Abstract:

Music tonality refers to music mode and harmony hierarchical structure. Studies on the relationship between music tonality and emotions are mainly done based on western music and westerners. It is found that music mode and harmony hierarchical structure that’s formed on a basis of a certain keynote are both important reasons of emotional responses. It is commonly shown that for westerners major modes arouses positive emotion while minor modes arouses passive emotion. What’s more, stable harmony generally arouses the feeling of relax while unstable harmony generally arouses the feeling of nervousness. The current dispute is whether the emotion effects of western music tonality which is established on the system of western music represent a cultural specificity or a cultural generality on emotional responses. Moreover, the emotional responses aroused by music tonality go in line with domain specificity or domain generality. To clear the dispute mentioned above, we examined the emotional responses of the Chinese person when the western music modes (major and minor) differed in the stability and harmony in experiment I. In Experiment II, we examined the emotional responses when the Chinese traditional music modes (gong-mode and yu-mode) were adopted. The Chinese gong-mode has similar characteristics to the western major mode and the Chinese yu-mode has similar characteristics to the western minor mode. We use subjective indicators (emotional valence, arousal and tension) and physical indicators (skin conductance, finger pulse and finger temperature) to examine the emotional responses. Six effects were observed through the two experiments. First, major and gong-mode induced positive emotion while minor and yu-mode induced negative emotion. The emotional valence when induced by the harmony in low stability was lower than when the harmony was in high stability. Second, the arousal induced by the harmony in low stability was higher than in high stability. Third, in major, the tension induced by the harmony in low stability was higher in high stability. Fourth, the skin conductance induced by the harmony in low stability was higher than in high stability. Fifth, the finger pulse induced by the harmony in low stability was higher than in high stability. Sixth, the finger temperature induced by major and gong-mode was higher than that of minor and yu-mode. Chinese participants, when examined under the circumstances of the western music tonality, share mostly common emotional responses with the western studies. As to the emotional responses, the Chinese traditional music tonality shares mostly common characteristics with the western music tonality. We suggest that the western and the Chinese music tonality are universal in emotional responses. Also, the emotional responses aroused by music tonality and its correlation trends with the subjective indicators have domain generality.

Key words: tonality, mode, function of harmony, emotion