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Music in everyday life: The role of emotions

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 18. Music in everyday life: the role of emotions

John A. Sloboda

18.1 Scope and purpose

The term ‘music in everyday life’ has been prevalent in the research literature for about a

decade. The only book to be so far published with this precise title is DeNora (2000),

although other terms, such as ‘music in daily life’ have preceded it (e.g., Crafts, Cavicchi, &

Keil, 1993). Earliest treatements were predominantly found within sociology and media

studies, with increasing attention by psychologists in more recent years.

Although this is a new topic of study, it is a fast growing one within music psychology.

This can be illustrated by the relative coverage of the topic in two comprehensive reviews of

the discipline published in the last decade. There is only the briefest of mentions of the topic

in the specially-commissioned multi-authored entry on ‘psychology of music’ in the New

Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Clarke, Cross, Deutsch, Drake, Gabrielsson,

Hargreaves, Kemp, McAdams, North, O’Neill, Parncutt, Sloboda, Trehub, & Zatorre, 2001).

Yet, only a few years later, ‘music in everyday life’ was considered so central that it was

assigned a six-chapter section to itself within the nine-section structure of the Oxford

Handbook of Music Psychology (Hallam, Cross, & Thaut, 2009).

The purpose of this chapter is not to document every type of activity that falls under the

rubric of music in everyday life. For that, the reader is referred to Sloboda, Lamont, and

Greasley (2009) and related chapters in Hallam et al. (2009). Rather the current purpose is to

extract and try to systematise some key issues relating to emotion as it impinges on, and

interacts with, music in everyday life.

In the book (Juslin & Sloboda, 2001) from which the current volume developed,

Sloboda and O’Neill (2001) contributed a chapter using primarily their own work to illustrate
 2

some key issues regarding emotions in everyday listening to music. That strategy was

appropriate to what was then a very young field. The current chapter adopts a different

strategy, drawing on the considerably larger body of research literature that has emerged since

2000 to formalise ten key propositions which aim to reflect what the research has suggested to

us about emotion in everyday music. While these propositions are rooted in published

empirical findings, they deliberately push beyond published formulations as a stimulus to

future research.

In her introduction, DeNora (2000) specifies her domain and intent as:

to document some of the many uses to which music is and can be put, and to describe a

range of strategies through which music is mobilized as a resource for producing the

scenes, routines, assumptions and occasions that constitute ‘social life’ (p. xi)

‘Social life’ is a catch-all category, since it can be argued that all uses of music, even

the most solitary, are elements of social life. Nothing is left out. Like most researchers in the

field, DeNora’s work tends to define ‘everyday’ implicitly, through the actual examples of

music use and experience that are studied. This chapter considers more explicitly some of the

dimensions along which one might assess whether or not a musical event counts as

‘everyday’. A test of whether such dimensions are useful is whether they can be used to

exclude anything. If they cannot, then the term ‘everyday’ is really not very useful. I hope that

the result of this exercise may be a little more clarity about a term which is often used in the

literature, but sometimes without a great deal of precision. Without that clarity it is hard to

assess what the distinctive role of emotions, if any, might be in such experiences.

I have found ten dimensions on which everyday music has been distinguished (whether

explicitly or otherwise) from the ‘non-everyday’. I describe each of these dimensions in turn,
 3

drawing out potential implications for emotion of each dimension. These implications will act

as working hypotheses against which to organise and evaluate the empirical research

literature.

18.2 Ten propositions about emotion in everyday music

18.2.1 Frequency of occurrence

Everyday music is the kind of musical experience that is prone to happen often, and could

plausibly happen every day. This gives it a strong cultural specificity. Musicians’ everyday

experiences will be very different to non-musicians, Nigerian everyday experience will be

different to Swedish. Frequency could also relate to the number of people for whom a set of

experiences is typical. More people in Western cultures hear music on radio than on player

piano (pianola), therefore listening to the radio is arguably more ‘everyday’ than listening to

player piano. However, 100 years ago, many homes and meeting places had pianolas - so at

that time pianolas were ‘everyday’. Now most people have to go to a museum to hear one.

Implications for emotion. In general emotions are strongest when events are unexpected

and surprising (Sonnemans & Frijda, 1995). Frequent events tend not to be very surprising

and so they that tend to elicit weaker emotions.

Proposition 1: everyday emotions to music tend to be of low intensity rather than high

intensity

Research evaluation. Proposition 1 is not to be confused with a different but

superficially similar claim that emotions involving music in everyday life are trivial or

unimportant. On the contrary, because everyday life is the ‘ground’ for our existence, small

emotional differences from day to day can have enormous cumulative effects. Rather, the
 4

claim is that music has its typical effect by shifting mild emotion by small steps rather than

pushing people to strong extremes of elation, despair or fury. A typical emotional result might

be that it helps a boring task to be less boring, or a sad mood to tip to a contented one. Such

modest outcomes can have significant effects on life - they can improve both cognitive and

social functioning (e.g., Thompson, 1991).

One indication that low-intensity emotions are typical for the everyday comes from

North, Hargreaves, and Hargreaves (2004) where they found that participants selected ‘helped

create or accentuate an emotion’ from a list of potential functions to describe only 20% of all

occurrences of self-selected music listening. This does not mean that there were no emotional

effects in the other 80% of cases, but it does suggest that these effects were small, and

possibly bound up in a broader judgement of outcome (such as ‘it helped pass the time’). A

more direct piece of evidence comes from a recent experience-sampling study by Juslin,

Liljeström, Västfjall, Barradas, and Silva (2008) where they asked respondents to explicitly

identify whether a specific episode of exposure to music in daily life affected the way they

felt. On 36% of occasions respondents specifically asserted that the music did not affect them

emotionally.

Similarly, Sloboda, O’Neill, and Ivaldi (2001) carried out a study where participants

self-rated change in affect after everyday instances of musical exposure on a series of seven

point scales (e.g., very happy, quite happy, somewhat happy, neutral, somewhat sad, quite

sad, very sad). The modal change was one scale point (mean = 1.3). It was very common for a

person to shift from neutral to somewhat happy for instance, but there were no instances

where the shift was from one end of the scale to the other.
 5

18.2.2 Ordinariness versus specialness of the context or the experience

Everyday life tends to exclude the protected or ‘specialist’ environments in which music takes

on a ‘heavier’ social or cultural weight than normal. Special environments could include a

concert, a wedding, a rave, or a funeral. Perhaps the everyday also excludes the transcendental

and the ‘peak’ (see Chapter 20, this volume; see also Whaley, Sloboda, & Gabrielsson, 2009)

- these could be seen as ‘special’ experiences, even if they do not occur in special contexts. In

contrast, everyday experiences tend to be rather mundane and insignificant, concerned with

the unexciting business of managing home, food, cleaning, getting to and from work,

shopping, and so on (North, Hargreaves, & Hargreaves, 2004). These experiences blur into

one another, it is hard to distinguish one ordinary day from another for most people (Stein,

Ornstein, Tversky, & Brainerd, 1996).

Implications for emotion. Memory for emotions tends to be greatest when the emotion

is intense, or the event of which the emotion is part, has a high personal significance (Levene,

1997, Levene & Safer, 2002 ).

Proposition 2: everyday musical emotions are rather unmemorable on average

Research evaluation. If we assume that music exposure is generally likely to have some

emotional impact on a listener, we can take answers to questions such as ‘how often do you

feel emotions in response to music’ as some measure of the memorability of music-related

emotions. Laukka (2007), in a questionnaire study with 500 participants aged 65 and over,

found that 55% of respondents responded ‘sometimes’ or less frequently (where sometimes

was defined as 33-66% of listening time). Therefore, there were significant numbers of

participants who could not recall experiencing any particular emotion to the majority of

musical episodes in their life.

 6

Why might this be? One potential line of explanation is that music is generally only one

part of a composite experience, which involves concurrent non-musical aspects as well.

Memorability may thus be affected by what is going on alongside the music. In general,

listening to music as the main activity (or for its own sake) is rather rare in everyday life.

North, Hargreaves, and Hargreaves (2004) found that only 12% of episodes of hearing music

were classified as ‘at home deliberately listening to music’. In Sloboda, O’Neill, and Ivaldi’s

study, the proportion was even less (2% of episodes were classified as listening to music as

the ‘main activity’). The non-musical activities found most frequently to accompany music

were, in North et al., driving (12%), ‘at home doing an intellectual demanding task’ (12%),

and ‘at home doing housework’ (7%); while in Sloboda et al. they were maintenance

(washing, getting dressed, cooking, eating at home, housework, shopping - 30%) and travel

(leaving home, driving, walking, going home - 23%). These are kinds of activity that take

place on many days if not every day, and whose emotional significance can be expected to be,

on average, low. If routine activities are not very memorable, then the music that accompanies

them may generally also be forgotten, along with the emotions they may have engendered.

We do, of course, need to take cognisance of the fact that some proportion of musical

experiences in everyday life do elicit strong and memorable emotions. Perhaps the most

widely cited category of such strong experiences come from hearing music which has become

associated with an emotionally-charged past event. Familiar music can be a trigger to strong

emotional memories of earlier times in life, close relationships, love, and loss (Baumgartner,

1992). Indeed, ‘memory of valued past events’ was one of the most cited categories of

musical function in the free written responses provided by the participants in Sloboda’s

(1999/2005) study. But the existence of a small number of emotionally memorable music

experiences need not invalidate the general conclusion that the majority of everyday musical

experiences are unmemorable.

 7

18.2.3 Location of occurrence

Everyday music tends to refer to music in the home, the street, shops, pubs, restaurants and

other public places characterised by the freedom to move through them at will and without a

special ‘appointment’. Workplaces are included, and public transport - but generally not

concert halls. There are some environments where the use of music tends to be restricted, or

controlled by professionals, such as hospitals and schools. This makes them sit both sides of

the divide. We might view the CDs and MP3s that students swap with one another in the

playground to be everyday, but not the specific pedagogical use of musical materials by a

teacher in a music lesson. Similarly, the music playing in the hospital canteen might be

everyday, while the music used by an anaesthetist to assist pre-operative relaxation may not

be. Music in film is an interesting case. Is it ‘everyday’ when you hear it at home on the TV,

and ‘non-everyday’ when you go and see the same film in a cinema? This may be a matter of

degree: if you organise to watch a film at home ‘seriously’, you will turn off your phone,

lower the lights, not stop half way through to do something else - in other words, you will turn

the everyday into the ‘special’ and will make your home into a temporary movie-theatre, thus

transforming the everyday into the special.

Implications for emotion. The locations involved provide significant opportunities for

distraction and flux in experience, with transitions to and from different settings and

activities.

Proposition 3: everyday musical emotions are short-lived and multiple, rather than

integrated or sustained
 8

Research evaluation. A variety of studies, using experience sampling and other time-

sensitive monitoring methods have indicated that many people are exposed to a significant

number of separate and potentially unconnected musical stimuli in the course of a day. For

instance, the non-musician participants studied by Sloboda et al. (2001) reported hearing

music four times a day on average. Among a self-selected sample of 222 respondents in a

radio survey carried out for the BBC1, the average number of times music was heard was

eleven times per day.

Since the range of contexts and types of music can be very broad, ranging from self-

chosen music at home or in transport, to music encountered in shops and other public places,

the potential for fragmentation and variety must be great. Unfortunately, none of the studies

published to date have looked at the temporal succession of events within individuals on a

day-by-day or hour-by-hour basis, although such data could clearly be extracted and analysed

from several of the studies.

18.2.4 Circumstance of exposure: the role of choice

Much everyday music is unchosen - people come across it as they go around their daily

routine (e.g., in shops or malls). Other music is chosen, and this relates to the technology

available (CD player, hifi, Ipod, etc.). This range of circumstances brings the issue of choice

to centre stage. People in everyday life need constantly to negotiate situations of greater or

lesser choice, and some of their emotional reactions may derive directly from the way they

handle choice (or the lack of it). In general, the everyday has a character where choice is

always open to subversion, simply because of the rather uncontrolled and ‘open’ nature of the

everyday domain, where whatever you are doing is always prone to interruption or

interference from other surrounding activities. Special music environments are generally ones
 9

where control is increased, and efforts are made to reduce interruption or interference to a

practical minimum. That is what makes them ‘non-everyday’.

Implications for emotion. Lack of choice tends to generate negative emotions as a

response to the thwarting of goals or values.

Proposition 4: everyday musical emotions include a significant proportion of negative

emotions such as irritation, disapproval, and dislike

One of the repeated findings of the literature is that, overall, people are surprisingly

tolerant of music that they have not chosen, and are often positively disposed towards it. This

suggests an overall positive attitude to music among people who hear it, and may also indicate

that those who choose music for playing in public places are often doing so with an informed

intention to increase the positivity or enjoyment of the public (i.e., they accurately judge the

music that the majority of people will appreciate).

For instance, in the study of North et al. (2004) with 346 UK participants aged 18-78,

the most frequently chosen response for music that participants had not chosen to hear was ‘it

helped to create the right atmosphere’ (32%) followed closely by ‘I enjoyed it’ (29%).

Similarly, in the Sloboda et al. study (2001), positive mood changes as a result of music

significantly outnumbered negative mood changes, and this was true even when the music

was not chosen, although the mean degree of change was less in such cases.

On the other hand, most studies indicate a number of cases where the emotional

reactions are not positive. In the North et al. study, around 27% of the responses to unchosen

music were negative (e.g., ‘it annoyed me’, ‘it hindered my attempts to do what I was trying

to do’). Negative reactions were most typical when the participant was trying to undertake

demanding intellectual work. Presumably, the music broke their concentration.

 10

A small but vocal minority experience very extreme negative emotions to music in

public places, to such an extent that they have made their dislike of it into a campaigning

issue. There is an organisation called ‘Pipedown’ dedicated to banning all music in public

places (see DeNora, 2003, and http://www.pipedown.info/). Sloboda (1999/2005) analysed

written responses from a self-selected UK sample to the open question ‘please could you tell

us all about you and music’ and discovered that the demographic group most likely to

volunteer strong negative reactions to music in public places were males over the age of 40. It

was hypothesised that men of this age, being at the height of their earning power and

associated social status, would be most used to being able to exercise control and choice in

their lives, and therefore most negatively emotionally affected when such choice was

thwarted.

It should not be assumed that all chosen music elicits positive emotions. Sometimes

people choose music to encourage or augment negative emotions such as grief or anger.

However, it would be safe to suggest that the frequency of negative emotions to chosen music

is considerably lower than to that of unchosen music - a suggestion supported by the findings

of Sloboda et al. (2001) that chosen music is on average associated with significantly greater

levels of positive emotional change than unchosen music.

18.2.5 Nature of transmission

Most music in industrialised cultures is now recorded music. Many cultures are characterised

by a paucity of live music. In the ESM study of Juslin et al. (2008), only 7% of the musical

emotion episodes during a two-week period involved live music. Live music is increasingly

heard only in specialised controlled (and thus non-everyday) environments. Probably the only

serious example of live everyday music would be the street musician (busker). The

consequence of the domination of recorded music is that the origins and mode of production
 11

of the music are de-emphasised or hidden. It is easy, even typical, for a listener not to know

anything about the composer, performer, or mediator of the music experience. The archetype

of this is the ‘hidden’ background music found in shops, airports, and malls. You do not know

who made the music, or who decided to impose it on the situation, or why, and you do not

have easy means of finding out. This is rarely the case in ‘non-everyday music’, where the

choice of the music is explained and articulated (e.g., through programme notes) and where

the identity of those who produced the music is a central aspect of what it is that listeners are

expected to know.

Implications for emotion. Everyday emotions to music are less likely to contain those

‘social’ emotions that rely on in-depth knowledge about the person producing the music (e.g.,

admiration, envy, empathy).

Proposition 5: everyday emotions in music are more self-referring (e.g., cheerful,

anxious) than other-referring (e.g., proud of, approving of)

Research evaluation. Juslin and Laukka (2004) provide a list of felt emotions to music,

in order of frequency of occurrence (reproduced here in Table 18.1). The first other-referring

emotion (‘admiration’) appears 17th in the list. ‘Happy’, ‘relaxed’, and ‘calm’ are the three

most cited emotions. A similar pattern was shown in Laukka (2007; see also Chapter 22, this

volume).

(Insert Table 18.1 about here)

18.2.6 Centrality of music to the experience, and the salience of the context

‘Special’ contexts for music engagement are those that tend to focus maximum attention on

the music itself, and minimise other concerns. Music comes centre-stage, and the aim is
 12

almost to make the context fade away into the background (Small, 1998). Everyday uses of

music tend to be characterised by a much stronger role for the context or the accompanying

activity. If you use music while engaging in some activity, such as exercising or working, you

are not, thereby, elevating the music above the non-musical activity. The non-musical task

still ‘drives’ the situation, in that the non-musical goals remain to be achieved. Even if music

is used to distract consciousness from a boring or routine task, the user still needs to maintain

whatever level of attention and control is needed to complete the task.

Implications for emotion. With a strong ‘balance of attention’ outside the music,

emotions are likely to be less dependent on the music itself than in specialised musical

settings. This could also mean that such emotions are going to show even more inter-

individual variation than in more controlled settings (because the meaning of the context, or

the music-context interaction, is more likely to be different for different people).

Proposition 6: everyday emotion to music reflects and is influenced by the personal

emotional meaning of the non-musical context

Research evaluation. The non-musical context can impact on emotional response in at

least two separate ways. The first source of influence is the current non-musical context, both

internal and external: What is actually going on (including what has recently happened and

what may happen in the immediate future) at the time the music is heard. But a second, and

sometimes strong, source of influence is through memories of non-musical contexts that are

triggered by, and associated to, the musical piece itself. So, when a person hears a particular

piece of music, it may remind them of a time in their life when this piece was central, or it

may remind them of a significant person or relationship (Schulkind, Hennis, & Rubin, 1999).
 13

Or it may simply remind them of some general cultural association (e.g., organ music

signifies churches, classical music signifies high-culture and privilege, etc.)

It could be argued that this second source of non-musical influence, which one might

call ‘personal and cultural associations’ is not specific to everyday music. These same

associations are also present and operating in the special and non-everyday exposure to music

of the concert hall or the ‘attentive absorption’ in music. Although this is true, the emotional

outcomes may be quite different. One aspect of emotional response is the generation of action

tendencies (Frijda, 1986). In the context of the everyday, these action tendencies can be

immediately translated into actions, which can ‘cash in’ the emotional energy in some way.

So, for instance, if I hear a piece of music in a shop that has negative emotional connotations

for me, I can often choose to walk out of the shop, thus removing myself from the source of

unwanted emotions (cf. Sloboda 1999/2005). Or, if a piece of Mediterranean music reminds

me of a pleasant holiday, I may be more inclined to pick up and buy a bottle of Italian wine

(North, Hargreaves, & McKendrick, 1999). In the context of the concert hall, these same

emotional tendencies cannot lead to action. In general, specialised music listening contexts

are ones that suppress or defer action tendencies, and that encourage the emotional effects to

be noticed, savoured, held, and fed back and integrated into the attentional response to the

unfolding musical event. Of course, the contrast is not complete. If concert music rouses

enough non-musical associations, one can often find that one’s attention is taken away from

the music onto non-musical problem-solving or rumination. In effect, one can ‘walk away

from the concert’ inside one’s head (e.g., Flowers & O’Neill, 2005). But as a generalisation,

the specialist music environment is one that suppresses, dampens, or defers action tendencies,

whereas the everyday environment is one that enables and facilitates the conversion of action

tendencies into immediate action. Some support for this notion comes from Krumhansl’s

(1997) study, where music listeners in a decontextualised laboratory environment showed

 14

psychophysiological responses similar to those typically found in contexts where emotional

responses are suppressed.

The impact of non-musical information on the emotional impact of music has been

studied in a variety of ways. For instance, Thompson, Graham, and Russo (2005) showed that

the same musical stimulus is rated as more happy when accompanied by visual exposure to a

smiling face than to a sad face. Evidence of effects of non-musical context on emotions felt to

music has been provided by Cantor and Zillman (1973), Dibben (2004), and Konecni, Wanic,

and Brown (2007), using factorial experimental designs.

18.2.7 Nature of the music

Is some music by its very nature ‘everyday’? Could an advertising jingle, a chart song, or the

signature tune for a TV show be ‘everyday music’, while a symphony or an opera is not? It is

possible that this distinction is partly a distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, between

art music versus vernacular music (DiMaggio, 1987). It is art music that is likely to be

presented in specialised non-everyday contexts, to allow a fuller and more contemplative

attention to it, whereas vernacular music is designed to rub along with anything else that is

happening in the marketplace of experience. It is possible that some negative emotions are

due to the evaluation of this kind of mismatch (e.g., people experiencing the playing of art

music in elevators as some kind of cultural transgression, as described in Barenboim, 2006).

On the other hand, any simplistic identification of the popular with the everyday needs to be

avoided. Popular music is, for many people, the locus of serious ‘connoisseurship’ that is

every bit as specialist as the attending given by some listeners to classical music (Frith, 1996).

In general, art music tends towards length and complexity (a symphony can last an

hour, an opera can last three hours), whereas vernacular music tends to brevity and simplicity

(the standard popular track or song lasts three minutes; musical ‘signatures’ such as theme-
 15

tunes can last for much less time than this - a few seconds, e.g. the ‘start up’ tune on

Microsoft Windows, which lasts around three seconds). These are by no means rigid

distinctions. Classical art music can be made more ‘everyday’ by cutting it up into shorter

segments (as happens on some ‘populist’ classical music radio stations - probably in part

explaining the ferocious hostility to this practice expressed by some classical music

aficionados). On the other side, there are some examples of what might be broadly termed

popular music because of some shared stylistic features, which are long, complex, or both

(such as the contemporary sub-genre Math Rock, or the work of musicians such as Mike

Oldfield). But in a sense these are exceptions that confirm the rule, and what makes them

interesting and controversial is precisely that they do not conform to the norm.

Implications for emotion. One of the functions of vernacular culture is to provide easily

recognised symbols, and these symbols can have a clear emotional element, because they may

need to get across their symbolic meaning in noisy and diverse situations. This suggests that

the more subtle, aesthetically tinged emotions may have lesser import.

Proposition 7: everyday emotional responses to music prioritise basic rather than

complex emotions

Research evaluation. For obvious reasons, musical experiences in everyday life will

tend to be more shortlived than in specialised music-listening contexts. Everyday experience

is full of ‘snatched moments’ where we might overhear a few seconds of a musical piece, as

we move past a particular location.

There is considerable evidence that very short musical extracts (even as short as one

second) are capable of communicating clear emotional signals, about which there is little

inter-rater disagreement (e.g., Bigand, Filipic, & Lalitte, 2005; Watt & Ash, 1998). This
 16

suggests that such emotions may be ‘read off’ the musical surface, rather than through deep

structural analysis. Similarly, such surface characteristics might directly influence brain

pathways to change emotional state, without any need for close attention to musical symbols

(see Chapter 5, this volume).

Everyday music might be considered to be that music whose emotional message is

primarily designed to be one that can be read off the surface. Those musical forms that are

primarily designed for everyday use (e.g., signature themes for TV programmes) need to be

designed for instant recognition and instant response in complex social environments where

there are competing attentional demands. Art music also has ‘surface’, and therefore it is

possible, if one’s attention is not fully on it, to respond to it entirely in terms of its surface

characteristics. It is exactly in such everyday situations as overhearing a snatch of art-music in

an elevator that such ‘surface hearing’ is most likely.

Obviously, people experience complex emotions in everyday life. What is being

suggested here is that the complexity is more likely to be sourced through the non-musical

aspects of the situation than through the musical. If a piece of music reminds me of a person

with whom I have a problematic and unresolved relationship, I may well experience complex

emotions, but these emotions are not engendered by a nuanced engagement with the musical

elements, but a nuanced engagement with cognitions about the person that the music reminds

me of. For instance, nostalgic rumination on past events and relationships is one key function

of music noted in a variety of studies (e.g., Sloboda, 1999/2005).

Within the set of basic emotions, it is also possible to question whether each basic

emotion is as likely to occur as any other. There is evidence that music engenders some basic

emotions more easily than others. For instance, Zentner, Grandjean, and Scherer (2008) found

that people were sixteen times more likely to report feeling happy to music than they were to

report feeling angry (p. 504, Table 2).

 17

18.2.8 Method of investigation

The term ‘everyday’ is sometimes used to refer to research strategy, and the prioritising of

‘ecological validity’. Everyday research studies are those that tend to involve field rather than

laboratory situations, and often involve self-report and other ‘rich’ interpretative user-driven

forms of data (see Chapter 8, this volume, for a more detailed discussion of self-report). This

means that the researcher often is unable, or unwilling, to impose control methodologies (e.g.,

factorial experimental design) on a situation, thus limiting the degree of rigorous theory

testing possible (see Chapter 26, this volume, for a defence of experimental approaches).

Another feature of the everyday methodology is that intrusive measurement techniques (e.g.,

psychophysiological monitoring; Chapter 9, this volume) are not generally used in this work

(although there is no reason in principle why not - minituarisation of means of recording

heart-rate, skin conductance and other relevant physiological measures means that participants

in research may carry monitoring equipment in their pockets as they go about their everyday

lives; e.g., Steptoe, Cropley, & Joekes, 2000).

Implications for emotion. Preferred methods for assessing emotional response are post-

hoc and interview or questionnaire based.

Proposition 8: everyday emotions to music are elicited by retrospective self-report

Research evaluation. Two factors are responsible for restricting almost all data-

gathering on everyday emotions to self-report. The first of these is technical - music

researchers have in general not found ways to directly observe or record physiological aspects

of emotional response whilst leaving participants complete freedom to go about their daily

affairs. There is no reason why future research should not remedy this. The second of these is
 18

more substantive - and relates to the difficulty of identifying emotion from physiological or

observational data without the self-report of the participant as an interpretational guide. You

cannot tell which emotion a person is feeling just from physiological measures alone (Scherer

& Zentner, 2001).

The wish to leave participants maximum freedom has also restricted the amount of work

using experimental paradigms, which means, in particular, that causal inferences are hard to

make. However, some researchers have found means of imposing some experimental control

on situations that still leave the participants the freedom of manoeuvre typical of everyday

situations. These means include simulation studies, where key elements of the real life

situation are re-created in the laboratory (e.g., studies of driving behaviour with driving

simulators; Brodsky, 2002). They also include studies in real-life situations where the

experimenter exerts some degree of control (e.g., altering the musical background in real-life

settings such as shops, canteens, on-hold music, and gyms; see North & Hargreaves, 2009). In

such situations, elements of the stimulus fall under experimenter control, but there are no

prescriptions for participant behaviour additional to those already present in the real-life

situation. These types of methods would seem readily adaptable to the experimental study of

everyday emotional responses to music.

The main dimensions on which studies of everyday emotions vary relate to (a) the tools

used to elicit self-report (free versus categorical), and (b) the time delay between event and

response. In free response, respondents are asked to describe their emotional reactions in their

own words (e.g., Batt-Rawden & DeNora, 2005; DeNora, 2000; Sloboda, 1999/2005; see also

Chapter 22, this volume). In categorised response, respondents are asked to tick or rate

researcher-specified categories and dimensions (e.g., Juslin & Laukka, 2004; North &

Hargreaves, 2004; Sloboda et al., 2001). Both alternatives have advantages and present

problems. Free response encourages respondents to think more deeply about their experience,
 19

and is more motivating. However when individuals are left free to choose their own words,

then differences in vocabulary and culture make it difficult to compare data across

individuals, let alone across studies (Scherer, Wranik, Sangsue, Tran, & Scherer, 2004).

Forced-choice judgements provide advantages for the researcher in terms of analytic ease and

cross-individual comparisons. However, when individuals select emotion labels from a pre-

determined list, the danger is that the word chosen does not reflect their true response so

much as a ‘nearest fit’ or some judgement of what would seem the ‘appropriate’ label to pick

(as a result of perceived emotional character of the music, rather than their own experience; or

as a result of demand characteristics of the study, see Chapter 10, this volume).

The main threat to the validity and reliability of data gathered in everyday situations is

the vulnerability of self-reports to bias (see Ericsson & Simon, 1980). When relating to

emotion, these biases are likely to include forgetting or conflating of routine and low-intensity

experiences, and processes of re-interpretation of high-intensity experience in the light of

post-experience events and current psychological state (Levine & Safer, 2002). Such biases

are likely to be least pronounced where data is gathered as close in time to the event

concerned as possible. The most ‘proximal’ is some form of participant observation where the

researcher is actually in the presence of the research participant (e.g., accompanying them on

a shopping trip, or eliciting concurrent commentary; e.g., De Nora, 2000).

Next in proximity comes experience-sampling methodologies (ESM) when participants

are contacted electronically (e.g., mobile phone) while going about their daily lives and asked

to report on a concurrent or recent event (North & Hargreaves, 2004; Juslin et al., 2008). This

typically reduces average delay between event and report to a few hours at most, and minutes

at best. This method was pioneered by Cziksentmihalyi and colleagues (e.g.,

Csikszentmihalyi & Lefevre, 1989) and introduced to music study by Sloboda, O’Neill, and
 20

Ivaldi (2001). A recent review of the research applications of ESM is given by Hektner,

Schmidt, and Csikzentmihalyi (2007).

It remains the case, however, that a very substantial part of the literature on this topic

derives from ‘one time’ encounters with participants, through questionnaires or interviews

that integrate memory-based material over a significant time span, which can vary from the

immediately preceding time-span (e.g., ‘can you tell me about yesterday? - DeNora, 2000)

through targeted distant times (e.g., ‘the first 10 years of life’ - Sloboda, 1989/2005), to more

unspecific generalised approaches (‘tell me about the role of music in your life’ - Hays &

Minichiello, 2005; Sloboda, 1999/2005). In expanding the time-span in this way, research can

quite significantly limit reliability, validity, and precision of the data so collected.

Although careful methodological decisions can raise the reliability and validity of the

data collected on emotional responses to everyday musical experiences, it is difficult to test

strong causal theories about the relationship of music to emotion through such work, since

there is little or no opportunity for a researcher to manipulate independent variables in a

controlled fashion. This does not mean that research into everyday music is free of serious

attempts at generalisation. Far from it, as I hope the material reviewed in this chapter shows.

What it does mean is that the work of testing theories of specific psychological mechanisms

through which emotions are engendered remains at a quite preliminary stage (see Juslin and

Västfjäll, 2008, for a critical evaluation of this area).

18.2.9 Intellectual stance of writer/researcher

In general, ‘music in everyday life’ seems to be an emblem for an anti-elitist approach, which

wishes to explore the full range of ways in which people engage with music in their lives,

rather than starting from some premise of how people ‘should’ engage with music. Such an

approach takes particular care not to start from the views of musicians and musical elites
 21

(composers, performers, critics, broadcasters). Rather, it starts from the point of view of the

consumer. It also reflects an approach that places as much interest in activities where music

plays a minor or supporting role, as those where music is the ‘main act’.

Implications for emotion. The everyday approach sits somewhat lightly to any a-priori

attempt to predict emotional response from the nature of the musical materials. It will take

emotion to arise from a materials-listener-context complex in which the composer/performer

and the musical work have no privileged position.

Proposition 9: everyday emotions to music are listener-focused rather than focused on

the musical work

Research evaluation. When a music-emotion researcher engages with a participant, it is

very hard to avoid giving the impression to the participant that you are particularly interested

in their responses to the music. So questions such as ‘how did the music make you feel?’, and

‘What is it about this music that you like?’ are the stock in trade of the music-emotion

researcher. There is, for that reason, a strong reason to believe that respondents will try,

wherever possible, to reference their emotional responses to the musical object, and privilege

such response over others.

In a laboratory study of music listening, Waterman (1996) classified free verbal

descriptions of moments in deliberate focused music-listening when the participants ‘felt

something’. Only two of the thirteen classifications were not pointing to characteristics of the

musical work. These two were sensual/physical reactions (e.g., ‘I felt a lump in my throat’)

and association (e.g., ‘it reminded me of when…’). Even among non-musically trained

respondents, only some 17% of responses fell into these two categories. The remaining 83%
 22

referenced the content of the stimulus in some way (e.g., ‘I noticed the change in mood’, ‘I

felt it because it got louder’, ‘The music is cheap’).

However, like the vast majority of research situations, the Waterman experiment was

designed to make music ‘centre stage’ in the participant’s awareness, recreating in the

laboratory that ‘special’ and ‘non everyday’ context of the concert hall where hushed and

reverent attention is being given to the music and where one monitors self-consciously the

effect that the music is having on the self. Everyday uses of music are not generally like this.

They are only like this in those somewhat rare situations when the listener’s attention is

predominantly on the music and his or her reactions to it, and not on the external context (or

non-musical cognitions, memories, associations).

Those of us who research and write about music, tend to do so because music is of deep

interest to us - our own experience of it is rich, complex, and necessarily quite explicit. We

may forget that there are some people, possibly many people, for whom talking and thinking

precisely about their musical experiences may be a rare and unpracticed activity. Even when

asked to focus their attention on specific music listening experiences by a researcher, they

may have rather little authentic to say! In a recent study by Greasley and Lamont (2006),

participants of different reported levels of engagement with music were intensively

interviewed about their uses of and reactions to music in their everyday lives. According to

the authors, less engaged participants often found it more difficult to articulate why they liked

music (‘it’s got me annoyed now, ‘cause I can’t explain why I like it, but I just do… there’s

very few songs I could explain why I like it’).

In the study by Sloboda (1999/2005), participants were asked to write in their own

words about ‘music and you’. It was very clear that the ‘you’ half of the pair received much

more elaboration than the ‘music’ half. Few people talked about specific pieces, or their

understanding of musical content and style. Many responses were notable for failing to
 23

reference a single style of music (e.g., pop, classical), far less an individual piece. But all

respondents wrote, sometimes at great length, about the contexts in which they listened to

music, and the personal functions that music listening fulfilled. A typical statement offered

was ‘On arrival home from work, music lifts the stress of work: it has an immediate healing

effect’. The implication of this statement is that the person concerned had long ago settled the

issue of what music to listen to on arrival home from work. Everything was set up, and he or

she could simply enjoy the habitual effects of this, much as the effects of a warm bath,

without too much focused cognition on the what and how.

On the other hand, there is some evidence that encouraging people to focus on their

emotional responses can actually help to bring music’s function into explicit awareness for

participants, thus enhancing their ability to reflect on and discuss it, and possibly use it more

strategically in their everyday lives in the future (e.g., Batt-Rawden & DeNora, 2005; see

Chapter 7, this volume). But even then, it is possible that the greater reflexivity achieved

relates not so much to a more detailed attention to the musical content as to a more detailed

attention to one’s own psychological states.

Is there any way of researching everyday emotional impact of music without telling

participants that this is what you are researching? It is hard to see how unless one embeds this

in a wider study of everyday emotions, where music just happens to crop up as one of a whole

variety of external stimuli: or where the emotional response is measured through non-verbal

means (e.g., physiological monitoring). There remain significant challenges ahead for music

researchers that have by and large not been addressed in the methodological approaches

outlined in Section III of this handbook, where most of the approaches involve high levels of

researcher-induced attention to the details of the musical experience.

 24

18.2.10 Contextual specificity of judgement obtained

There are many studies that ask people about their music preferences (see Konecni, 1982; and

Chapters 24 and 25, this volume). These would appear to tap the enduring emotional value of

particular pieces of music. However, where these preferences are generalised (‘I like style x

more than y’), these seem to take the studies out of the realm of everyday life to some

platonic sphere of comparative aesthetic values. Studies of preference only become

‘everyday’ when preferences are linked to contexts (e.g.. ‘I like style x to work to, exercise to,

wake up in the morning’). Indeed, it could be argued that there is always a cultural ‘frame’ for

comparisons between different pieces of music, it is simply that in some contexts this frame is

implicit and un-stated. The everyday approach is to assume that music is functional for the

individual’s goal achievement. There may be no such thing as ‘listening to music for its own

sake’ even when that listening is solitary and self-referring. There is always a social or

cultural outcome, even if only in the imagination. If this is the correct way to look at music

engagement, then it should be possible, through sufficient probing or deconstruction, to

uncover a specific functional explanation behind any statement of generalised liking or

preference. Such general statements will simply be shorthand for an emotional orientation

towards a piece of music, or a genre, which reflects the emotional outcomes of previous

specific encounters with that music that achieved specific functional outcomes for that person.

Implications for emotion: The functional approach highlights emotions relevant to goal-

achievement (including mood regulation), rather than emotions relating to enduring traits or

attitudes.

Proposition 10: everyday emotions to music arise from transient aspects of goal

achievement with which the music becomes associated, rather than from stable

evaluative attitudes to the music

 25

Research evaluation. Sloboda et al. (2009) reviewed research studies on music listening

by choice (as opposed to involuntary exposure). They organised their review by the functional

niche that the music is chosen to be part of. They identified five main everyday niches in the

research literature. These are (a) travel (e.g., driving a car, walking, using public transport);

(b) physical work (everyday routines like washing, cleaning, cooking, and other forms of

manual labour); (c) brain work (e.g., private study, reading, writing, and other forms of

thinking); (d) body work (e.g., exercise, yoga, relaxation, pain management); and (e)

emotional work (e.g., mood management, reminiscence, presentation of identity).

In reviewing the research literature, Sloboda et al. identified four recurring functions of

self-chosen music use. Distraction is a way of engaging unallocated attention and reducing

boredom (as evidenced in studies on pain management - e.g., Mitchell, MacDonald, Knussen,

& Serpell, 2007). Energising is a means of maintaining arousal and task attention (as

evidenced by research on driving - e.g., Cummings, Koepsell, Moffat, & Rivara, 2001). In

entrainment, the task movements are timed to coincide with the rhythmic pulses of the music,

giving the task or activity elements of a dance (shown to be a significant factor in choice of

music to accompany physical exercise - e.g., Belcher & DeNora, 1999). Finally, meaning

enhancement is where the music draws out and adds to the significance of the task or activity

in some way (as in the use of music to enhance personal reminiscence - e.g., Greasley &

Lamont, 2006). A related classificatory scheme has been applied to music use in adolescents

by Saarikallio and Erkkila (2007).

In many of the functional niches for self-chosen music, emotions are not the primary

intended functional outcome. Rather, outcomes such as task completion are primary (e.g.,

getting the housework done). However, emotions and affective states in general can be

secondary or intermediate outcomes. If I find housework boring and demotivating, then I may
 26

be able to get through the housework more successfully if I use music to help me feel more

cheerful. There is little research evidence on how these ‘secondary’ emotions work.

However, the fifth functional niche identified by Sloboda et al. (mood management,

reminiscence, presentation of identity) is more directly concerned with the achievement of

desired emotional outcomes as a primary goal. Evidence for deliberate and self-conscious use

of music to manage (or regulate) mood comes from a range of qualitative studies, where

respondents are asked to explain their music use in an intensive way (e.g., Batt Rawden &

DeNora, 2005; DeNora, 2000; Sloboda, 1999/2005). There is clear evidence that the ability to

use music in this way is subject to individual differences. Women generally give more

detailed and articulate accounts of their regulatory strategies than men (North, Hargreaves, &

O’Neill, 2000), and people who have a low level of engagement with music (as evidenced by

their self-rated subjective importance of music-listening) appear less aware of the range of

emotional functions that music can fulfil than more engaged listeners (Greasley & Lamont,

2006). There is evidence that self-aware use of music for mood regulation can be enhanced

through therapeutic or educational intervention (Batt-Rawden & DeNora, 2005), although the

conditions under which this may best take place have not yet been systematically investigated.

There also exists a broader general psychological literature on mood-regulation, which

studies the use made by people of a variety of strategies and tactics to create, maintain,

enhance, or change a mood or emotion in an intended direction (Parkinson, Totterdell, Briner,

& Richards, 1996). Music is only one of many devices by which people attempt to regulate

their mood (they also include eating, exercise, watching TV, etc.). The detailed research on

everyday uses of music is by and large not closely informed by the wider literature on mood

regulation, and as a result there is little comparative analysis of the specific characteristics and

potentials of music as opposed to other available (and effective) mood-regulation tactics

(Van-Goethem, 2008).
 27

The line of argument being pursued is that everyday emotions to music rarely if ever

arise out of a decontextualised aesthetic relationship to the music as object. In other words, it

is difficult to find instances in everyday music listening where you can convincingly account

for an emotional response purely on the basis that the listener likes the music in question,

regardless of any psychological outcomes that the music might be allowing the listener to

achieve. One well-researched factor in accounting for emotional attachments to music is

identity: that specific pieces or genres of music reflect and communicate, to the listener and to

those in his or her social world, something about who he or she is, and about values (see, for

instance, MacDonald, Hargeaves, & Miell, 2002). In this context, a strong positive emotional

response to a particular piece of identity-confirming music may arise from a sense of pride,

belonging, resistance against a common foe, personal honour or value, which the identity

confers, and that the music reminds the listener of. For that reason, the same piece of music

should always simultaneously be capable of engendering emotions deriving from exclusion,

alienation, indifference or disaffection in those whose identity is not associated with the music

in question.

18.3 Concluding remarks

Table 18.2 summarises the issues that this chapter has reviewed. The dimensions on which

everyday music has been characterised fall into three main groups. The first group

(propositions 1-3) concern general qualities of the emotional experience. The second group

(propositions 4-7) concern the specific emotional content, and the third group (propositions 8-

10) concern the context in which the emotions are experienced and researched. In each case,

everyday music has been contrasted, either implicitly or explicitly to the ‘non-everyday’ or

‘special’ reception of music, of which the experiences of an attentive and informed audience
 28

of a classical symphony concert might be considered a paradigm. The table summarises these

constrasts in the columns headed ‘everyday’ and ‘non-everyday’.

(Insert Table 18.2 about here)

In relation to quality of the experience, everyday experiences are low on intensity,

memorability, and integration; whereas the non-everyday experiences are, on average, higher

in all these respects. In relation to content, everyday experiences involve basic-level self-

referential emotions, with a focus on factors external to the music, and a significant

proportion of negative reactions; whereas non-everyday experiences tend towards more

complex, broadly positive, and other-referenced emotions drawing on the music itself. The

context for everyday experience is one focused on the goal achievement of the listener as

elicited through discourse; whereas the non-everyday context focuses on aesthetic reactions to

the work and those who produced it, as elicited through a range of behavioural and

psychphysiological measures.

For most of its short life, the psychological study of emotional responses to music has

focused primarily on the non-everyday. Its methods, theories, and base assumptions have

been deeply influenced by this orientation. Historians and sociologists of the subject can

profitably analyse why this might have come about - in relation to the institutions,

professions, and key individuals which have shaped the discipline. But in general, there seems

to be a strong cultural tendency to elevate the aesthetic discourse of music over the practical,

which runs more strongly for music than for some other domains.

It is instructive, for instance, to compare the way we think about the consumption of

music to way we think about the consumption of food. Both music and food have practical

and aesthetic components. As for music, some people interested in food (‘gourmets’) are

willing to pay substantial sums of money to go to ‘special’ non-everyday places, where food

is prepared and served with great thought and care, and everything is done to ensure that full
 29

attention is placed on the textural, sensual, and structural properties of the meal. This is a

perfectly valid way of consuming food, and one which merits close study. It undoubtedly

brings with it a set of emotional responses that are distinctive and interesting. But it would be

very strange if food psychologists were to act in ways that implied that they thought that the

gourmet experience was the most central or paradigmatic mode of food consumption, and the

one which merited central study, relegating the study of everyday food consumption to the

margins.

Maybe the difference between food and music is the issue of necessity. If we don’t eat

we die, and therefore the mundane, goal-oriented (and survival-oriented) aspects of food

consumption are clearly central to any psychological consideration of it. Music is not a

necessity for individual survival, and so, although it may be recruited for goal-oriented

activities, there is nothing to require this. People who want to ‘reserve’ music for the aesthetic

domain are free to do so, and this somewhat elitist impulse seems to have dominated the

scholarly study of music.

It is my belief that the role of psychological investigation is to describe and explain

what is there, in all its rich complexity. Everyday music listening probably comprises the vast

bulk most of ‘what is there’ within contemporary music experience. Describing and

explaining the special is important too, as it helps us to understand the potentials and limits of

human capacity. But unless our examination of the ordinary and the exceptional interact and

cross-fertilise each other, then an integrated understanding will be hard to achieve.

 30

Further recommended reading

1. DeNora, T. (2000). Music in everyday life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

2. Hallam, S., Cross, I., & Thaut, M. (Eds.). (2009). Oxford handbook of music psychology.

Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chapters 40-45)

 31

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Footnote
1
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