Music and movement share a dynamic structure that supports universal expressions of emotion.

ABSTRACT: Music moves us. Its kinetic power is the foundation of human behaviors as diverse as dance, romance, lullabies, and the military march. Despite its significance, the music-movement relationship is poorly understood. We present an empirical method for testing whether music and movement share a common structure that affords equivalent and universal emotional expressions. Our method uses a computer program that can generate matching examples of music and movement from a single set of features: rate, jitter (regularity of rate), direction, step size, and dissonance/visual spikiness. We applied our method in two experiments, one in the United States and another in an isolated tribal village in Cambodia. These experiments revealed three things: (i) each emotion was represented by a unique combin

SUBMITTER: Sievers B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3538264 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature