Compositional Mechanisms in Popular Music: Emotional Affect on the Subconscious Mind
Natalie Danielle Nicolas · The Sydney eScholarship Repository (The University of Sydney) · 2018
How does popular twenty-first century music manipulate emotions of its mass audience? Music carries emotional valence, due to key basal psychological functions interacting with listeners as they undergo musical experience. This dissertation aims to identify how and why we are emotionally manipulated when experiencing music in our everyday contexts, to assist in the composers’ plight: altering emotions of a listener for a purpose. Experiencing emotion occurs in three steps: an arousal of nervous energy, a blocked tendency to react, and a build up of energy manifesting as emotion (MacCurdy, 2013). Certain individuals are more susceptible to emotional change than others due to an “aptitude for mood disturbance” (Garrido & Schubert, 2013). Popular music has been proven to influence emotions at both a general level (i.e., influencing shopping behaviour) and at a specific level (i.e., provoking joy or nostalgia). In this study, seven fundamental psychological mechanisms form a toolbox used to analyse a selection of emotionally charged tracks from the last decade. The musical analysis demonstrates the presence of these mechanisms in popular music, and draws comparison between which of them occur most frequently, and which emotions are conveyed most frequently. The prevalent mechanisms in the analysed tracks were Rhythmic Unity and Emotional Contagion, and the prevalently conveyed emotion was catharsis. The invocation of Catharsis via Rhythmic Unity became the key in my own composition. This study seeks to demonstrate why music has power over our everyday lives, providing a toolbox for musical analysis and for composers to use to effect positive emotional change. Future analysis in music and emotions might utilise this type of multi-disciplinary approach in order to accurately understand the relationship between music, emotions and a listener’s experience.