tended to make more confusion errors between pitches which had similar phonetic labels in a condition considered to activate a speech mode. These results suggested that AP possessors encoded pitch depending on the phonetic labels.

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College students majoring in education (N＝100) participated in an experiment which examined changes of the listeners’mood and their impression rating of a picture. The first investigated factor was mood induction (affliation/depression/control), and the second factor was listening time (2 minutes before/during whole experiment). After the experimental groups were presented with music, the participants rated their own mood. In the second step, the participants of the experimental groups and a control group were presented with a picture, and then rated it. As for the results, the effect of mood induction was observed, and the induced mood affected the impression rating of the picture. The experimental groups rated their mood positively after listening to the music, while the control group did not rate their mood positively. The affiliation group rated the picture positively, while the depression group rated the picture negatively.

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In recent years the study of musical affect and emotion has been developing in various ways. This field is connected with music therapy, which puts sounds and music to practical use for people suffering from illness or impediment. One of the main reasons for using music is that it has therapeutic value as ``a regulator of emotion'' for listeners. This paper is an attempt to review the present state of research on both musical emotion and music therapy, and to comment on their mutual relevance from the view point of music psychology. First, we review music therapy research; then we touch on the mutual relation of the two fields. A review of empirical studies of musical emotion follows. We discuss then several theories of induced emotions in music, and also highlight the primary issues of music therapy, and finally consider the problems in fundamental research that still await solution.

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The concept of soundscape was originally proposed by R. Murray Shafer. This article introduces the concept of soundscape and its evolution until now. This article systematically explains why and how Schafer has proposed the concept of soundscape, the features of concept of soundscape, three areas to realize the soundscape concept (acoustic ecology, soundscape design, and sound education), and expansion and interdisciplinary nature of the soundscape concept. Researchers in the area of music perception and cognition may not ignore the stream of the soundscape study. Readers can understand what soundscape is by this article.

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