Music holds tremendous power over our emotions. Through a particularly touching phrase, a forceful chord or even a single note, musical sounds trigger powerful subjective reactions. For neuroscientists, these strong reactions are vexing facts, because such emotional reactions are typically understood as survival reflexes: our increased heart rates, suddenly- sweaty hands or deeper breath are responses preparing our organism to, for example, fight or run away if we stumble into a bear in the woods. Stumbling into music, be it a violin or a flute, a C or a C#, hardly seems a similar matter of life or death. In the past decade or so, experimentalists have tried to dissect musical sounds to see what exactly makes our brains think them worthy of such strong reactions – perhaps because they mimic the dissonant roar of a predator, reproduce the accents and prosody of emotional speech, or the spectral patterns of certain environmental sounds.
For music composers, sonic events that are able to drive us into such Darwinian reactions also are the topic of an endless quest. With careful workmanship, the art of the composer is to sculpt sounds – how they’re written, how they’re performed, how they’re heard – that are optimally significant for the listening audience. For a certain school of contemporary crea- tion in particular, music making proceeds by delibera- tely reducing and rarefying its sonic material to the point of imitating our most minimal biological acts, e.g. in voice (crying, shouting, breathing) or movement (brushing, sliding, springing).
With this symposium, featuring invited contributions by some of the most influent voices in the worlds of music neurosciences and contemporary music, our aim is to explore and confront the views of both scientists and composers on this issue – what are the origins of musical emotions?