Poster #203 - Children use Speed and Loudness to Communicate Musical Emotions

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Music is ubiquitous in children’s lives. Caregivers sing to infants to regulate their emotional state, and much of children’s entertainment and interactions incorporate play songs. In adulthood, both music listeners and performers identify music-related emotions as among the primary motivations for engaging with music (Juslin & Laukka, 2004; Lindström, Juslin, Bresin, & Williamon, 2003). Indeed, this aspect of music has been proposed as one possible explanation for the observation that music is found across human cultures (e.g. Trainor, 2015). Thus, the association between music and emotion appears to be present in infancy and persists throughout the lifespan.

By adulthood, adults can readily identify emotions in musical performances (e.g. Balkwill, Thompson, & Matsunaga, 2004; Fritz, et al., 2009; Juslin & Laukka, 2003). How children learn to interpret emotions in music, however, is not well understood. Even less is known about how children use expressive cues to communicate musical emotions. Previous research investigating children’s musical productions have been limited in two important ways. First, previous work has relied on children’s singing, which is likely affected by the physiological limitations of the vocal apparatus and by children’s tendency to focus more on linguistic content than expressive cues (Adachi & Trehub, 1998, 2012). Second, previous research has asked children to perform “happy,” and “sad” renditions only, and these two emotion categories differ both on the dimensions of valence (positive vs. negative) and arousal (high activity vs. low activity). Research on adults’ expressive performances suggests that certain acoustic cues tend to map onto one or the other dimension, but work with children thus far has not disentangled the cues used to express valence and arousal.

In the present work, 3-, 5- and 7-year-old children “performed” music to express basic emotions using a self-pacing paradigm. Participants controlled the onset and offset of each chord in a musical sequence (Bach chorales) by repeatedly pressing and lifting the same key on a MIDI piano. Key press velocity controlled the loudness of each chord. Participants performed the music to match vignettes and accompanying facial expressions conveying joy, sadness, peacefulness, or anger. We measured how children incorporated speed, loudness, and articulation (connectedness from chord to chord) to express these emotions. By five years, children distinguished emotional arousal, using faster and louder chords for joy and anger than sadness and peacefulness, as do adults. By 7 years, children’s performances became more differentiated from each other and more similar to adults, using more disconnected chords for joy than peacefulness and for anger than sadness, as well as incorporating different levels of loudness to distinguish between anger and joy. Three-year-olds showed little differentiation, suggesting that children’s ability to express emotions through music develops dramatically in early childhood.

Authors

• Haley Kragness, McMaster University
  Presenting Author

• Ammaarah Baksh, McMaster University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Laurel Trainor, McMaster University
  Non-Presenting Author