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Emotional Processing In Music: Study In Affective Responses To Tonal Modulation In Controlled Harmonic Progressions And Real Music, Marina Korsakova-Kreyn, Jay W. Dowling

Lander College for Women - The Anna Ruth and Mark Hasten School Publications and Research

Tonal modulation is one of the main structural and expressive aspects of music in the European musical tradition. Experiment 1 investigated affective responses to modulations to all eleven major and minor keys (relative to the starting tonality) in brief, specially constructed harmonic progressions, by using six bipolar scales related to valence, potency, and synaesthesia. The results indicated the dependence of affective response on degree of modulation in terms of key proximity, and of mode. Experiment 2 examined affective responses to the most common modulations in nineteenth-century piano music: to the subdominant, dominant, and minor sixth in the major mode. The …