Emotions in everyday listening to music

John A. Sloboda and Susan A. O'Neill

Department of Psychology, Keele University

To appear in Juslin, P. and Sloboda, J. (Eds.), Music and Emotion: Theory and Research.

Oxford University Press.

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 Emotions in everyday listening to music

1. Introduction

Recent developments in social psychology involving discursive approaches (e.g., Edwards

& Potter, 1992; Harré & Gillett, 1994) as well as the growing literature in anthropological

psychology which examines emotion systems in other cultures (e.g., Lutz, 1982, 1988; Rosaldo,

1980), have altered the way we conceptualise and understand of the psychology of emotions. In

particular, social constructionist theory suggests that emotions should not be thought of as abstract

entities such as ‘anger’ or ‘elation’, but rather as actual moments of emotional feelings and displays

in particular situations within a particular culture. These emotional feelings and displays are not

considered to represent internal states of an individual (whether innate or acquired through learning

and experience) which result in physiological reactions to environmental stimuli. Rather, they are

meaningful displays that are taken as emotional when they are embodied expressions of

judgements, and in many cases, ways of accomplishing certain social acts (Harré & Gillett, 1994).

Despite the growing recognition that our experience of emotion is inextricably linked to the

social world and the structures and practices used to make sense of that world, we tend to think of

our emotions as personal, ‘private’ experiences, especially if they do not involve ‘public’ emotional

displays. For example, when we feel angry, we might experience our anger as a private emotion

which may or may not be ‘acted out’ in the things we do or say. However, this is not the case in all

cultures. Lutz (1990) describes the way in which the Ifaluk (Samoan and Pintupi Aborigine) use

emotion words to describe their relationship to events and other people, and not as expressions of

private, internal states. For example, the closest translation of anger in the Ifaluk language is the

word ‘song’ which means ‘justifiable anger’. It is not considered a privately owned feeling but

rather a moral and public account of some transgression of accepted social practices and values (cf

Burr, 1995). According to Harré and Gillett (1994), we must take into account both emotional

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feelings and displays as part of a sequence of events based on conventions and rules that depend

not only on shared understanding of language, but also a common background of knowledge and

beliefs.

Music is an important cultural resource in the social construction of emotional feelings and

displays. Music is always heard in some social context. It is heard in a particular place and time,

with or without other individuals being present, and with other activities taking place which have

their own complex sources of meaning and emotion. The emotional response to the music is

coloured, and possibly sometimes completely determined, by these contextual factors. Any

meaningful account of music’s role in the emotional response of individuals must involve the

recognition of these complex, interdependent social factors. We should be quite wary about too

facile generalisations from the results of laboratory studies to the rest of life. The laboratory has

some quite specific social features which make it unlike many other music-listening situations. We

therefore focus in this chapter on investigations which attempt to preserve, or take account of, as

much of the social context of music listening as possible.

Music is ubiquitous in contemporary life. The prevailing contexts in which we encounter

music are, by definition, mundane. They include those contexts in which the most routine activities

of life take place: waking up, washing and dressing, eating, cleaning, shopping, travelling. There

are, of course, special and ‘out of the ordinary’ events which music can form a part of, even a

crucial and defining part, but we would argue that we can only understand these special events and

their emotional significance in relation to everyday experience. It is the everyday and normal

which frames and helps define the special. This chapter focuses, therefore, on habitual and routine

modes of engagement with music.

Our strategy makes it necessary to exclude any significant treatment of two types of

phenomenon. The first exclusion relates to the extremely intense, sometimes transcendent

experiences to music which people characterise as defining or life-changing (e.g. Gabrielsson &

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Lindstrom, 1995; Gabrielsson, this volume). These events rarely occur in the lives of individuals,

and so are difficult to study empirically. One retrospective study by Sloboda (1989a), which we

will discuss in more detail in a later section, provides suggestive evidence that these ‘peak’ events

can occur in childhood, and, when they do, can have a profound influence on a person's attitudes

towards, and commitment to, music. Indeed, people who devote their lives to music often include

such experiences in the stories of their developing commitment (e.g. Brodsky, 1995). This, then,

brings us to the second exclusion of our chapter. We shall not be examining the everyday

emotional world of the professional musician or the intending professional musician (i.e. the music

student). The emotional experiences of these groups are covered other chapters in this book (ref.

Persson chapter), and we would wish to claim that the everyday contexts in which musicians

experience music are so different from those of non-musicians (who form the vast bulk of the

population of the industrialised nations) that they require separate treatment.

2. Capturing everyday experience

One of the problems with studying everyday experience is that it happens outside the

laboratory in a wide variety of settings. Although an investigator may make observations (or even

attempt to experimentally manipulate) musical engagement in a single setting, it is difficult to

observe directly the entire range of settings in which music might be experienced even in the course

of a single day. A second problem is that the everyday is, by definition, unmemorable, and so

retrospective studies (such as interviews) may not capture the richness and diversity of musical

experience. The more mundane occurrences are simply forgotten or filtered out. For these reasons

we (Sloboda, O'Neill & Ivaldi, submitted) recently conducted a pilot study with eight individuals

where we adapted a method developed by Csikszentmihalyi and Lefevre (1989) which allows for

an unselected and therefore representative sample of everyday experiences to be studied in some

detail.

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 The method is known as the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), and involves participants

carrying electronic pagers with them at all times during their waking hours. The pagers are

connected to a computer which is programmed to call participants at pre-programmed intervals. In

our study, participants were paged once in each two-hour period between 0800 and 2200. The

precise timing of a call within each two-hour block was determined randomly. On each paging

participants were asked to stop what they were doing as soon as practicable and complete one page

of a response booklet, which they were also asked to carry with them at all times. The booklet

asked questions regarding the most recent experience of music listening since the previous paging.

If there had been no music experience in that period, participants completed the booklet with

respect to the activity taking place when the pager sounded.

The eight participants in our study were all adult non-musicians between the ages of 18 and

40 who were either studying or working at our institution. They each carried a pager with them for

a one-week period. Analyses of the data collected provided some quite revealing information about

everyday music use. First, 91% of paging resulted in a page of the booklet being filled in. This

suggested a high level of compliance and involvement in this task over an extended period of time.

It also meant that the method provided an almost complete picture of the musical and non-musical

experiences of each participant over a normal week (none of the participants reported the week in

question being unusual or atypical).

We call the event described on each page of the response booklet an ‘episode’. A second

major finding was that 44% of all episodes involved music. In other word, there was a 44%

likelihood of music being experienced in any two-hour period. It has repeatedly been claimed that

music pervades everyday life. Our data confirms this and provides a specific estimate of its

frequency.

Participants were asked to respond in their own words to the question “What was the MAIN

thing you were doing?”. Reported activities were coded post-hoc according to the classification

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shown in Table 1. There were three main categories, personal, leisure and work. Personal

activities cover those everyday activities which are a necessary consequence of living, and are

further divided into states of being, maintenance activities and travel. Leisure activities were

divided into three sub-categories, including music-related activities in virtue of the focus of this

study. Work activities were categorised according to whether they were primarily solitary (self) or

primarily group-based (other).

Table 1. Categorisation of activities

Category Core Exemplars

Time fillers doing nothing, waiting

Personal - being states of being (e.g. sleeping, waking up, being ill, suffering from

hangover)

Personal - maintenance washing, getting dressed, cooking, eating at home, housework,

shopping

Personal -travelling leaving home, driving, walking, going home

Leisure - music listening to music (N.B. there were no examples of performing music)

Leisure - passive watching TV/film, putting on radio, relaxing, reading for pleasure

Leisure - active games, sport, socialising, eating out, chatting with friends

Work - self writing, computing, marking/assessing, reading for study

Work - other planning for meeting, in lecture/seminar, making appointment, in

meeting

It is particularly significant that listening to music as a main activity accounted for only a

small percentage of all episodes (2%). This suggests that the concentrated, attentive, focusing on

music that is paradigmatic of the classical concert or the laboratory experiment is a rather untypical

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activity for most listeners. Instead people are distributing their attention across a complex situation

of which music is only a part. In fact, there were three categories of activity which seemed

particularly likely to involve music. These were the personal-maintenance, personal-travel, and

leisure-active categories from Table 1.

Emotional reactions to the music were measured by asking participants to rate their state on

eleven bipolar scales (e.g. happy-sad, irritable-generous, bored-interested) with respect to how they

felt before the music started and how they felt after it had ended. We found that these scales

grouped under three main factors. The first factor related to the degree of positivity or negativity,

the second factor to the degree or arousal or alertness, and the third factor to the extent to which

participants' attention was on the present situation or elsewhere (e.g. reminiscing, daydreaming,

nostalgic).

We found that, on average, the experience of music resulted in participants becoming more

positive, more alert, and more focussed in the present. Insofar as such emotional transitions are

desired and beneficial, it could be concluded that in general music is making these participants "feel

better". Table 2 shows the number of episodes resulting in change on each of the factors. This

shows that where there is change, arousal rarely moves in the direction of lower arousal (7% of

changes), and little more so in the direction of less positivity (13%). However, present-mindedness

shows 35% of change episodes involving moves away from the "positive pole". It seems, in other

words, as though emotional states arising from a focus on "things and people not present”, such as

nostalgia, are a particularly important sub-category within everyday responses to music.

Table 2. Distribution of mood-change direction

Number of episodes showing

Positive change No change Negative Change

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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Arousal 63 82 5

Present-mindedness 90 9 48

Positivity 71 71 11

3. Themes and issues in everyday musical experience

The experience sampling method (ESM) is only one of the means available for investigating

everyday music experience. Rather, however than describe each other available methodology in

turn, we will now address some core themes which emerge from our work, comparing it, where

appropriate, with results from other kinds of studies.

3.1 Functional niches within daily life

Our working assumption has been that music has different emotional functions in different

contexts (c.f. Merriam, 1965). In our ESM study we were, therefore, interested to see whether there

were any cases in which mood change factors were dissociated from one another (i.e. cases where

one mood increased simultaneously with another mood decreasing). Inspection of cases showed

that 16% of music episodes were in this category. These cases are particularly important in

beginning to identify distinct functional niches for music engagement. The largest group of such

episodes (10) involved increases in positivity along with decreases in present-mindedness.

One example of this comes from a male participant reporting being at home relaxing with a

group of friends and acquaintances. The activity was being done out of choice. There was ambient

music playing on a CD, although the participant had not chosen it. The participant commented that

"the music was very tranquil and relaxing", that others present were "discussing work boringly" and

that s/he was "very, very tired". This episode was also associated with a decrease in arousal during

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the music. It would be reasonable to assume that the participant was using the music as a means of

relaxing and disengaging from the surrounding conversation.

A second example from the same category is provided by a female participant who reported

being at home, tidying a bedroom as part of the normal basic routine. The participant had chosen to

listen to a piece of pop/chart music on a tape. The participant commented that the music was

chosen to "enhance the wonderful experience of cleaning" and was "very lively". This episode was

associated with an increase in arousal during the music. It seems as if the purpose of this music

was to allow the participant to focus attention on the music, and away from the uninteresting

domestic chore, and this focused attention was used to increase energy levels.

It was less easy to find examples of episodes where positivity decreased, but one clear

episode involved a female participant at home, alone, doing the washing up as part of a basic

routine. S/he had chosen to listen to rock music on the radio and commented that the track was "a

favourite song I had not heard for some time... It brought back certain memories". The music

increased this participant's nostalgia, sadness, and loneliness, at the same time as making him/her

more alert. It is clear that this episode reminded the participant of a significant past event which

brought on nostalgia. At the same time it appears as if s/he had chosen the music to engage and

arouse during an uninteresting routine task.

In a separate study, using a stratified sample of 76 panel members from the Sussex Mass

Observation Archive (Sloboda, 2000a; see also Sheridan, 1998), respondents were asked to write,

in open-ended fashion about the uses they made of music in their everyday lives. Table 3 shows

the activities and functions spontaneously mentioned by members of the sample. The most

frequently mentioned activities were housework and travel. This mirrored quite closely the

distribution found in the ESM study. Functions mentioned were varied but had a predominantly

affective character, with many participants (particularly women) explicitly mentioning music as a

mood-changer or enhancer. The most frequently mentioned function was essentially nostalgic.

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Participants found it natural to link functions to activities, often mentioning both in the same

sentence (e.g. on arrival home from work "music lifts the stress of work: it has an immediate

healing effect").

Table 3. Percentage of Mass-Observation Respondents reporting various functions and activities

chosen for music.

ACTIVITIES

To wake up to 6

While having a bath 4

Whilst exercising 4

To sing along to 6

To work to (desk work) 14

To work to (housework) 22

On arrival home from work 2

Whilst having a meal 12

Background while socialising 4

To accompany sexual/romantic events 4

Whilst reading 6

In bed / to get to sleep 14

While driving/running/cycling 22

While on public transport (Walkman) 4

FUNCTIONS

Reminder of valued past event 50

Spiritual experience 6

Evokes visual images 2

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Tingles/goose pimples/shivers 10

Source of pleasure/enjoyment 6

To put in a good mood 16

Moves to tears/catharsis/release 14

Excites 2

Motivates 2

Source of comfort/healing 4

Calms/soothes/relaxes/relieves stress 8

Mood enhancement 8

To match current mood 6

In an interview study involving 52 women ranging in age from 18 to 78, most of whom

were not accomplished musicians, DeNora (1999) also found examples of emotional self-regulation

involving a number of musical strategies described by participants as ‘revving up’ or ‘calming

down’, ‘getting in the mood’ (e.g., for a particular social event), ‘getting out of a mood’ (e.g., to

improve a ‘bad’ mood or ‘de-stress’), ‘venting’ strong emotions. For the most part, as in the two

previously mentioned studies, these were predominantly described at the ‘personal’ or intrapersonal

level as a means of creating, enhancing, sustaining and changing subjective, cognitive, bodily, and

self-conceptual states. According to DeNora, the women exhibited considerable awareness of the

music they ‘needed’ to hear in different situations and at different times, often working as ‘disc

jockeys’ to themselves. ‘They drew upon elaborate repertoires of musical programming practice,

and a sharp awareness of how to mobilize music to arrive at, enhance and alter aspects of

themselves and their self-concepts. This practical knowledge should be viewed as part of the (often

tacit) practices in and through which respondents produced themselves as coherent social and

socially disciplined beings’ (p.35).

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 In addition to the emotional functions at the intrapersonal level, DeNora found examples in

which music played a social function in communicating emotions to others. For example, a

university student described repeatedly playing at full volume a song from Radiohead entitled ‘We

Hope Your Choke!’ not only as way of diffusing her anger against her boyfriend’s parents when

she lived with them over the summer holidays, but also as a way of communicating her anger to

them. In other words, the display of anger or irritation described by the respondent expressed a

judgement of the moral quality of some other person’s actions. Such a display was also an act of

protest directed towards the boyfriend’s parents. Music provided one means by which this display

was ‘acted out’ at an interpersonal level. However, as DeNora points out, music is not simply used

to express some internal, private feeling or state, nor does it simply ‘act upon’ individuals, like a

stimulus. ‘It is a resource for the identification work of ‘knowing how one feels’ – a building

material of ‘subjectivity’ (p.41). In this way, music becomes part of the construction of the emotion

itself through the way in which individuals orient to it, interpret it, and use it to elaborate, ‘fill in’ or

‘fill out’, to themselves and others, an emotional feeling or display.

3.2. Autonomy and individuality

One of the questions in Sloboda, O'Neill and Ivaldi's ESM study asked participants to rate

the music in each episode on an eleven-point scale according to the degree of personal choice

exercised in hearing the music (from 0 = none at all, to 10 = completely own choice). There was a

significant effect of degree of choice on the degree of emotional change experienced while listening

to the music. For each emotion factor this showed a similar effect - the greater the choice the

greater the change. We found that high choice situations were most likely to occur when the person

was alone, travelling or working, at home or in a vehicle, undertaking activities for duty. Low

choice situations occurred more often when with others, during active leisure or personal

maintenance activities, in shops, gyms, and entertainment venues, and when doing activities

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because one wants to. Most of these findings are not surprising, although the link between choice

and activities undertaken for duties is not intuitively obvious. It may be that choosing music to

accompany duties is a way of bringing some autonomy and personalisation back to them. DeNora

(1999) suggests that the music associated with duties is used as a catalyst to shift individuals out of

their reluctance to adopt what they perceive as ‘necessary’ modes of agency, and into modes of

agency ‘demanded’ by particular circumstances.

The issue of choice and individuality also permeated the responses of the Mass Observation

panel (Sloboda, 2000a). Many of the musical situations described were solitary, and some

participants graphically characterised a difference between the private arena, where emotional work

of one sort or another could be accomplished with the help of music, and the public arena, where

self-presentation or the conflicting demands of others precluded this kind of activity. One

respondent wrote: "When I'm down I listen to this (a specific track) and go down as far as I can,

then I cry, I cry deep from inside. I wallow in self-pity and purge all the gloom from my body.

Then I dry my eyes, and wash my face, do my hair, put on fresh makeup, and rejoin the world".

Another reported "the car is the only place where I can listen to it loud enough without annoying

other people".

Many participants displayed negative, or at best, ambivalent reactions to the music that they

experienced in public places, such as shops, restaurants and bars. These attitudes were sometimes

associated with reports of dramatic behavioural consequences with high emotional charge (e.g.

abruptly leaving a shop with disliked music, arguing with waiting staff in a restaurant about getting

the music turned off). In several responses, the appropriateness of the music was a major theme.

Judgements were made both about the situation itself, and about the fit between the music and the

person's own identity and preferences. For example, restaurant music could be acceptable so long

as it matched the ambience or mood of the venue (e.g. oriental music in an oriental restaurant,

"mellow" music during a romantic encounter), or if its general acoustic characteristics matched the

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listeners' needs (e.g. not so loud that conversation was difficult, but loud enough to cover

potentially embarrassing silences and to prevent people at nearby tables overhearing ones'

conversation). In other cases, although music in public places might be generally disliked,

exceptions were made where the music itself had value for the participant (e.g. - "I have discovered

Waterstones Bookshop in Newcastle plays good music: the last time I was there Beethoven's

"Egmont" Overture was playing, and the trouble is that I pay more attention to the music than to

finding the book I want."). In this example, because the music was judged to be "good" the

participant was prepared to let his appreciation of the music partially override his main intention to

buy a book. The issue of "fit" between music and its context has been investigated experimentally.

For instance, North & Hargreaves (in press) showed that people make consistent discriminatory

judgements about the music that is suitable for such activities as aerobic exercise or yoga, and that

specific characteristics of the music (e.g. tempo) are implicated in these judgements.

There is evidence that resistance to music in public places increases with age. DeNora

(1999) found that most of her respondents over 70 (and interestingly those who were trained

musicians) found it antithetical to conceive of music as ‘background’ to anything. The Mass

Observation data also showed that males in the 40-60 age group reported more negative emotional

reactions to music in public places than any other group. It may be hypothesised that the higher

average status a group has, the less tolerant it will be of removal of autonomy. However, there are

also often more complex subcurrents to do with intergenerational and intergroup stereotypes. The

following example reveals much about the attitudes of one middle-aged man to the public self-

presentation of some younger men. "I also dislike the din that some cars make when they pass by,

infesting the streets with their thumping noises from within. How they can drive properly with

such a din in their cars, God knows. It concerns me too that they wouldn't be able to hear the sound

of an ambulance or police car with such a noise going on inside their cars. It seems to me, rather

like the fastest drivers, it is usually young men between the age of 17 and 25 who are the main

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culprits. They usually like to have their driving-seat window open, elbow leaning out of the car

and looking macho."

One phenomenon which deserves greater study and theorising is the unique position of the

busker (street musician) in the affections of even the most hardened opponents of music in public

places. Many Mass Observation respondents spontaneously singled out buskers as evading the

opprobrium of other forms of public music. It often was reported as relevant that this music is live

rather than pre-recorded. Two quotes are provided as representative: "Both my husband and I have

performed on the streets. My husband is still a regular busker. This to me is musical entertainment

at its purest form. The joy of busking is its spontaneity. Your audience is free to come and go as it

wishes, to pay or not pay, to listen or not listen. There is a beautiful freedom about busking that I

love, and I hope we never lose street entertainment." - "The music in the streets is acceptable.

Quite often the musicians are quite good and anyway the noise is dispersed.". Arguably, street

musicians do not undermine the sense of agency and autonomy that people like to experience. The

musician is potentially amenable to interaction (you can request your favourite song: and audience

reactions can be assumed to matter to the busker). There is also a sense of groundedness in a

busker. The piped music in shops is produced by unknown people in unknown places, and

mediated through hidden production mechanisms (e.g. an under-the-counter sound system), for

hidden purposes (e.g. suspected manipulation of buying behaviour). The busker, by contrast, is

earning an "honest" living by aiming to please and entertain through the exercise of visible craft

that is the result of personal effort and investment. It may also be significant that modern busking is

probably the phenomenon which comes closest to meeting the conditions under which most people

in most cultures through history have interacted with music. It is live, public, improvisational,

spontaneous, participatory, and social. It creates a small arena of the communal in a pervading

culture of individualism and isolation. It may meet an emotional need which is quite fundamental,

but which there are few opportunities to indulge.

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3.3 Identity and the social construction of self

In recent years, there has been a growing questioning of traditional approaches to the study

of identity which fail to take into account the multiple dimensions of identity as a continual process

of negotiation and change. Discursive psychology, which views identity as constructed out of the

discourses which are culturally available to us and which we use when communicating with others,

has radically altered the way social psychologists conceptualise and study identity. Music, when

viewed as a cultural resource, provides numerous ways in which musical materials and practices

can be used as a means for self-interpretation, self-presentation, and for the expression of emotional

states associated with the self. According to DeNora (1999), a sense of self is locatable in music, in

that ‘musical materials provide terms and templates for elaborating self-identity’ (p.50). For

example, one of the respondents in her study described a preferred type of musical material (‘juicy

chords’) as like ‘me in life’, associating certain musical structures with her sense of self. DeNora

suggests that ‘music is a “mirror” that allows one to “see one’s self”. It is, also, however, a “magic

mirror” insofar as its specific material properties also come to configure (e.g., “transfigure”,

“disfigure”, etc.) the image reflected in and through its (perceived) structures.’ (p.51).

Nowhere is this more apparent than during adolescence, where identities are being forged,

experimented with, and explored. According to Green (1991), music can offer a powerful cultural

symbol, which aids in adolescents’ construction and presentation of self. Several studies suggest

that musical tastes are predictive of a wide range of non-musical activities and attitudes, such as

clothing, media preferences, drug use, and degree of sexual activity (Hanaken & Wells, 1990;

Lewis, 1995). Insofar as the processes involved with creation and maintenance of identity are key

to individual self-image and well-being (e.g., Shotter & Gergen, 1989), then we would expect

emotions to be deeply implicated in this process. Because most adolescents do not have jobs or

16
family responsibilities they have more "discretionary" time than many adults do (estimated as up to

50% of waking hours by Csikszentmihalyi and Larson, 1984). Much of this time is taken up with

media use, mainly TV and music. 81% of teenagers say that music is an important part of their life,

and has influenced how they think about important issues (Leming, 1987). This is in direct contrast

to TV watching, which most teenagers do not believe has had any major influence on their lives

(McCormack, 1984). In an experience sampling study of adolescent daily lives Larson, Kubey, and

Colletti (1989) found that music listening was associated with greater personal involvement that

TV watching (which was associated with feeling less happy, less alert, more passive and more

bored than at other times). Larson and Kleiber (?) summarise their findings as suggesting that "the

moving lyrics of ballads and the hard-driving beat of rock appear to stimulate a level of personal

involvement that is lacking in TV watching. A teenager may be lying face-down on her bed, but

her mind is alive and active, thinking about friends, school, or the future" (p.130).

In a recent study by North, Hargreaves and O’Neill (in press), marked gender differences

were found in adolescents’ reasons for listening to music. Girls were more likely to report that

music could be used as a means of mood regulation, whereas boys reported that music could be a

means of creating an impression with others. The boys’ reason was particularly interesting in that

the majority of respondents reported that they usually listened to music on their own. This suggests

that adolescent boys in particular are involved in the social construction of identity through the use

of stereotypes and gendered role-models associated with the music they listen to (e.g., the ‘macho’

and ‘sexy’ image of male pop/rock musicians playing mainly guitars and drums). O’Neill (1997)

points out that adolescents’ musical values are influenced by culturally defined stereotypes that

once learned are extremely resistant to change and disconfirmation.

3.4. The balance between context and content

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 Emotional responses to music are a complex outcome of the contribution of a person's

reaction to the content (i.e. the musical materials themselves and their associations) and their

reactions to the ongoing context in which the music is embedded. For instance, the context may

determine the amount of attention available to place on the musical content (a parent out shopping

with an irritable and loudly complaining small child and being embarrassed by the hostile looks of

other shoppers may barely notice the soothing Mozart playing quietly in the background). At the

same time the content may be subtly changing the way the person construes the context (the Mozart

excerpt carries the subliminal message that this is a high-class store for serious well-behaved

adults, and small noisy children have no place here - thus intensifying the feelings in the parent of

embarrassment and shame). These effects have been studied experimentally by, for instance,

manipulating music-film pairings or music-picture pairings and observing how construed emotional

meaning is affected (ref Cohen chapter).

However, everyday life does not provide opportunities for controlled manipulation of

variables, and so it is difficult to disentangle the unique contribution of content and context. The

work which comes the closest to providing an insight into these issues is a study by Sloboda

(1989a) in which individuals were asked to recall any incidents from the first 10 years of life which

were in any way connected with music. This period was chosen because a major aim of the study

was to find connections between early music experience and later attitudes to music. For each

incident recalled, participants were asked to say as much as they could about the context (who they

were with, what event the music formed part of), and what meaning or significance the event had

for them. This allowed each incident to be assigned a value on each of two dimensions, an internal

dimension, concerned with the musical content, and an external dimension concerned with the

context. On each dimension the significance could be positive, neutral, or negative.

When the 83 incidents elicited were cross-tabulated on these two dimensions, some

interesting features emerged. First, there were very few cases where the musical content had a

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negative significance. One person recalled disliking the sound of a particular set of pipes on a

church organ, but there were few other clear cases. This was not, however, the result of a rosy

view of childhood where all negative memories had been erased, because there were many cases

where the musical context was negative. Many people remembered situations of anxiety, pain, and

humiliation, mainly connected with negative appraisal of their musicality by adult authority-figures

(particularly teachers). The most extreme incident was where a teacher physically beat a child for a

performance error. There were, however, positive contexts too. For instance, one respondent

recalled rehearsing carols for a school carol concert. What gave the incident its positive

significance was the sense of enjoyment among the group, undertaking this festive preparation in

place of normal academic classes.

The second important feature was the almost complete absence of incidents where the

musical content was appraised positively and the context was appraised negatively. One might

interpret this finding by supposing that where the immediate context is a source of threat or

emotional challenge, there is little chance of musical content capturing the emotional system. This

study suggests that positive emotions derived from engagement with musical materials is only

possible when the context is appraised as, at worst, emotionally neutral. The specific contexts

where strong content-related emotions were felt included home, church, and the concert hall, alone

or with friends and family. They tended not to include lessons at school, or situations in the direct

presence of a teacher. Although hopefully not inevitably so, it seems that formal instructional

settings have a tendency to be inimical to emotional engagement with music. This may be because

of the emphasis within such settings on achievement, success, and failure, with the concomitant

threats to self-esteem and self-worth. It has the paradoxical consequence that people may be driven

to express their deepest and most personal relationships with music in private, or in supportive peer

reference groups outside, and hidden from, the formal educational process.

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4. Technological factors: focussing on the CD collection.

A defining feature of modern everyday music experience is its almost total dependence on

technology. Most of the music people hear these days is either recorded or broadcasted. The

portability of the technology means that people not only can choose what to hear, and when to hear

it, but also where to hear it. The miniaturisation of music technology means that music can be

carried in the pocket, and heard alone, through personal headphones. However, we know little

about the motivational and emotional goals that propel the technological choices made by people.

Why do some people possess and use personal stereos, while others do not? Why do some people

have large CD collections, while others do not?

The CD (or tape or record) is a particularly interesting object of study. It gives to its owner

the maximum chance of being able to hear the music it contains exactly when he or she decides.

The decision to deliberately acquire a specific CD (by purchase or other means) has its own

emotional logic, partly separable from the decision to play the CD on any given occasion (it is

possible to buy a CD and rarely or never play it). In some cases, what one would imagine to be the

core motivation for acquisition (to hear the music) may be augmented or even supplanted by

motivations which have more to do with the psychological functions of purchase and ownership.

CDs are objects which may be displayed in the home and elsewhere to provide information about

the owner's lifestyle and attitudes to others. The set of like objects may come to constitute a self-

consciously organised "collection" which motivates further purchases in pursuance of a number of

goals, including the aim to possess complete sets of particular types of object. The wish to possess

every recording of a particular artist is a frequently-experienced motivation of this sort, even if

some of the works are rarely listened to.

Despite considerable research attention to the psychology of collecting ((cf. Belk, 1995),

there is almost no serious research on the psychological functions served by CD collections. De

Las Heras (1997) surveyed 82 UK volunteers (self-confessed music-lovers), and found that the

20
average number of CDs possessed was around 300. Males tended to own about double the number

of CDs owned by females, and were more likely to self-define as collectors. Clearly, with

collections of this size, using and adding to them would meet our criteria to qualify as an everyday

phenomenon. De Las Heras found that the most commonly stated reason for buying a CD was that

of having already heard part of it (on the radio, or from a friend), and wanting to have the music for

oneself. However, the second most common reason was interest in the specific type of music (e.g.,

style or artist) without having heard the specific CD. In the ESM study of Sloboda et al (submitted)

we found one clear example deriving from this second category. The participant was listening to a

recently purchased CD for the first time, with high expectations based on prior hearing of other

CDs by the same artist. The emotion experienced was one of disappointment that the music did not

live up to expectations.

De Las Heras looked in particular at the factors which correlated most strongly with a key

motivation for CD purchase, the need to re-experience that particular piece of music. People who

reported high need to re-experience music, also reported high levels of agreement with certain

statements about reasons for music use. Three groups of statements identified by factor analysis

contained most of the relevant statements: the "transcendental use" factor contained such

statements as "I play music to transcend myself", or "the music connects me to a higher self"; the

"memory-use" factor contained statements like "I want to think of a person so I put on a CD that

reminds me of them" and "Someone close to me often listens to this music, so listening to it makes

me feel like there's a special link"; and the "analytical-use" factor contained statements such as "I

like listening out to see how the different parts of the music are put together". This is suggestive

evidence that people amass collections in order to fulfil quite specific emotional and aesthetic

goals. The first two factors discovered have considerable similarity to the memory and spiritual

categories identified by Sloboda (2000a) in the Mass Observation study.

21
 One final aspect of De Las Heras' study which is worthy of mention in this context is some

data on the need to exercise control over musical experience, as evidenced by high levels of

agreement to statements such as "I want to be able to listen to that music whenever I feel like it".

Those self-defining as collectors (predominantly male) were most likely to show evidence of nee to

control. This is consistent with the gender-difference found for tolerance to imposed music in

public places reported in the Mass Observation study (see Section 3.2. above). Contrasting sharply

to the need to control is what De Las Heras calls "serendipity" - the need to experience novelty.

Interestingly, there was no difference between collectors and non-collectors in attitudes towards

serendipitous listening. Presumably every collector must enjoy experiencing new items, so that

they can discover unknown potential additions to their collections. It may well be that when music

in public places samples from styles that form the basis of a person's collection, then that person is

more tolerant of the music, since they might hear something they would like to buy. Music in

many public places reflects the prevailing popular music styles which are most likely to be found in

the collections of younger people, thus providing another explanation for the age effect discussed

earlier.

5. Everyday music use as self-therapy

In the preceding paragraphs we have seen much evidence of music being used deliberately

and consciously to achieve psychological outcomes which are reflected in emotional change.

Music clearly is used by people to make them feel better or different, or help them accomplish or

attune themselves to some concurrent or anticipated activity. These kinds of activity have

sometimes been, perhaps rather glibly, cited as examples of self-therapy (e.g. Sloboda, 1989b,

1992). However, therapy, as understood by therapists, is not simply about manipulation of

emotions, it is about helping the individual in therapy to develop more appropriate and functional

responses to the problems of living (cf Bayne & Nicolson, 1993). There is almost nothing in the

22
literature on everyday uses of music which would count as strong evidence that particular self-

chosen music improves problem-solving or decision making, as compared to no music, or different

music. It would be an interesting study to ask people to deny themselves any self-chosen music

for a period of time, and compare their adjustment on a number of psychological measures to that

found during normal music use. The Experience Sampling Methodology would seem to be

particularly well suited to the measurement of the effects of such manipulations.

However, the strong claims made by users of music in a wide range of studies, supported by

subjective and anecdotal evidence make it likely that such effects do exist, although the

mechanisms by which they are mediated are poorly theorised. There is, however, one very

plausible class of mechanisms by which music could have a therapeutic effect. Much is made in

the literature on the "everyday" psychological disorders, such as depression of the effect of

cognitive set or narrowing. A depressed person is often locked in a cycle of negative and self-

defeating cognitions, unable to call to mind plausible alternatives to the narrow circle of linked

aversive scenarios (Blaney, 1986; Pollock & Williams, 1998). These cognitions are also often

accompanied by anomalous states of arousal, such as high anxiety, insomnia, or lethargy. Well-

chosen pieces of music may be able to help individuals break out of such cycles by the specific

combination of intrinsic and extrinsic cues that they provide (ref Sloboda and Juslin chapter).

Extrinsic cues may remind the person of situations, scenarios, people, and emotions that lie outside

the closed loop of the pathological state. Intrinsic cues (the ebb and flow of tension, resolution,

expectancy, etc.).may provide means for altering arousal states in positive directions.

In addition, the unique capacity of music to engender emotional release (as in crying; see

Sloboda and Juslin, this volume) may be in itself therapeutic. For reasons which are not well

understood, emotional release appears to assist psychological adjustment (through a process

sometimes called catharsis, e.g. Davis, 1988). A fuller working out of some of these ideas in the

context of music's role in spirituality is provided by Sloboda (2000b).

23
6. Conclusion

It is a significant feature of many of the everyday musical scenarios that we have outlined that

although they may be experienced in solitude, their point of reference is the relationhip of the

music user to others. Reliving past relationships, managing identity, using music to “siphon off”

emotions that are not for public presentation: all of these depend on, and are used to negotiate and

develop, the complex web of cognitions and behaviours that constitute social life. In other words,

everyday musical emotions are manifestations of and a projection of the “personhood” of the music

user. Such manifestations may have little or nothing to do with the specific discourses in which

musicological characterisations of emotions have been developed and articulated. It is for this

reason that our chapter has made almost no reference to specific musical works, or to structural and

symbolic features of these works. This is not to say that musical materials don’t matter. Of course

they do. But if we introduce them first, and then attempt to characterise the user’s emotional

responses in relation to them, we have already smuggled in by the back door the historical

projections and social preoccupations of the various professional elites that have dominated the

work of defining what music is and what it is for, not only for themselves but for culture at large.

As authors trained within the mainstream of classical music discourse, we haven’t worked out how

to describe musical materials in a way that is free (or at least self-consciously aware) of the

limiting assumptions of our own training. That is a task for the future.

Summarise….

(Paraphrase – from Harré and Gillett, 1994)

“If emotion feelings and displays are to be understood as embodied judgments…they must occupy

their proper places in unfolding episodes, to be analyzed something like conversations. In this way

24
we can study the kinds of judgments that displays of emotions express, and the kinds of acts they

accomplish. According to the discursive theory, in those cultures in which both feelings and

displays are taken to be properly described in terms drawn from the emotion vocabulary, there

should be both private and public expression of embodied judgments and the relevant social acts.”

(p.154).

Our experience of emotion is undifferentiated and intangible without the framework of language to

give it structure and meaning. ….. link to the identification of musical discourses as a future area of

research…

and more specifically ‘individualism’

25
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