The music of morality and logic

GUILLERMO CECCHI; MARCOS A TREVISAN; RODRIGO G ALONSO; MARIANO SIGMAN; B. MESZ

Boston

Conferencia; NEUROSCIENCES AND MUSIC ? VI CONFERENCE; 2017

BRAMS (International Lab for Brain, Music and Sound Research), Universidad de Montréal y Universidad McGill

We investigated two specific domains of musical semantics: morality and logic. While morality has been historically associated with music [1], [2], logic concepts,which involve more abstract forms of thought, are rarely linked with musical structures. We examined improvisations of 19 pianists on a MIDI keyboard inspired by 8positive and 8 negative morality terms (positive: loyalty, goodness, charity, solidarity, humility, generosity, prudence, patience; negative: lust, gluttony, laziness,evil, avarice, envy, pride, and anger) and logic concepts (8 positive: truth, certainty, consistency, exactness, adequacy, authenticity, conformity, reality and 8negative: falsehood, inexactitude, incorrectness, inadequacy, error, doubt, deception, misrepresentation), analyzing the associations between these words and theirmusical representations in terms of acoustic and perceptual features. We found that music conveys information about valence (good and true vs. evil and false) withremarkable consistency across individuals. This information is carried by several musical dimensions which act in synergy to achieve very high classification accuracy.Positive concepts are represented by music with more ordered pitch structure and lower harmonic and sensorial dissonance than negative concepts. Music alsoconveys information indicating whether the word which triggered it belongs to the domains of logic or morality (true vs. good), principally through articulation