With apologies for cross-posting.
Please circulate:
Music in
Everyday Life: the Role of the Emotions
Considerable recent attention has been given to the way in which
listening to music in everyday life (home, car, office) may have different
characteristics to listening to music in deliberative cultural settings (e.g.
concert-hall, psychological laboratory). This means that psychological data and
theory derived from one context may not be straightforwardly applicable to the
other. Most research on emotional response to music has been gathered in
deliberative, rather than everyday, contexts. This paper attempts to
systematise what we now know about the contrasts between the deliberative and
the everyday by identifying ten distinctive characteristics of music in
everyday life, and examining the implications of each for the nature and
dynamics of emotional responses to such music. These characteristics relate to
the quality (intensity, memorability, integration), content (valence, reference,
focus, level), and context (elicitation, referent, attitude) of everyday
musical experiences. Such characteristics collectively delineate a distinctive
and coherent psychological world which, for many listeners, may be more
paradigmatic than the deliberative immersion of the classical concert-goer.
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