Claims of categorical primacy for musical affect are confounded by using language as a measure
Year: 2020
Type: letter
Abstract: Cowen et al. (1) leverage modern gains in data science to describe impressive cross-cultural similarities in the perception of musical affect and do so in unprecedented detail. Their approach is innovative and fundamentally empirical. As such, it should have important applications for prediction in the field of affective computing, which aims to create artificial systems that can recognize and simulate human affect (2). At a theoretical level, however, the authors argue that their results support the primacy of categories in how music makes us feel, posing broad dimensions like valence (3) and arousal (4, 5) as post hoc derivations. If true, these claims would have broad …
[↵][1]1Email: dbowling{at}stanford.edu.
[1]: #xref-corresp-1-1
Author: Daniel L. Bowling
Institutions: Stanford Medicine, Stanford University
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W3015531119