Chapter 3: Sheep and an Emotional Rollercoaster

Hello, hello! Remember those snowmen (Snowmans? Snowmen? Well, Grammarly tells me it’s the latter) we built last week, I hope those didn’t melt already because you’re gonna need them today! Don’t worry, we’ll also talk about sheep today…

As promised, let’s first finish up our conversation about musical vocabulary last time! 

Building triads on major and minor scales, which is the foundation of our chord progressions! 

NOTE: for the C minor harmonic, there should be a b natural for the III chord, thus making it augmented! 

The figure above shows the triads built on the C Major scale and the c minor harmonic scale. For the Major key, we see that I, IV, and V are Major triads; ii, iii, and vi are minor triads; and the seventh (vii°) is a diminished triad. For the minor key, V and VI are Major triads; i and iv are minor triads; ii° and vii° are diminished triads; and III+ is an Augmented triad. Of course, for both the Major and the minor, V (the fifth chord) can also be V7, the dominant seventh chord. 

Next up…we got…

Breaking News! I’ve found a new term! Drum roll, please…

Word Painting! Okay, okay, the term itself doesn’t sound very artistic or fancy, but it is very relevant to my project!!! 

Word painting is a device that manipulates musical elements to portray the lyrics’ meaning through sound. Essentially, it was just “painting” the meaning of the text—not with a paintbrush, but with music! How fun! 

For instance, in the Baroque oratorio Messiah, one of the lines goes, “And we like sheep have gone astray.” On the word “astray,” the choir sings a wide array of pitches, rapidly sliding up and down. If you get the image, it’s like the sheep running around all over the place, or “gone astray”!

Anyway, with that brief, overarching introduction, I’m now going to share the bulk of my literature review that I’ve done for this week, which covers the wide variety of research that has already been done on the effects of musical elements on emotion. 

Starting off with Sidharth Roy, he studied how the different chord progressions and timbre/tonality (produced by different instruments) influence the participants’ perceived emotions—the emotions that they associate with the music. Through a survey consisting of 9 different audios (3 different chord progressions played by 3 different instruments), 40 participants chose one emotion from an emotion wheel for each audio. Roy found that chord progressions in the major key were associated with positive emotions, while chord progressions with chords from a different key were most commonly perceived with negative emotions. 

Next, in a study by Sun and Cuthbert, they labeled all lyrics with the NRC Emotion Lexicon, which automatically assesses the text based on 8 emotions and 2 sentiments (positive and negative)—collectively called the affect—and then collected the musical features of the notes corresponding to those lyrics. They, in fact, did discover correlations between the emotions connotated by the lyrics and the musical elements of the relative melody. For instance, surprising words are, on average, an 8/10th semitone higher than anger words; negative words use significantly shorter note values; and positive/joyful words are more often on strong beats. In a similar study, researchers specifically investigated the link between chords and lyrics—whether the perceived emotion in the chords is reflective of the words in the corresponding lyrics. 

(Hang tight, we’re almost there!)

Moving onto Smit, she examined the perceived emotions of chord progressions by manipulating the ending cadence type (authentic, plagal, half, or deceptive), the major/minor mode, the removal/inclusion of a tetrad (a dissonant four-note chord), the average pitch (mean of all musical pitches), and the final chord. Participants were asked to rate each chord progression on arousal/energy level and on valence/emotional level. Some of her significant results found that half/deceptive cadences and higher average pitch are more arousing than authentic cadences and lower average pitch, while plagal and minor cadences have lower valence than authentic and major ones. 

Using a similar experimental model as Smit, Zwaag, Westerink, and Broek investigated the effect of tempo, mode, and percussiveness on emotions. Participants rated the level of arousal, valence, and tension they experienced, while skin and heart responses were recorded. An increase in tempo was associated with an increase in arousal, an increase in tension, and an increase in heart rate stability; a major mode was connected to an increase in arousal; and percussiveness seems to be proportionately linked to the level/frequency of skin responses. 

 In a study done at the Eastman School of Music, Temperley and Tan examined the impact of different diatonic modes on emotions. The “happiest” mode, as they found, was the Ionian mode, while the Phrygian was the least favored. It also seems that the level of “happiness” decreases with increasing distance to the Ionian mode. Other studies examined the perception of nonadjacent keys, which concluded that a parallelism exists between language and music of global reach.

Well, what’s different about my research project? Past research has been mainly done on all sorts of musical elements, but I’m investigating songs’ chord progressions in specifics. 

Now that we’re finally done with all the theoretical stuff, we’re finally onto some physical experimentation! I can already sense the troubles coming ahead, but onwards! 

Sources:

Celebrate Theory Book 6. RCM Publishing. Canada. Print.

Celebrate Theory Book 7. RCM Publishing. Canada. Print.

Harlow, Randall, et al. “5.5 Roman Numerals and Diatonic Harmony: Tutorial.” Pressbooks.pub, Iowa State University Digital Press, 4 Aug. 2023, iastate.pressbooks.pub/comprehensivemusicianship/chapter/5-5-roman-numeral-notation-tutorial/. Accessed 8 Mar. 2025.

Beach, Pamela, and Benjamin Bolden. “Word Painting: Using a Musical Technique to Enhance Vocabulary.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 72, no. 6, 2 Nov. 2018, pp. 750–754, https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1780.

Roy, Sidharth. “Analyzing the Effect of Chord Progression and Instrument on Music in Perception of Emotion in Different Age Groups.” International Journal of Indian Psychology, vol. 11, no. 4, Redshine Publication, Oct. 2023, ijip.in/articles/the-effect-of-chord-progression-and-instrument-on-music/.

Beach, Pamela, and Benjamin Bolden. “Word Painting: Using a Musical Technique to Enhance Vocabulary.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 72, no. 6, 2 Nov. 2018, pp. 750–754, https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1780.

Sun, Sophia H., and Michael Scott Cuthbert. “Emotion Painting: Lyric, Affect, and Musical Relationships in a Large Lead-Sheet Corpus.” Empirical Musicology Review, vol. 12, no. 3-4, 25 June 2018, p. 327, https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v12i3-4.5889.

Smit, Eline A., et al. “Perceived Emotions of Harmonic Cadences.” Music & Science, vol. 3, 1 Jan. 2020, p. 205920432093863, researchdirect.westernsydney.edu.au/islandora/object/uws:56749/datastream/PDF/view, https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204320938635.

Woolhouse, Matthew, et al. “Perception of Nonadjacent Tonic-Key Relationships.” Psychology of Music, vol. 44, no. 4, July 2015, pp. 802–15, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735615593409. Accessed 24 May 2022.

‌Van der Zwaag, Marjolein D., et al. “Emotional and Psychophysiological Responses to Tempo, Mode, and Percussiveness.” Musicae Scientiae, vol. 15, no. 2, July 2011, pp. 250–269, https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864911403364.

Temperley, David, and Daphne Tan. “Emotional Connotations of Diatonic Modes.” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 30, no. 3, 1 Feb. 2013, pp. 237–257, https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2012.30.3.237.

Kolchinsky, Artemy et al. “The Minor fall, the Major lift: inferring emotional valence of musical chords through lyrics.” Royal Society Open Science vol. 4,11 170952. 15 Nov. 2017, doi:10.1098/rsos.170952