The Emotional Power of Music

How can an abstract sequence of sounds so intensely express emotional states? How does music elicit or arouse our emotions? What happens at the physiological and neural level when we listen to music? How do composers and performers practically manage the expressive powers of music? How have societies sought to harness the powers of music for social or therapeutic purposes?

In the past ten years, research into the topic of music and emotion has flourished. In addition, the relationship between the two has become of interest to a broad range of disciplines in both the sciences and humanities. The Emotional Power of Music is a multidisciplinary volume exploring the relationship between music and emotion.
Bringing together contributions from psychologists, neuroscientists, musicologists, musicians, and philosophers.
The volume presents both theoretical perspectives and in-depth explorations of particular musical works, as well as first-hand reports from music performers and composers.

The first section in the book explores how music can stimulate the emotions, considering the psychological and neurological mechanisms that underlie music listening. In the second section, the authors consider the expression of emotion within music, through both performance and composing. The third section explores how different societies have sought to manage and manipulate the power of music.

The book is valuable for those in the fields of music psychology and music education, as well as philosophy and musicology

Tom Cochrane, Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, UK,Bernardino Fantini, Full Professor of History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, Switzerland,Klaus R. Scherer, Director, Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, Switzerland

Tom Cochrane is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sheffield, where he teaches aesthetics, ethics and the philosophy of mind. He received his PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2007. From 2007 to 2010 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, researching emotions and the arts. He then spent two years at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen's University Belfast, working on an individual research project called 'The Mood Organ: Putting theories of musical expression into practice'. His main areas of interest are music, emotion, extended and collective cognition and complexity.

Bernardino Fantini is Full Professor of History of Medicine , Director of the Institute of the History of Medicine and Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, and Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for the Historical Research on Public Health. Since 2009 he is active in the Focus Music and Emotion of the National Center of Competence in Affective Sciences, Geneva.

After a PhD in biochemistry in Rome, he has got a PhD in History and Philosophy of Life Sciences at the EPHE-Sorbonne, Paris, in 1992. His main research subjects are the history of infectious diseases and international health, the epistemology of biology and medicine and the history of relationships between medicine, science and music.

Klaus Scherer, born in 1943, studied economics and social sciences at the University of Cologne and the London School of Economnics. Following his postgraduate studies in psychology, he obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1970. After teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and the University of Kiel, Germany, he was appointed, in 1973, full professor of social psychology at the University of Giessen, Germany. From 1985 to 2008, Klaus Scherer has been a full professor of psychology at the University of Genneva, Switzerland, and director of the Human Assessment Centre (Laboratoire d'Evaluation Psychologique). Since 2004 he is the Director of the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences at the University of Geneva. Apart from extensive theoretical work (Component Process Model), Scherer's research activities focus on different aspects of emotion and other affective states, in particular emotional expression and induction of emotion by music.