Carol Krumhansl

In the meta-analysis “Music: A Link Between Cognition and Emotion” Carol L. Krumhansl dissects the emotional impact of music and how the structure of it can alter the emotions that are expressed. Krumhansl starts by throwing out multiple theories of why emotions are tied to music and finds that the notion of musical tension and the expectation surrounding it is the answer to what effects human emotion. Gathering information from multiple studies including some of her own work, Krumhansl concludes that tempos, dynamics, pitch, and note density play major parts in attributing to creating musical tension. Tension is apparent in all emotional types of music, but it takes its form in different ways depending on the selected emotion. The tension of a song is created by the expectation of the listener. Once the expectation is fulfilled, the tension

has the opportunity to rise again. Tension can affect physiological properties of the body. Although there is an effect, the data proves to be less reliable due to response times of body structures. Later, Krumhansl shows the link between music and dance proving dance and music hold similar qualities of emotion within them. The final point compared emotional differences through genres such as British and Chinese folk songs with multiple cultural groups. The results showed that music, regardless of the genre, provoke universal emotion. Krumhansl concludes the structure of music heavily affects the emotion felt by the person listening through musical tension and that music has many different approaches in the field of psychology.
The compilation of ideas in the text is very convincing and insightful.

By assimilating multiple studies and experiments, Krumhansl gives multiple angles on the psychological aspects of music, which allows the reader to have a well-rounded understanding on how music affects human emotions. With an organized paper, all subjects discussed are condensed into dense paragraphs, so as to not add any irrelevancies. They only attribute that could be improved on is in the section testing the universality of emotion through different genres of music and cultural groups. Collectively, it states that all music provokes expectation and tension, but in different ways. An interesting addition to the section would be to test modern music and its effects on emotion. Classical music and traditional European and Asian music are cornerstones in music history, but with modern music, the experiments would have more modern relevancy. Perhaps a comparison between classical and modern music might have insightful information within it. In conclusion, Krumhansl concentrated useful information to produce a versatile paper with little need for

improvement.