Antti Seppä

Searching for the Universal Subconcious: Study on Music and Emotion Antti Seppä

Are there any differences in how we feel about music? This research reaches to clarify differences and their reasons in our perception of music-related emotions. Furthermore, this research presents two new measuring tools for how to consider music-related emotions and musical preferences, The Eye of Emotions and The Indicator of Interest. The first aim of this study was to test the above-mentioned models in practice. Both of these new models capture together the categorical and dimensional ways of thinking about music-related emotions. The second aim of this research was to find out if the participants? aesthetic distance, for example musical history, age, gender and preferences, would be related with the emotions experienced during the test. In most cases the participants reported very similar emotional listening experiences despite of the differences in their current emotional state or musical background. In addition to the two main research questions, this study reflects to the growing amount of research on the field opening aspects to the most important questions on the matter, such as what is an emotion?