Living Artisan

Human attraction to music stems from the aesthetic experience and strong emotional reactions music evokes. Basic emotion theories posit a finite number of innate and universal emotions that have evolved because they promote survival by motivating adaptive behaviors and help maintaining physiological homeostasis (Ekman 1992), and numerous neuroimaging studies have tested whether music is capable of activating the survival circuits underlying these emotions (Mitterschiffthaler et al. 2007; Brattico et al. 2011; Koelsch et al. 2013). Indeed, emotional responses to music show many hallmarks of basic emotions including distinct subjective experience, emotional expression, action tendencies, changes in the autonomic nervous system activation (Juslin and Vastfjall 2008) and distinct effects of thought and judgment (Vuoskoski and Eerola 2012). Yet, it seems counterintuitive that that instrumental music could elicit “genuine” basic emotions because emotional reactions to music do not have unambiguous causes (real-life threat, success, or loss, etc.) and they do not involve events that have obvious goal or survival-relevant consequences (Konečni 2008; Scherer and Zentner 2008). Thus, even though listeners often interpret their subjective reactions to music as basic emotions, these responses may differ from genuine basic emotions in the underlying neural processes.

https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/31/5/2549/6046263