Psychologists have known for decades that people perceive music as happier when it’s played faster, and in a major key (mode). Take a listen to the following sound clips I created using a synthesized flute. Each plays the same melody three times—first in a major mode, then a minor mode, then a “whole tone” middle ground. The only difference between the two clips is that the second clip is played twice as fast.
For most people, the second clip sounds happier than the first overall, and the major mode portion sounds happiest within each clip. But what matters most—the speed (tempo), or the mode?
When Kate Hevner first reported on this phenomenon in the 1930s, she demonstrated the relationship between tempo and mode and happiness/sadness judgements, declaring tempo to be the more important of the two. After listening to the clips, you may agree with Hevner, but her data didn’t offer a compelling reason to believe that tempo matters more.
Much more recently, Lise Gagnon and Isabelle Peretz found a way to determine which impacts our perception of emotions more—mode or tempo. They developed 8 different melodic sequences (one of which I duplicated in the clips above), and then adapted them to major, minor and whole tone modes. These sequences were then played for paid participants in four different conditions:
- Mode change: All sequences were played at the same tempo, in each of the different modes—major, minor, and whole tone
- Tempo change: All sequences were played in whole tone mode, at a fast, middle and slow tempo
- Convergent: Fast tempo sequences were played in major mode, middle tempo sequences were played in whole tone mode, and slow tempo sequences were played in minor mode
- Divergent: Fast tempo sequences were played in minor mode, middle tempo sequences were played in whole tone mode, and slow tempo sequences were played in major mode
After hearing each sequence, participants rated it on a scale of 1 (happiest) to 10 (saddest). The Mode and Tempo change conditions were included simply to replicate earlier work by Hevner and others, and as expected, the major mode and faster tempo were associated with happier ratings. Gagnon and Peretz expected to find stronger happiness and sadness ratings in the Convergent condition, because mode and tempo effects were combined. As they expected, in the Convergent condition, participants rated combined fast, major mode sequences as significantly happier than either major mode or fast tempo by themselves.
The Divergent condition was the key to the experiment—when, for example, a fast tempo was combined with a minor key, or a slow tempo was combined with a major mode, tempo always took precedence. Slow tempo, even when associated with a major mode, was rated sad, and fast tempo, even when associated with a minor mode, was rated happy.
But what if the only reason for this difference is that the tempo changes were more dramatic than the mode changes? Gagnon and Peretz had doubled the speed of the sequences, from 110 beats per minute for the slow tempo to 220 for fast tempo. What if the tempo change were made less dramatic—would the results still hold? The researchers figured out a way to generate tempo changes that were roughly equivalent to mode changes: they tested the sequences with a new group of volunteers, but this time they used many different tempos, until they found a set of three whose happiness and sadness ratings were roughly equal to those found in the Mode Change condition. This time, the fast tempo was reduced to only 160 beats per minute.
They now repeated the entire experiment using the smaller range of tempos. Even though participants had rated tempo-only and mode-only changes as the same, in the Divergent condition, tempo once again took precedence. So it appears that tempo is more important than mode in determining whether a musical selection is happy or sad.
Gagnon, L., & Peretz, I. (2003). Mode and tempo relative contributions to “happy-sad” judgements in equitone melodies. Cognition and Emotion, 17(1), 25-40.