A new piece of research out of Australia has revealed that music which expresses more emotion than listeners feel is likely to be uncool.
The study involved Dr Schubert, a music psychologist, playing participants pieces of instrumental music, asking them their response to it and to determine what emotion the music was trying to express.
â€I took the difference between the rating for the expressed emotion and the rating for the felt emotion,†Dr Schubert said. “The smaller the gap between people's 'felt' emotion and music's 'expressed' emotion, the more they enjoy it.â€
Dr Schubert refers to this difference as the 'Differential Affect Gap' – or 'DAG factor'. He noted that “If a piece of music is thought to be daggy or not cool, generally it seems that those pieces will be rated as expressing too much emotion, inappropriately too much emotion for that listener,†he said.
I guess this confirms what we knew all along, emos are simply not cool.
Key Themes Behind This Trend
- Decreased Emotionality in Music
- Opportunity for developing music that expresses emotions in a more subtle and relatable way to resonate with listeners.
- Personalized Emotional Music
- Opportunity to create music platforms that curate emotional music based on individual preferences to bridge the gap between expressed and felt emotions.
- Emotionally Intelligent Music Recommendation
- Opportunity to develop algorithms or AI systems that can recommend music based not only on genre or mood but also on the desired level of emotional expression.
Where This Applies
- Music Streaming Services
- Disruption opportunity to enhance music platforms with features that allow users to customize emotional expression levels in their music recommendations.
- Music Production
- Opportunity to explore innovative production techniques that strike a balance between expressing emotions and appealing to a broader range of listeners.
- Music Psychology Research
- Opportunity to further investigate the relationship between expressed and felt emotions in music and identify strategies to create emotionally resonant music.
