The Theories Of The Relationship Between Music And Emotion

The Latin quote “Musica Animae Levame,” and its English translation expresses one of music’s most powerful characteristics—its direct effect on the human soul. Just like medicine can positively affect the body, music can positively affect the emotions housed in the soul.

Musicians and composers desire to evoke an emotional movement in the listener. This is accomplished by the cognitive processing of music’s formal patterns and techniques. Many scholars, critics, and musicologists have written various articles and books on the subject of emotions and how they relate to music, however, the theory of the link between music and emotion has been progressively developed by several; including Leonard B. Meyer, Kate Hevner, Christoph Rueger, and Stefan Koelsch. Examining the work of these four pivotal figures allows us to establish a timeline of the development of this theory from its gestation to its recognition in the musical and scientific communities and beyond.

Meyer is known for outlining two theoretical approaches that analyze how music affects emotion; absolute expressionism and formalism. The absolutist theorist claims that the emotional responses seen in people while listening to music are simply fundamental processes that are not central to music. Meyer tries to combine this idea with the formal ideas of music by describing the similarities between the essential music elements that provoke an intellectual stimulus and those elements that can also cause a response of the emotional kind (Meyer, 1-42). In other words, Meyer’s theory states that emotional and intellectual responses to music are directly linked—when one has a better intellectual understanding of music, their emotional appreciation is