Exploring Changes in the Emotional Classification of Music between Eras

Prior work has noted changes in musical cue use between the Classical and Romantic periods. Here we complement and extend musicological findings by blending score-based analyses with perceptual evaluations to provide new insight into this important issue. Participants listened to excerpts from either Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier or Chopin’s 24 Preludes – historically important sets drawn from distinct musical eras, with 12 major and 12 minor key pieces each. Participants selected one of five categories for each piece, adapted from previous musical analyses exploring historical changes in music’s cues. Combining participant classifications with score-extracted cues offers a useful way to complement and extend previous work exploring changes in the function of mode across musical eras based only on notational information. In doing so, we find evidence that changing associations of cues in the Romantic era influence judgments of affective meaning. This study provides a useful step toward bridging the divide between traditional approaches to musicology, music theory, and music perception by combining perceptual evaluations with cues extracted from musical scores to shed light on changes in musical emotion across eras.