Determining the emotional
character of emotions
The Theory of Musical Equilibration
hypothesizes that, to date, the
effect of overtones has been misunderstood. Despite earlier beliefs
to the contrary, it is not that we
perceive changes in the notes:
instead, we identify with the will
that they express, and unlike previous premises, the notes want
to remain unchanged. Something
else remarkable is the fact that the
notes are not perceived as what
they really are – frequencies – but
as something vague and uncertain.
The tonal characters
of musical harmonies
The fundamental principle of the
Theory of Musical Equilibration is
quite simple at first. Chords are traditionally described in many textbooks as having ‘striving’ notes,
i.e. notes that want to be resolved.
This sense of striving, however, is
a contradictory desire. For example, the real musical experience
we have when we hear a C-major
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In 1996, Bernd and Daniela Willimek
began conducting surveys to learn
how children judged the effects of different chords. They used these data
as the basis for a wide-scale study in
which over 2100 children from four
continents have participated in musical preference tests. These tests were
designed to find correlations between
scenes from fairy tales and musical
selections that described emotional
terms. The most well-known participants in the tests included members
of the Vienna Boys’ Choir and the
Regensburg Cathedral Choir.
Overall there was an 86% match,
i.e. 86% of the participants correlated the musical selection to the
emotion outlined by the Theory of
Musical Equilibration as being the
best match. As a supplement to the
tests, the Willimeks also researched
the repertoire of classical music and
film scores to explore further links
between music and emotions. Here
they found conspicuous parallels
which further confirmed their findings.