Temporal Cues in the Judgment of Music Emotion for Normal and Cochlear Implant Listeners.
Tanmayee Pathre, Jeremy Marozeau
PMID 37097919WHAT IT FOUND
Normal-hearing listeners judged happy or sad music emotion from congas alone, without pitch or melody.
The speed they tapped to the beat predicted their emotion judgments better than the tempo written in the score. These temporal cues may explain how cochlear implant users perceive music emotion.
Key findings
01Listeners could identify happy versus sad emotions from conga drum pieces that contained no tonal or melodic information.
02The tempo written in the music score did not predict emotion judgments, but the speed at which listeners tapped to the beat did.
03An objective measure of the average time between notes predicted emotion judgments more accurately than the listeners' own tapping speed.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study tested normal-hearing listeners, not cochlear implant users. The findings are a model of what CI listeners might use, not direct evidence of their perception. Sample sizes were small, with 12 participants per experiment. The conga stimuli lacked the harmonic and melodic cues of real music, limiting generalizability to complex everyday listening. Emotion judgments varied between individuals, with two listeners showing no correlation between tapping speed and emotion ratings.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest and received no financial support for the research.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume this study proves that cochlear implant listeners use perceived tempo to judge emotion. The experiments were conducted only with normal-hearing listeners. The link to CI perception is an extrapolation based on comparing the current data to a separate prior study.