Background: Previous studies have suggested both universality and cultural specificity in music emotion recognition. Basic emotions could be recognised across cultures, however, there may be an in-group advantage if the music and the listeners stem from the same culture. Emotion perception in music could be based on a combination of universal and cultural cues, which might influence listeners differently across cultures. Similar to Western music, Chinese music is often appreciated for its emotional expressivity in Chinese culture. However, there is still rare research comparing Chinese music and Western music in the cross-cultural perception of musical emotions.

Aims: The first purpose of the study was to examine whether the in-group advantage of music emotion recognition, which has been found in many previous studies, can be replicated in the Chinese and Western contexts. The second purpose was to investigate how acoustic cues are associated with the perception of musical emotions in Chinese and Western listeners.

Method: Two hundred seventy-eight Chinese (69 males, 98 musicians, M = 25 years) and 136 Westerners (54 males, 68 musicians, M = 35 years) participated in an online study via Qualtrics. After completing a demographic questionnaire, participants were required to listen to 18 Chinese and Western music excerpts, which were presented randomly and intended to express happiness, sadness, peacefulness, anger, and fear. Participants were instructed to indicate to which degree they thought the music expressed the five emotions on continuous scales ranging from 1 to 5.

Results: The repeated measures ANOVAs revealed that regardless of the cultural origin of the music, Chinese participants seemed to be more sensitive than Western participants to the perception of happiness and sadness, while Western participants seemed to be better at identifying fear. By extracting the acoustic features via the MIR Toolbox 1.8.1 and conducting mixed linear regressions, it was also found that the number and degree of acoustic features correlated with emotion recognition differed across cultures.

Conclusions: In-group advantage in the cross-cultural music emotion recognition was not well substantiated in this study, as different cultural groups seemed to generally demonstrate better performance in recognising specific emotions. In addition, differences in the quantity and quality of acoustic cues associated with emotion recognition across cultures were shown. Based on relevant literature, the above findings could be related to the differences in the personality traits or cognitive styles among different cultures, and thus subsequent studies exploring these assumptions are suggested to be conducted.

 

• Keywords: Cross-cultural, emotion recognition, acoustic features

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Copyright © 2023 Menglan Lyu and Hauke Egermann.