Its all well and good being able to create music to a set brief like I am doing for my client but how do you know if your music is really giving out the right message or if its emotionally effecting people in any way? Usually with popular music, its structure and style relies heavily on market research leading up to a musical production and then when it comes to the release, its success is entirely judged by its consumers. However, with designer music it’s a little different. As designer music is developed to evoke a particular mood it can be put through testing and then tweaked based on those test results until the large majority of participants show the emotion the music is attempting to convey.

“In the study of music and emotion, a central aim of psychology is to understand the mechanisms that intervene between music reaching a person’s ears and an emotion being experienced or detected by that person as a result of hearing that music. Other important aims involve understanding the roles of emotion in composing and performing music.” (Juslin and Sloboda, 2001, p. 72)

My particular assignment involves composing and producing 3 pieces of ‘designer music’ to be used as background music in a VIP in Lincoln’s largest nightclub. These pieces of music have to adopt some forms of music psychology in the sense that the compositions must attempt to inflict particular moods on the rooms customers. The ‘circumplex model of emotion’ is a model and theory depicted in Juslin and Sloboda’s book ‘Music and Emotion’. It is a theory that splits recognisable human emotions into 4 sections and how they occur. This proves a useful tool for my work as i can see what categories certain emotions fall into so i know which section to direct my music to or even attempt to accommodate other similar emotions in the spectrum within my product.

(Juslin and Sloboda, 2001, p. 78)

In respect of the circumplex model of emotion, i should be looking to aim for the segment named ‘low arousal, positive affect’ which accommodates such emotions as ‘Serene’, ‘Relaxed’ and ‘Calm’. There is also some room for manoeuvre within this theory as my product should be able to reach the ‘high arousal, positive impact’ section as these emotions tend to develop from the low arousal, positive affect section. As long as my music does not bring its consumers into the negative sections by showing emotions like depressed or fatigued my product should be a success. So going back to the original question: How do we test the emotions that a piece of music inflicts on its consumer?

“The most basic observations arguably come from studies that use self-reports. These studies have yielded evidence that people experience emotions while listening to music, and that they perceive music as expressive as emotions.” (Juslin and Sloboda, 2001, p. 84)

By utilising this commonly used experiment I can gather a group of subjects to document their current emotional state before and after playing them my product within a controlled environment. By simply asking a group of participants to all fill in brief forms asking them to select their current emotional state individually both before and after my ‘designer music’ is played to them I can gauge how effective my product has been in evoking positive emotions within its consumers. Also I can take these results and use them to tweak various sections of my product that may not provoke the intended emotions, or exaggerate certain aspects of the music to give stronger positive emotions where before they may have been lacking. For this I plan on testing a total of around 30 people consisting of students, adults, audio professionals and my personal client when the product is completed. I will post the results and any supporting materials from the experiments as soon as i have confirmed a date and executed the tests.

Sources:  Juslin, P. N. and Sloboda, J. A. 2001. Music and emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.