Perception of six basic emotions in music

A test of the ability to perceive six basic emotions (happiness, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness, and fear) in music was presented to 115 participants. Eighteen musical segments, lasting 3-5 seconds, were designed for this test using a variety of solo instruments. The results show that six basic emotions are perceivable in musical segments previously unknown to the listeners, although there was large variability in the percentage of correct classification of each of the segments comprising each emotion, and happiness and sadness were easier to classify than the other emotions. Moreover, the ability to classify musical emotions was not related to childhood or youth musical instruction or personality traits (assessed by NEO-PI-R).