If a song is played louder does it increase or decrease our enjoyment towards a song? Do we have to already enjoy or dislike a song in order to notice the influence of volume? Any possible resources you can provide me with to read regarding this topic? Many thanks!
I think it can increase the emotions towards a song. If it is a song that you like it will increase the enjoyment and the opposite if you dislike the song. Volume is important because it will let the song take part in your body system, muscles and nerves, and this will effect the subconscious by reaching deeper into your system. You can find interesting articles in these two books: Handbook of Music and Emotion. Theory, Research, Applications. I: P. N. Juslin & J. A. Sloboda. Music, Health and Wellbeing. Hanser, S.
The books that Leif Jordansson mentions are a great starting point. You should also check out the works of Klaus Scherer and Tuomas Eerola for more information about systems for representing emotion as it pertains to music and the characteristics of music that may map to emotional responses . Such as:
Article How music creates emotion: a multifactorial process approach
Article A Review of Music and Emotion Studies: Approaches, Emotion M...
Leif Johnson mentions some good biological and psychological points as to why volume has played an increasingly important role in the way that music is produced in recent years, particularly since the dance music and dubstep boom of 2010. Simply put, when we are presented with two similar sounds, we will prefer the louder one, which is why it is important for mix engineers to use gain staging at multiple levels during the mix process in order to make informed decisions. The (not so recent) phenomenon in the music industry has been what engineers call the "loudness wars" where engineers and producers try to strategically use compression and limiting at many different stages to get their tracks to be louder than other songs so that they can stand out more and so that their sounds can hit harder on the dance floor.
A very interesting topic. Through personal experience (also as a music educator), the volume itself is not necessarily a contributing factor towards the level of enjoyment. It is more the fact that the louder that music is, the quieter everything else seems in comparison. One can literally drown out daily life, the daily grind, personal emotional issues etc all seem to periodically 'go away' whilst listening to loud music. It becomes a focus point and welcome distraction to many. Does listening to the same song quietly have a different affect, or can you simply hear background noise that then interrupts the flow of your experience?
I can't recall where I read about emotions and musical volume, but I would suggest that if the volume level is painfully loud, so that it hurts your ears (disturbs young children), then that's a negative thing.
I often wonder if we are damaging our hearing with sustained loud sounds. The physical and emotional impacts should be considered in your question.
This is a very interesting question. In my research we are investigating if music listening at night time can improve sleep in adults with depression and sleep disturbances. Volume does play a role. Not in particular concerning enjoyment but concerning the effectiveness of the music for the purpose of falling asleep. Some of the participants find that music played at a very low volume requires an intense focus of attention which is helpful because it distracts attention away from thoughts preventing them from falling asleep. Other participants find that music with a higher volume is needed to dominate the sound environment as well as distract from inner thoughts so they can fall asleep. This tells us that within the same population different volume levels are needed for the same desired effect of the music.
Concerning enjoyment of music in a general population I agree that both physical and emotional impacts are important. Diving into the field of music and public health, I suggest reading Music Health and Wellbeing edited by Raymond MacDonald, Gunter Kreutz and Laura Mitchell, and Music and Public Health - a Nordic perspective edited by Lars Ole Bonde and Töres Theorell.
If music can be linked to singing, and singing be linked to some primitive collective sounds that unites the group to action, we can say that music stirs some sort of "social" emotional response.
The sounds are LOUD when we are trying to incite aggressive emotional action, such as sexual excitement in rock-and-roll or nationalistic excitement in playing a nations national anthem.
But if the emotional response we seek is mild our music can be mild, as with a child's lullaby or a romantic lovers ballad.
Music is a distraction. If we are driving and suddenly find ourselves lost and we have to pay close attention to where we are going, we often turn off the music so as not to distract the mind.
Also worth adding: we're in the process of publishing a paper on music emotion recognition, where we found that energy levels of the music signal were strongly correlated with the emotional dimension of arousal (using Russell's Circumplex Model of Affect)
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