Musical impression and contribution of structural factors

Music is constructed with various structural factors, for example, pitch, timbre and tempo. We listen to these factors overall and have an impression to the musical piece. Research concerning the influence of musical structure on emotional expression has been done by many experiments, and there are some results that suggest each factor has the effect to our emotional expression. The purpose of this research is solving how the musical structires affect our impression and investigating the relation between structural factors and our impression. Three experiments were tried to find out the factor of impression and investigate the influence by structural factors. In first experiment, the subjective evaluation using the rating scale methods was tried without listening to the music for 91 subjects. By the factor analysis, four factors were found, which were Passion, Activity, Sufficiency, and Brightness. In second experiment, 101 subjects who were given some types of instraction listened to Ravel’s Bolero and answered the sheet of question. As a result, it was suggested that there is no change of the impression depending on how to listening. In last experiment, 20 subjects listened to 46 short variations selected from Brahms’s Four Piano Pieces, which were arranged in twelve factors, and evaluation was performed. After calculating using the contribution of the factor and the score of data, we inquired about the influence of twelve structural factors. As a result, it turned out that there was great difference of the influence to the impression by each structural factor. Especially, we had the conclusion that mood and pitch had great influence. On the contrary, we found out that some factors were not so important. Thus, these experiments show that the structural factors respectively bring the different influence to our impression. Keywords musical structural factor, impression, subjective evaluation, factor analysis 1