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International Symposium on Performance Science © The Author 2013ISBN tbc All rights reserved

Emotional communication among performers:Modelling the affective experience as portrayed

and perceived emotions

Fernando Gualda1 and Júlio César Wagner1

1 Music Department, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil

This paper reports results from listening experiments with liveperformances, during which the performer conveyed distinct affects for

repetitions of the same musical excerpt. Two kinds of experiment were

conducted. Pilot studies were designed to test word-based interfaces for

marking changes of expression. The main experiment aimed at testing

how the performer conveyed his interpretations to 60 listeners, all

musicians. Results indicate a bias toward higher valence in the report by

the listeners than in the intended affects as conveyed by the performer,

as well as an amplification of the values on the arousal axis.

Keywords: Emotional Communication; Portrayed Emotion; perceived

Emotion; Music Performance; Affective Experience

This research assumes that multiple interpretations of a work are desirable. It

follows that multiple apprehensions of a performance may also be both

possible and desirable. Winold (1993) suggest that "a musical work may not

only afford multiple interpretations, but also present ambiguities that

stimulate concomitant interpretations." (Gualda, 2011, p. 11). Since the nature

of affective experience may transcend the possibility of modelling it as a

single or central emotion, this research attempts to study the communication

of the affective experience as a combination of several discrete

representations of emotions on the valence-arousal circumplex (Russel 1980),

as translated into Portuguese (Ramos 2008; Fornari 2010). Thus it differs

from previous works, for it does not try to model how affects can be conveyed,

but instead whether combinations of contrasting affects are comprehended by

the listeners as as well as how it differs from those intended by the performer.



002 WWW.PERFORMANCESCIENCE.ORG

Feldman (1995) studied "the relationship between personality and the

structure of the affective experience" (p. 156) by modelling variations of the

overall shape of the position of 16 mood terms on the semantic circumplexacross subjects. Her work suggests that each person might have a particular

bias toward amplifying or reducing the scaling of the values on the valence-

arousal axes of the semantic circumplex. The dimensionality of the semantic

circumplex has also been studied. Eerola and Vuoskoski (2010) suggest that

three dimensional models might collapse into two dimensions, whereas

Trkulja and Jankovic (2012) suggest that "cognitive evaluation" may also

contribute to the perception of emotion in music (p. 1017), but it may

correspond to a small percentage.

Eerola and Vuoskoski (2011) discuss the some problems in the study of

musical emotion: "(1) reliance on discrete emotions only, (2) focus on

unambiguous exemplars, or (3) insufficient stimulus quantity." (p. 40)

Zentner, Grandjean, and Scherer (2008) propose nine musical emotions, and

discuss whether they are true emotions. The authors distinguish between

induced emotion (emotion felt by the listener, aroused by music) and

perceived emotion (imagined emotion, associated with the music) and define

"attribution error" (pp. 514-515) as the confusion between emotions listeners

might have imagined or perceived whilst listening to music with the emotionsmusic might have induced on the listeners. This research does not

differentiate between aroused and perceived emotions. It simply assumes that

even if emotions reported by the listeners could be of either nature, it does

not interfere in conveying those emotions.

METHOD

Participants

60 listeners, 22 years old (s.d. 4.562) on average, with an average 9.8 years

(s.d. 4.718) of musical training, (under)graduate music students from

UFRGS, who attended an introductory class, undertook a listening

experiment with live performances. They filled an eight-word interface

containing discrete affects that should be associated with the performance

they have just heard. The interface accepted three levels of association (Likert

scale). Since participants have probably never been exposed to this

experimental setting, before starting the experiment, they performed threetrials with a different musical excerpt from those utilised in the experiment.



INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PERFORMANCE SCIENCE 003

Materials

Three short musical excerpts from the standard oboe repertoire have been

selected by the performer, namely bars 1-4 from Pan, the first movement ofthe Six Metamorphoses after Ovid , Op. 49, by Benjamin Britten; the first bar

of the second movement of the Sonate pour Hautbois, Op. 166 by Camille

Saint-Saëns; bars 15-27 of Café 1930 from Historia del Tango, by Ástor

Piazzolla, originally composed for the flute. The selected excerpts allowed

distinct interpretations that included at least two contrasting affects. In each

excerpt, the first half is structurally different from the second. Figure 1

(below) presents the three excerpts with an additional double bar that

indicates the point of that division:

Figure 1. Musical excerpts utilised in the listening experiments (live performances):

Britten (top); Saint-Saëns (middle); and Piazzolla (bottom).

Three interfaces have been devised. The first contained twelve pairs of similar

affects (Russel 1980) in Portuguese (Ramos 2008; Fornari 2010). The second

presented four pairs of dichotomies: agitated versus sleepy (maximal and

minimal arousal); beautiful versus ugly (maximal and minimal valence);happy versus sad (positive valence and arousal, negative valence and arousal)

and serene and tense. The third version presented two lists of 8 words.

Procedure

Three musicians took part in a pilot study in which three different materials

were tested, namely a long list with 24 affects, a short list of eight affects that

approximate the equal division of the semantic circumplex, and a double list

of the same eight affects designed for comparing contrasts between affects.The third version, with contrasting affects was chosen to be applied.

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Before performing each excerpt, the performer filled the same list of affects

that the listeners would fill after the performance. In each performance, the

performer attempted to convey a different pair of affects: one for the first half,and another until the end of the excerpt. In order to seek ecological validity

(Clarke 2004), no further instructions were given to the listeners besides to

mark with a 3-point Likert-scale (nothing, a little, a lot) on each affect on the

lists after listening to each performance.

RESULTS

Averaged data on reports by 60 musicians who undertook the experiment

were compared through canonical correlation. Figure 2 depicts r values on

the polar coordinate system, representing the valence-arousal plane. Figure 2

also presents a theoretical model of the expected correlation among affects. It

is represented by dotted line. In agitated (maximal arousal, Figure 2,) all

correlations, with exception of ugly, are very close to their theoretically

expected values. Similarly, its dichotomy, sleepy, is similar to the model.

Even though affects are not orthogonal, dichotomies of affects presented very

strong anti-correlation, as presented in Table 1.

Figure 2. Polar representations of maximal and minimal arousal. The angle represents

the emotion on the circumplex, and the azimuth represents the correlation of average

reports on emotions. Dashed lines depict a theoretical model of ideal correlation.

Maximal correlation (1.0) is represented on the outmost circumference (octogonon),

whereas minimal correlation (-1.0) is represented by the point on the center.

-1.0

0.0

1.0

A+

V+

A-

V-

Agitated

!"#$

$#$

"#$

A+

V+

A-

V-

Sleepy



INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PERFORMANCE SCIENCE 005

Table 1. Correlation coefficients of the four dichotomies of affects ( p < 0.0001).

Agitated-Sleepy Happy-Sad Beautiful-Ugly Serene-Tense r -0.931 -0.968 -0.736 -0.640

The level of agreement between musicians-as-listeners and the performer

was not particularly high (overall agreement, r = 0.26, p = 0.049; principal

affects, r = 0.474, p = 0.0001). In accordance with Feldman (1995), however,

there is an overall bias that can be measured on each listener. This bias could

have been a personal bias of the performer himself, that might have tried to

emphasise affects on the valence axis instead of those on the arousal axis. It

could also be explained by the choice of repertoire, which might favour higher

valence.

Figure 3. Performer's and listeners' percentages of marks on the eight affections

considered in this study (left). The polar representation of the difference between

portrayed and perceived emotions presents a clear bias toward positive valence (right).

DISCUSSION

This research focused on discrete emotions, and combined averaged data on

their frequency in order to represent the ambiguity of multiple or concurrent

apprehensions. Performer's interpretations also presented some ambiguity

that was captured by this approach. Since performer and listeners were

colleagues, his presence might have induced the student listeners to deem as

higher in valence.

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful for support from PROPESQ/UFRGS.

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Address for correspondence

Fernando Gualda, Music Department, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Rua

Senhor dos Passos, 248, Porto Alegre, RS 90020-180, Brazil; Email: [email protected]

References

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