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Abstract
This study grew out of the observation of a remarkable sparing of emotional responses
to music in the context of severe deficits in music processing after brain damage
in a non-musician. Six experiments were designed to explore the perceptual basis of
emotional judgments in music. In each experiment, the same set of 32 excerpts taken
from the classical repertoire and intended to convey a happy or sad tone were presented
under various transformations and with different task demands. In Expts. 1 to 3, subjects
were required to judge on a 10-point scale whether the excerpts were happy or sad.
Altogether the results show that emotional judgments are (a) highly consistent across
subjects and resistant to brain damage; (b) determined by musical structure (mode
and tempo); and (c) immediate. Experiments 4 to 6 were designed to asses whether emotional
and non-emotional judgments reflect the operations of a single perceptual analysis
system. To this aim, we searched for evidence of dissociation in our brain-damaged
patient, I.R., by using tasks that do not require emotional interpretation. These
non-emotional tasks were a 'same-different' classification task (Expt. 4), error detection
tasks (Expt. 5A,B) and a change monitoring task (Expt. 6). I.R. was impaired in these
non-emotional tasks except when the change affected the mode and the tempo of the
excerpt, in which case I.R. performed close to normal. The results are discussed in
relation to the possibility that emotional and non-emotional judgments are the products
of distinct pathways.