Perception-Based Classification of Expressive Musical Terms

Expressive Musical Terms (EMTs) are commonly used by composers as verbal descriptions of musical expressiveness and characters that performers are requested to convey. We suggest a classification of 55 of these terms, based on the perception of professional music performers who were asked to: 1) organize the considered EMTs in a two-dimensional plane in such a way that proximity reflects similarity; and 2) rate these EMTs according to valence, arousal, extraversion, and neuroticism, using 7-level Likert scales. Using a minimization procedure, we found that a satisfactory partition requires these EMTs to be organized in four clusters (whose centroids are associated with tenderness, happiness, anger, and sadness) located in the four quarters of the valence-arousal plane of the circumplex model of affect developed by Russell (1980). In terms of the related positive-negative activation parameters, introduced by Watson and Tellegen (1985), we obtained a significant correlation between positive activation and extraversion and between negative activation and neuroticism. This demonstrates that these relations, previously observed in personality studies by Watson & Clark (1992a), extend to the musical field.