Inspired by Juslin: A New Model to Snapshot Music Stimuli’s Functionalities in Music Emotion Research
Jingzhu Chen · 2025
Since the turn of the 20th century, empirical studies using music stimuli to test key theories in music affects have mushroomed, in which selecting or designing music stimuli became a common practice. However, the majority of the studies didn’t justify the selecting methods of the music stimuli within a consistent framework. More than half of the research rely on a modest amount of familiar music stimuli from the past, targeting a narrow range of discrete emotions, raising concerns on comparability, and reproducibility across studies. In this article, I designed a novel diagrammatic method named Abstraction-Measure Diagram (AMD), inspired by Juslin's ICINAS-BRECVEMAC framework to address the current issues. I also illustrated how to draw AMD with understudied affects in previous research and recommended a few selected repertoire as new music stimuli. The goal is to initiate a study of “musi-metrics” (which I term) for music stimuli best practice aiming to promote consistency, comparability, and reproducibility in the field, and enhance research rigor for the future. An additional wish through this article is to raise more awareness for the timeless aesthetic legacy throughout music history.