North-West University expert’s new book explores the role of music in emotions
Music can alter our mood, as the phrase “music calms the savage beast” illustrates, for example.
It can set the scene for calmness, romance, learning and creativity. A new book by North-West University (NWU) academic Prof Conroy Cupido explores how four visual artists created original artworks about the meaning they attach to music and how the music influenced their emotions.
Music, art and emotion: depictions of the night inspired by romantic art song is an open-access scholarly book that was launched on 22 February.
It offers insights on how music can evoke emotions, from anger to sadness, joy and lightness, and can simulate sounds such as birdsong or thunder. In other words, music can convey something outside itself, and the listener can attach specific meaning to it.
NWU researchers Dr Jaco Meyer and Dr Willem Venter contributed chapters to the book.
“Their research focused mainly on the role of music in well being and positive emotions. Four visual artists listened to five art songs by Schubert, Strauss, Fauré and Berlioz. This inspired them to create 20 new artworks based on their personal understanding of the meaning of the songs, without understanding the original French and German words in the songs,” says Prof Cupido, associate professor in Music.
The artists were Jean Lampen, Marna de Wet, Kevin du Plessis and Elna Venter. He explains that they had to rely on referential meaning in music and take into account their emotional experience of the music during the project.
“Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this research and the many different methods we used in our approach, I was able to gather and analyse empirical data that provided a rich, in-depth understanding of how people ascribe meaning to music,” Prof Cupido says.
“I found that listeners are automatically drawn to the words of the songs. But there is so much meaning hidden in music, and I wanted to find out how listeners ascribe meaning to art songs when they do not understand the words.”
He also examined the artists’ creative process and combined it with existing literature on emotion and referentialism* in music.