Affect induction through musical sounds: An ethological perspective

Abstract

How does music induce or evoke feeling states in listeners? A number of mechanisms have been proposed for how sounds induce emotions, including innate auditory responses, learned associations and mirror neuron processes. Inspired by ethology, it is suggested that the ethological concepts of signals, cues and indices offer additional analytic tools for better understanding induced affect. It is proposed that ethological concepts help explain why music is able to induce only certain emotions, why some induced emotions are similar to the displayed emotion (whereas other induced emotions differ considerably from the displayed emotion), why listeners often report feeling mixed emotions and why only some musical expressions evoke similar responses across cultures.