Music in Everyday Life: the Role of the Emotions
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- Speaker(s):
- John Sloboda (RHUL) and Chair: Susan Hallam (Institute of Education)
- Event date:
- Thursday 07 May 2009
School of Advanced Study, University of London
- Description
-
Considerable recent attention has been given to the way in which listening to music in everyday life (home, car, office) may have different characteristics to listening to music in deliberative cultural settings (e.g. concert-hall, psychological laboratory). This means that psychological data and theory derived from one context may not be straightforwardly applicable to the other. Most research on emotional response to music has been gathered in deliberative, rather than everyday, contexts. This paper attempts to systematise what we now know about the contrasts between the deliberative and the everyday by identifying ten distinctive characteristics of music in everyday life, and examining the implications of each for the nature and dynamics of emotional responses to such music. These characteristics relate to the quality (intensity, memorability, integration), content (valence, reference, focus, level), and context (elicitation, referent, attitude) of everyday musical experiences. Such characteristics collectively delineate a distinctive and coherent psychological world which, for many listeners, may be more paradigmatic than the deliberative immersion of the classical concert-goer.