page_title: Culture in music cognition
section_title: Cue-redundancy model
hierarchical_section_title: Culture in music cognition / Emotion recognition / Cue-redundancy model
caption_attribution_description: English: For culture in music cognition page
context_page_description: Culture in music cognition refers to the impact that a person's culture has on their music cognition, including their preferences, emotion recognition, and musical memory. Musical preferences are biased toward culturally familiar musical traditions beginning in infancy, and adults' classification of the emotion of a musical piece depends on both culturally specific and universal structural features. Additionally, individuals' musical memory abilities are greater for culturally familiar music than for culturally unfamiliar music. The sum of these effects makes culture a powerful influence in music cognition.
context_section_description: According to the cue-redundancy model, individuals exposed to music from their own cultural tradition utilize both psychophysical and culturally bound cues in identifying emotionality. Conversely, perception of intended emotion in unfamiliar music relies solely on universal, psychophysical properties. Japanese listeners accurately categorize angry, joyful, and happy musical excerpts from familiar traditions (Japanese and Western samples) and relatively unfamiliar traditions (Hindustani). Simple, fast melodies receive joyful ratings from these participants; simple, slow samples receive sad ratings, and loud, complex excerpts are perceived as angry. Strong relationships between emotional judgments and structural acoustic cues suggest the importance of universal musical properties in categorizing unfamiliar music.
  When both Korean and American participants judged the intended emotion of Korean folksongs, the American group's identification of happy and sad songs was equivalent to levels observed for Korean listeners. Surprisingly, Americans exhibited greater accuracy in anger assessments than the Korean group. The latter result implies cultural differences in anger perception occur independently of familiarity, while the similarity of American and Korean happy and sad judgments indicates the role of universal auditory cues in emotional perception.
  Categorization of unfamiliar music varies with intended emotion. Timbre mediates Western listeners' recognition of angry and peaceful Hindustani songs. Flute timbre supports the detection of peace, whereas string timbre aids anger identification. Happy and sad assessments, on the other hand, rely primarily on relatively "low-level" structural information such as tempo. Both low-level cues (e.g., slow tempo) and timbre aid in the detection of peaceful music, but only timbre cued anger recognition. Communication of peace, therefore, takes place at multiple structural levels, while anger seems to be conveyed nearly exclusively by timbre. Similarities between aggressive vocalizations and angry music (e.g., roughness) may contribute to the salience of timbre in anger assessments.
caption: Schematic of the cue-redundancy model.
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