Single chords convey distinct emotional qualities to both naïve and expert listeners

Previous research on music and emotions has been able to pinpoint many structural features conveying emotions. Empirical research on vertical harmony’s emotional qualities, however, has been rare. The main studies in harmony and emotions usually concern the horizontal aspects of harmony, ignoring emotional qualities of chords as such. An empirical experiment was conducted where participants (N = 269) evaluated pre-chosen chords on a 9-item scale of given emotional dimensions. 14 different chords (major, minor, diminished, augmented triads and dominant, major and minor seventh chords with inversions) were played with two distinct timbres (piano and strings). The results suggest significant differences in emotion perception across chords. These were consistent with notions about musical conventions, while providing novel data on how seventh chords affect emotion perception. The inversions and timbre also contributed to the evaluations. Moreover, certain chords played on the strings scored moderately high on the dimension of ‘nostalgia/longing,’ which is usually held as a musical emotion rising only from extra-musical connotations and conditioning, not intrinsically from the structural features of the music. The role of background variables to the results was largely negligible, suggesting the capacity of vertical harmony to convey distinct emotional qualities to both naïve and expert listeners

The Employment and Output Effects of Changing Patterns of Afforestation in Scotland

This paper considers the economy-wide output and employment effects of the shift in forest expansion away from coniferous plantations towards broadleaf and native species. Four different woodland types are distinguished within a Scottish input-output table and demand and supply multipliers estimated to show the total effects on the economy of a 100 hectare increase in the land area devoted to each type as well as a switch in land from agriculture. Results suggest that the output and employment effects of new native woodlands and farm woodlands are greater than those generated by planting additional coniferous woodlands of equivalent size. In addition, an increase in the area of these policy-driven woodland types is likely to have positive effects, even when the expansion impinges onto agricultural land of average productivity. It is thus argued that the traditional economic objectives of forestry policy have not been compromised in the drive towards multi-benefit woodlands

Principles of structure building in music, language and animal song

M.R. was generously supported by the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy as well as the Zukunftskonzept at TU Dresden supported by the Exzellenzinitiative of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. W.Z. is supported by the New Generation Initiative of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. G.A.W. is supported by the Lrn2Cre8 and ConCreTe projects, which acknowledge the financial support of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme within the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission, under FET grant numbers 610859 and 611733. C.S. acknowledges funding from the Excellence Clusters Languages of Emotions and Neurocure, the collaborative research grant SFB 665, and Bernstein focus area ‘neural basis of learning’, project ‘variable tunes: neural mechanisms underlying learning motor sequences (01GQ0961/TP1, BMBF)