International Symposium on Performance Science

ISBN 978-2-9601378-0-4

The Author 2013, Published by the AEC

All rights reserved

Emotional communication among performers:

Modeling the affective experience as portrayed
and perceived emotions
Fernando Gualda and Jlio Csar Wagner
Department of Music, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

This paper reports results from listening experiments with live performances, during which the performer conveyed distinct affects for repetitions of the same musical excerpt. Two kinds of experiment were conducted. Pilot studies were designed to test word-based interfaces for
marking changes of expression. The main experiment aimed at testing
how the performer conveyed his interpretations to 60 listeners, all musicians. Results indicate a bias toward higher valence in the report by the
listeners than in the intended affects as conveyed by the performer, as
well as an amplification of the values on the arousal axis.
Keywords: emotional communication; portrayed emotion; perceived
emotion; music performance; affective experience

This research assumes that multiple interpretations of a work are desirable. It

follows that multiple apprehensions of a performance may also be both possible and desirable. Winold (1993) suggests that "a musical work may not only
afford multiple interpretations, but also present ambiguities that stimulate
concomitant interpretations" (cited in Gualda 2011, p. 11). Since the nature of
affective experience may transcend the possibility of modeling it as a single or
central emotion, this research attempts to study the communication of the
affective experience as a combination of several discrete representations of
emotions on the valence-arousal circumplex (Russel 1980) as translated into
Portuguese (Ramos 2008, Fornari 2010). Thus it differs from previous works,
for it does not try to model how affects can be conveyed, but instead whether
combinations of contrasting affects are comprehended by the listeners, as
well as how they differ from those intended by the performer.
Feldman (1995) studied "the relationship between personality and the
structure of the affective experience" (p. 156) by modeling variations of the

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overall shape of the position of 16 mood terms on the semantic circumplex

across subjects. Her work suggests that each person might have a particular
bias toward amplifying or reducing the scaling of the values on the valencearousal axes of the semantic circumplex. The dimensionality of the semantic
circumplex has also been studied. Eerola and Vuoskoski (2011) suggest that
three dimensional models might collapse into two dimensions, whereas
Trkulja and Jankovic (2012) suggest that "cognitive evaluation" may also
contribute to the perception of emotion in music (p. 1017), but it may correspond to a small percentage.
Eerola and Vuoskoski (2011) discuss some problems in the study of musical emotion: "(1) reliance on discrete emotions only, (2) focus on unambiguous exemplars, or (3) insufficient stimulus quantity" (p. 40). Zentner et al.
(2008) propose nine musical emotions and discuss whether they are true
emotions. The authors distinguish between induced emotion (emotion felt by
the listener, aroused by music) and perceived emotion (imagined emotion,
associated with the music) and define "attribution error" (pp. 514-515) as the
confusion between emotions listeners might have imagined or perceived
while listening to music with the emotions music might have induced on the
listeners. This research does not differentiate between aroused and perceived
emotions. It simply assumes that, even if emotions reported by the listeners
could be of either nature, this does not interfere in conveying those emotions.
METHOD
Participants
Participants were 60 listeners, 22 years old (SD=4.56 years) on average, with
an average 9.8 years (SD=4.72) of musical training. They were undergraduate
and graduate music students from the Federal University of Rio Grande do
Sul (Brazil), who attended an introductory class and undertook a listening
experiment with live performances. They filled an eight-word interface containing discrete affects that should be associated with a performance that they
had just heard. The interface accepted three levels of association (Likert
scale). Since participants had probably never been exposed to this experimental setting, before starting the experiment, they performed three trials
with a different musical excerpt from those utilized in the experiment.
Materials
Three short musical excerpts from the standard oboe repertoire were selected
by the performer: bars 1-4 from Pan, the first movement of the Six Meta-

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Figure 1. Musical excerpts utilized in the listening experiments (live performances):

Britten (top), Saint-Sans (middle), and Piazzolla (bottom).

morphoses after Ovid, Op. 49 by Benjamin Britten (1952); the first bar of the
second movement of the Sonate pour Hautbois, Op. 166 by Camille SaintSans (1921); and bars 15-27 of Caf 1930 from Historia del Tango, by stor
Piazzolla (1986), originally composed for the flute. The selected excerpts allowed distinct interpretations that included at least two contrasting affects. In
each excerpt, the first half is structurally different from the second. Figure 1
presents the three excerpts with an additional double bar that indicates the
point of that division.
Three interfaces have been devised. The first contained twelve pairs of
similar affects (Russel 1980) in Portuguese (Ramos 2008, Fornari 2010). The
second presented four pairs of dichotomies: agitated versus sleepy (maximal
and minimal arousal), beautiful versus ugly (maximal and minimal valence),
happy versus sad (positive valence and arousal, negative valence and
arousal), and serene versus tense. The third version presented two lists of 8
words.
Procedure
Three musicians took part in a pilot study in which three different materials
were tested: a long list with 24 affects, a short list of eight affects that approximated the equal division of the semantic circumplex, and a double list of
the same eight affects designed for comparing contrasts between affects. The
third version, with contrasting affects, was chosen to be applied. Before performing each excerpt, the performer filled the same list of affects that the
listeners would fill after the performance. In each performance, the performer
attempted to convey a different pair of affects: one for the first half, and an-

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Figure 2. Polar representations of maximal and minimal arousal. The angle represents
the emotion on the circumplex, and the azimuth represents the correlation of average
reports on emotions. Dashed lines depict a theoretical model of ideal correlation.
Maximal correlation (1.0) is represented on the outmost circumference (octagon),
whereas minimal correlation (-1.0) is represented by the point on the center.

other until the end of the excerpt. In order to seek ecological validity (Clarke
2004), no further instructions were given to the listeners besides to mark the
3-point Likert scale (nothing, a little, a lot) for each affect on the lists after
listening to each performance.
RESULTS
Averaged data on reports by the 60 musicians who undertook the experiment
were compared through canonical correlation. Figure 2 depicts r values on
the polar coordinate system, representing the valence-arousal plane. Figure 2
also presents a theoretical model of the expected correlation among affects. It
is represented by a dotted line. In agitated (maximal arousal) situations, all
correlations, with exception of ugly, were very close to their theoretically expected values. Similarly, its dichotomysleepyis similar to the model. Even
though affects are not orthogonal, dichotomies of affects presented very
strong anti-correlation, as presented in Table 1.
The level of agreement between musicians-as-listeners and the performer was not particularly high (overall agreement, r=0.26, p<0.05; principal effects, r=0.47, p=0.0001). In accordance with Feldman (1995), however,

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Table 1. Correlation coefficients of the four dichotomies of affects (p<0.0001).

Agitated-sleepy

Happy-sad

Beautiful-ugly

Serene-tense

-0.93

-0.97

-0.74

-0.64

Figure 3. Performers and listeners percentages of marks on the eight affections considered in this study (left). The polar representation of the difference between portrayed
and perceived emotions presents a clear bias toward positive valence (right).

there is an overall bias that can be measured for each listener (see Figure 3).
This bias could have been a personal bias of the performer himself, who
might have tried to emphasize affects on the valence axis instead of those on
the arousal axis. It could also be explained by the choice of repertoire, which
might favor higher valence.
DISCUSSION
This research focused on discrete emotions, and combined averaged data on
their frequency in order to represent the ambiguity of multiple or concurrent
apprehensions. Performers interpretations also presented some ambiguity
that was captured by this approach. Since the performer and listeners were
colleagues, his presence might have induced the student listeners to report a
higher valence.
Acknowledgments
The authors are very grateful for support from PROPESQ/UFRGS.

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Address for correspondence

Fernando Gualda, Music Department, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Rua
Senhor dos Passos, 248, Porto Alegre RS 90020-180, Brazil; Email: gualda@ufrgs.br
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