Tuomas Eerola
Biographic Data
| ID | 1083928 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tuomas Eerola |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tuomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Eerola |
| SIGNATURE | EEROLA T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2896-929X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 40 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Measuring Emotional Experiences with Music
This study focuses on the first stage of instrument development, content validity, and provides guidance on what steps should be taken when designing and evaluating content through the development of an instrument to reflect a recent theory concerning emotional episodes. To establish this instrument, we (1) operationalized the theory, identifying 25 sub-constructs for topics such as listening attention, meaning generation, preferences, familiarit…
The influence of consonance–dissonance contrasts on perceived pleasantness of concluding tonic chords in short chord sequences
Does dissonance enhance the pleasantness of the following consonance due to the ensuing contrast? The contrast between the affective characteristics of successive stimuli is considered an important factor for the perceived pleasantness of the final stimulus, known as the contrast effect. We tested the contrast effect of dissonance and consonance by employing short chord sequences ending with a manipulated penultimate chord, resolving to the final…
Auditory affective priming
To date, there has been relatively little research on the relationship between anxiety and music. Trait anxiety (TA) is known to modulate responses to threat-related stimuli, but it is unclear whether this is driven by differences or biases related to attention, vigilance avoidance, or information processing. We evaluated competing predictions based on Attentional Control Theory (ACT), Vigilance Avoidance, and the Information Processing model. We…
A genre-specific structure of subjective feeling in music listening
Most studies of subjective feeling categories in musical emotion use dimensional or categorical models to describe the different kinds of emotions induced by music. There are several data-driven approaches, of which one example is Zentner and colleagues’ Geneva Emotions in Music Scale (GEMS), which proposes 10 terms which can parsimoniously describe emotional experiences with music. Ethnomusicologists, however, advocate approaches to music and em…
Gender, emotion regulation, and cognitive flexibility as predictors of depression, anxiety, and affect in healthy adults
Anxiety and depressive disorders are among the most prevalent mental health conditions. Consequently, identifying the factors that contribute to their development and maintenance has been a longstanding focus of interest within the scientific community. Gender differences, cognitive flexibility, and emotion regulation strategies have all been considered influential in the development of these disorders, but few works have analyzed these variables…
The perception of tension in harmonic intervals across Indian and Western listeners
A fundamental task for research on music cognition is to pinpoint the exact roles of nature and nurture in the perception of consonance/dissonance, i.e., the relative agreeableness and stability versus disagreeableness and instability of concurrent pitch combinations. In this experiment listeners (N = 133) from two cultural groups (Indian and Western) with two levels of musical expertise (musicians and non-musicians) rated perceived tension acros…
Major-minorness in tonal music
Mode is a foundational concept of Western music, serving as the basis for chords and harmonies, detecting and assessing cadences and form, and conveying musical emotion. Traditionally treated categorically, here we build upon recent work exploring this crucial musical construct on a continuum, an approach we refer to as ‘relative mode’. Specifically, we formulate and evaluate a computational model calculating this property from either symbolic or…
Episode model
We present a novel framework for music and emotion research that addresses emotional experiences with music as functional episodes. This framework, called the Episode Model, places the situation and the function of the music for the individual at the centre of the experience and integrates acts of affective self-regulation to our understanding of music as emotional experiences. The model consists of a set of five common and functionally unique ep…
Prevalence of transparency and reproducibility-related research practices in music psychology (2017–2022)
Social sciences are navigating an unprecedented period of introspection about the credibility and utility of disciplinary practices. Reform initiatives have emphasized the benefits of various transparency and reproducibility-related research practices; however, the adoption of these across music psychology is unknown. To estimate the prevalence, a manual examination of a random sample of 239 articles out of 1,192 articles published in five music …
The role of gender in emotional reactions elicited by music
Studies in the field of emotions have yielded mixed findings regarding differences between women’s and men’s emotional reactivity. In the majority, emotional scenes, facial expressions, and movies were used as stimuli. However, music has been less frequently used, despite its capacity to evoke strong emotional responses in the listeners. In this study, we aimed to explore the role of gender in emotional reactivity to music. A sample of 110 health…
Music as social surrogate? A qualitative analysis of older adults’ choices of music to alleviate loneliness
People are living longer than ever. Loneliness is prevalent across various age groups, posing a serious threat to both wellbeing and health. The social surrogacy hypothesis predicts that people make use of temporary substitutes for interaction with other people. In this qualitative study, we explored the role of self-chosen music as a social surrogate. A sample of older adults ( N = 35) was asked to name three pieces of music they would choose to…
Valenced Priming with Acquired Affective Concepts in Music
This study tested whether chords that do not differ in acoustic roughness but that have distinct affective connotations are strong enough to prime negative and positive associations measurable with an affective priming method. We tested whether musically dissonant chords low in valence (diminished, augmented) but that contain little acoustic roughness are strong enough in terms of negative affective connotations to elicit an automatic congruence …
Vigilance and social chills with music
It is unclear how music elicits chills (emotional experiences accompanied by goosebumps, shivers, and tingling sensations), and what psychological mechanisms underlie the response. Crucially, current explanations of chills struggle to encapsulate the variability of results linking the experience to musical features, psychophysiological activity, and individual differences, suggesting there may be distinct types of musical chills elicited through …
Analysis and Classification of Music-Induced States of Sadness
The enjoyment and pleasure derived from sad music has sparked fascination among researchers due to its seemingly paradoxical nature in producing positive affect. Research is yet to develop a comprehensive understanding of this “paradox.” Contradictory findings have resulted in a great variability within the literature, meaning results and interpretations can be difficult to derive. Consequently, this review collated the current literature, seekin…
Individual differences in music reward sensitivity influence the perception of emotions represented by music
Although music is one of the most important sources of pleasure for many people, there are considerable individual differences in music reward sensitivity. Behavioral and neurobiological characterizations of music reward variability have been topics of increasing scientific interest over the last two decades. However, it is not clear how differences in music reward sensitivity might influence the perception of emotions represented by music and, s…
The role of population size in folk tune complexity
Demography, particularly population size, plays a key role in cultural complexity. However, the relationship between population size and complexity appears to vary across domains: while studies of technology typically find a positive correlation, the opposite is true for language, and the role of population size in complexity in the arts remains to be established. Here, we investigate the relationship between population size and complexity in mus…
Register impacts perceptual consonance through roughness and sharpness
The perception of consonance and dissonance in intervals and chords is influenced by psychoacoustic and cultural factors. Past research has provided conflicting observations about the role of frequency in assessing musical consonance that may stem from comparisons of limited frequency bands without much theorizing or modeling. Here we examine the effect of register on perceptual consonance of chords. Based on two acoustic principles, we predict a…
Affective priming with musical chords is influenced by pitch numerosity
Previous studies using an affective priming paradigm have shown that valenced chords (e.g., consonant–positive; dissonant–negative) facilitate the evaluation of similarly valenced target words. The role of numerosity (the total number of pitches in a chord) and timbre has not yet been systematically investigated in previous priming studies using consonant/dissonant chords. An experiment was conducted in which 40 participants evaluated positive an…
The Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance Data Collection
The Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance Data Collection (IEMPDC) comprises six related corpora of music research materials: Cuban Son & Salsa (CSS), European String Quartet (ESQ), Malian Jembe (MJ), North Indian Raga (NIR), Tunisian Stambeli (TS), and Uruguayan Candombe (UC). The core data for each corpus comprises media files and computationally extracted event onset timing data. Annotation of metrical structure and code used in the p…
Phenomenological Differences in Music- and Television-Evoked Autobiographical Memories
Music can be a potent cue for autobiographical memories in both everyday and clinical settings. Understanding the extent to which music may have privileged access to aspects of our personal histories requires critical comparisons to other types of memories and exploration of how music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) vary across individuals. We compared the retrieval characteristics, content, and emotions of MEAMs to television-evoked aut…
Spanish adaptation of a film music stimulus set (FMSS)
The literature review reveals different conceptual and methodological challenges in the field of music and emotion, such as the lack of agreement in terms of standardized datasets, and the need for replication of prior findings. Our study aimed at validating for Spanish population a set of film music stimuli previously standardized in Finnish samples. In addition, we explored the role of gender and culture in the perception of emotions through mu…
A Response to Michael Spitzer's Commentary
The authors respond to the commentary by Michael Spitzer which appeared in Vol. 14, No. 1-2 of Empirical Musicology Review. The response 1) points out the problem with equating nostalgia and tension in the perception of single chords, 2) makes a case for why studying the role of vertical harmony, isolated from other musical cues, is insightful, and 3) questions the relevance of appoggiaturas as an explanation for the perception of nostalgia in si…
Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance
Interpersonal musical entrainment—temporal synchronization and coordination between individuals in musical contexts—is a ubiquitous phenomenon related to music’s social functions of promoting group bonding and cohesion. Mechanisms other than sensorimotor synchronization are rarely discussed, while little is known about cultural variability or about how and why entrainment has social effects. In order to close these gaps, we propose a new model th…
Interpersonal entrainment in Indian instrumental music performance
Two complementary aspects of interpersonal entrainment – synchronization and movement coordination – are explored in North Indian classical instrumental music, in the auditory and visual domains respectively. Sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) is explored by analysing pairwise asynchronies between the event onsets of instrumental soloists and their tabla accompanists, and the variability of asynchrony by factors including tempo, dynamic level and…
Ambivalent Emotional Experiences of Everyday Visual and Musical Objects
Art brings rich, pleasurable experiences to our daily lives. However, many theories of art and aesthetics focus on specific strong experiences-in the contexts of museums, galleries, and concert halls and the aesthetic perception of canonized arts-disregarding the impact of daily experiences. Furthermore, pleasure is often treated as a simplistic concept of merely positive affective character, yet recent psychological research has revealed the exp…
A comparison of the discrete and dimensional models of emotion in music
The primary aim of the present study was to systematically compare perceived emotions in music using two different theoretical frameworks: the discrete emotion model, and the dimensional model of affect. A secondary aim was to introduce a new, improved set of stimuli for the study of music-mediated emotions. A large pilot study established a set of 110 film music excerpts, half were moderately and highly representative examples of five discrete e…
Formulating a Revised Taxonomy for Modes of Listening
Listening to sounds or music is not a homogeneous act of grasping meanings by hearing. Yet it is often portrayed as such, especially when the intentional stance of a listener is overlooked. This paper distinguishes listening as the action-oriented intentional activity of making sense of the world. It is proposed that the multifaceted and heterogeneous nature of ‘understanding by listening’ can be outlined in terms of distinct modes of listening. …
Are the Emotions Expressed in Music Genre-specific? An Audio-based Evaluation of Datasets Spanning Classical, Film, Pop and Mixed Genres
Empirical studies of emotions in music have described therole of individual musical features in recognizing particular emotions. However, no attempts have been made as yet to establish if there is a link between particular emotions and a specific genre. Here this is investigated byanalysing nine separate datasets that represent categories ranging from classical (three sets), and film music (two), to popular music (two), and mixed genre (two). Ato…
Ambivalent Emotional Experiences of Everyday Visual and Musical Objects
Art brings rich, pleasurable experiences to our daily lives. However, many theories of art and aesthetics focus on specific strong experiences-in the contexts of museums, galleries, and concert halls and the aesthetic perception of canonized arts-disregarding the impact of daily experiences. Furthermore, pleasure is often treated as a simplistic concept of merely positive affective character, yet recent psychological research has revealed the exp…
Melodic and contextual similarity of folk song phrases
Various models of melodic similarity have been proposed and assessed in perceptual experiments. Contour and pitch content variables haven been favoured although music-theoretical and statistical variables have also been claimed to explain similarity ratings. A Re-analysis of earlier work by Rosner & Meyer (1986) suggests that simple contextual features can also be highly explanatory with more complex stimuli. A new experiment containing short mel…
Expectancy in Sami Yoiks revisited
This study extends a previous study concerning melodic expectations in North Sami yoiks (Krumhansl et al., 2000) in which a comparison between expert and non-expert listeners demonstrated the existence of a core set of principles governing melodic expectancies. The previous findings are reconsidered using non-Western listeners (traditional healers from South Africa) in a modeling investigation. Comparison of different models made it possible to s…
A nalysing E motions in S chubert ' s E rlkönig
The present article provides an outline of the computational prediction of emotions expressed by music. A recent model based on the extraction of acoustic features derived from film music is used to demonstrate each phase of the model's construction, and the musical relevance and predictive accuracy of such models are discussed. This model, as well as a stylistically more appropriate model based on piano performances, is applied to a segmented an…
A comparison of the discrete and dimensional models of emotion in music
The primary aim of the present study was to systematically compare perceived emotions in music using two different theoretical frameworks: the discrete emotion model, and the dimensional model of affect. A secondary aim was to introduce a new, improved set of stimuli for the study of music-mediated emotions. A large pilot study established a set of 110 film music excerpts, half were moderately and highly representative examples of five discrete e…
Measuring music-induced emotion
Most previous studies investigating music-induced emotions have applied emotion models developed in other fields to the domain of music. The aim of this study was to compare the applicability of music-specific and general emotion models – namely the Geneva Emotional Music Scale (GEMS), and the discrete and dimensional emotion models – in the assessment of music-induced emotions. A related aim was to explore the role of individual difference varia…
Music and Emotion
This special issue draws on a selection of papers presented at the inaugural International Conference on Music and Emotion in Durham in 2009, focusing on the scientific approach to understanding music and emotions. In this editorial we consider the current state of research into music and emotion, drawing comparisons with the earlier special issue of this journal published ten years ago and between the two edited collections which mark progress i…
Measuring Music-Induced Emotion
Most previous studies investigating music-induced emotions have applied emotion models developed in other fields to the domain of music. The aim of this study was to compare the applicability of music-specific and general emotion models – namely the Geneva Emotional Music Scale (GEMS), and the discrete and dimensional emotion models – in the assessment of music-induced emotions. A related aim was to explore the role of individual difference varia…
Music and emotion
This special issue draws on a selection of papers presented at the inaugural International Conference on Music and Emotion in Durham in 2009, focusing on the scientific approach to understanding music and emotions. In this editorial we consider the current state of research into music and emotion, drawing comparisons with the earlier special issue of this journal published ten years ago and between the two edited collections which mark progress i…
Are the Emotions Expressed in Music Genre-specific? An Audio-based Evaluation of Datasets Spanning Classical, Film, Pop and Mixed Genres
Empirical studies of emotions in music have described therole of individual musical features in recognizing particular emotions. However, no attempts have been made as yet to establish if there is a link between particular emotions and a specific genre. Here this is investigated byanalysing nine separate datasets that represent categories ranging from classical (three sets), and film music (two), to popular music (two), and mixed genre (two). Ato…
Who Enjoys Listening to Sad Music and Why?
although people generally avoid negative emotional experiences in general, they often enjoy sadness portrayed in music and other arts. The present study investigated what kinds of subjective emotional experiences are induced in listeners by sad music, and whether the tendency to enjoy sad music is associated with particular personality traits. One hundred forty-eight participants listened to 16 music excerpts and rated their emotional responses. …
Formulating a Revised Taxonomy for Modes of Listening
Listening to sounds or music is not a homogeneous act of grasping meanings by hearing. Yet it is often portrayed as such, especially when the intentional stance of a listener is overlooked. This paper distinguishes listening as the action-oriented intentional activity of making sense of the world. It is proposed that the multifaceted and heterogeneous nature of ‘understanding by listening’ can be outlined in terms of distinct modes of listening. …
A Review of Music and Emotion Studies
The field of music and emotion research has grown rapidly and diversified during the last decade. This has led to a certain degree of confusion and inconsistency between competing notions of emotions, data, and results. The present review of 251 studies describes the focus of prevalent research approaches, methods, and models of emotion, and documents the types of musical stimuli used over the past twenty years. Although self-report approaches to…
Universal and culture-specific factors in the recognition and performance of musical affect expressions
We present a cross-cultural study on the performance and perception of affective expression in music. Professional bowed-string musicians from different musical traditions (Swedish folk music, Hindustani classical music, Japanese traditional music, and Western classical music) were instructed to perform short pieces of music to convey 11 emotions and related states to listeners. All musical stimuli were judged by Swedish, Indian, and Japanese par…
Fifty shades of blue
It has been repeatedly shown that sad music induces mainly pleasant or mixed emotions, and is particularly relevant for self-regulation goals. However, this is not entirely compatible with the view that sadness is one of the basic emotions experienced in the face of an unpleasant event or a loss. Also, a distinction between grief and sadness is often drawn, which seemingly does not have relevance in relation to musical experiences. The discrepanc…
Age trends in musical preferences in adulthood
Increased age has been found to be associated with differences in musical preferences in adulthood. In past research, these differences were mostly attributed to changes in the social context. However, these influences were small and a large proportion of variance in age trends in musical preferences still remains to be explained. The aim of this article is to investigate the hypothesis that age trends in musical preferences are related to differ…
Interpersonal entrainment in Indian instrumental music performance
Two complementary aspects of interpersonal entrainment – synchronization and movement coordination – are explored in North Indian classical instrumental music, in the auditory and visual domains respectively. Sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) is explored by analysing pairwise asynchronies between the event onsets of instrumental soloists and their tabla accompanists, and the variability of asynchrony by factors including tempo, dynamic level and…
Ambivalent Emotional Experiences of Everyday Visual and Musical Objects
Art brings rich, pleasurable experiences to our daily lives. However, many theories of art and aesthetics focus on specific strong experiences-in the contexts of museums, galleries, and concert halls and the aesthetic perception of canonized arts-disregarding the impact of daily experiences. Furthermore, pleasure is often treated as a simplistic concept of merely positive affective character, yet recent psychological research has revealed the exp…
A Response to Michael Spitzer's Commentary
The authors respond to the commentary by Michael Spitzer which appeared in Vol. 14, No. 1-2 of Empirical Musicology Review. The response 1) points out the problem with equating nostalgia and tension in the perception of single chords, 2) makes a case for why studying the role of vertical harmony, isolated from other musical cues, is insightful, and 3) questions the relevance of appoggiaturas as an explanation for the perception of nostalgia in si…
Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance
Interpersonal musical entrainment—temporal synchronization and coordination between individuals in musical contexts—is a ubiquitous phenomenon related to music’s social functions of promoting group bonding and cohesion. Mechanisms other than sensorimotor synchronization are rarely discussed, while little is known about cultural variability or about how and why entrainment has social effects. In order to close these gaps, we propose a new model th…
The Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance Data Collection
The Interpersonal Entrainment in Music Performance Data Collection (IEMPDC) comprises six related corpora of music research materials: Cuban Son & Salsa (CSS), European String Quartet (ESQ), Malian Jembe (MJ), North Indian Raga (NIR), Tunisian Stambeli (TS), and Uruguayan Candombe (UC). The core data for each corpus comprises media files and computationally extracted event onset timing data. Annotation of metrical structure and code used in the p…
Phenomenological Differences in Music- and Television-Evoked Autobiographical Memories
Music can be a potent cue for autobiographical memories in both everyday and clinical settings. Understanding the extent to which music may have privileged access to aspects of our personal histories requires critical comparisons to other types of memories and exploration of how music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) vary across individuals. We compared the retrieval characteristics, content, and emotions of MEAMs to television-evoked aut…
Spanish adaptation of a film music stimulus set (FMSS)
The literature review reveals different conceptual and methodological challenges in the field of music and emotion, such as the lack of agreement in terms of standardized datasets, and the need for replication of prior findings. Our study aimed at validating for Spanish population a set of film music stimuli previously standardized in Finnish samples. In addition, we explored the role of gender and culture in the perception of emotions through mu…
The role of population size in folk tune complexity
Demography, particularly population size, plays a key role in cultural complexity. However, the relationship between population size and complexity appears to vary across domains: while studies of technology typically find a positive correlation, the opposite is true for language, and the role of population size in complexity in the arts remains to be established. Here, we investigate the relationship between population size and complexity in mus…
Register impacts perceptual consonance through roughness and sharpness
The perception of consonance and dissonance in intervals and chords is influenced by psychoacoustic and cultural factors. Past research has provided conflicting observations about the role of frequency in assessing musical consonance that may stem from comparisons of limited frequency bands without much theorizing or modeling. Here we examine the effect of register on perceptual consonance of chords. Based on two acoustic principles, we predict a…
Affective priming with musical chords is influenced by pitch numerosity
Previous studies using an affective priming paradigm have shown that valenced chords (e.g., consonant–positive; dissonant–negative) facilitate the evaluation of similarly valenced target words. The role of numerosity (the total number of pitches in a chord) and timbre has not yet been systematically investigated in previous priming studies using consonant/dissonant chords. An experiment was conducted in which 40 participants evaluated positive an…
Neuroscience and Music Perception (37 works) · Psychology (34 works) · Cognitive psychology (27 works) · Social Psychology (19 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Music and Audio Processing (16 works) · Diverse Music Education Insights (15 works) · Art (14 works) · Communication (14 works) · Musical (14 works)