From ‘Wanting’ to ‘Liking’: Listeners’ Emotional Responses to Musical Cadences as Revealed by Skin Conductance Responses Chen-Gia Tsai * * Graduate Institute of Musicology, National Taiwan University, Taiwan (ROC) tsaichengia@ntu.edu.tw ABSTRACT Background Research on the emotional responses and brain activations evoked by music has been a topic of great academic and public interest. A recent brain-imaging study by Salimpoor et al. (2011) suggests the involvement of mechanisms for ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ when subjects listened to intensely pleasurable music. Their paper elaborates the roles of the reward system in music listening, and its correlates to musical emotions. It is widely reported that music influences listeners’ emotional state. An emotional response can be related to an isolated musical event and/or the temporal structure of a music piece. In the past decades, physiological measures have been used to investigate the relationship between musical structures and listeners’ emotional reactions. Skin conductance is one of the most commonly used response systems. There is a high correlation between bursts of sympathetic nerve activity and skin conductance responses (SCRs). An SCR is characterized by an abrupt increase of skin conductance and should be interpreted as arousal elevation. Music-induced chills are often accompanied by SCRs (Grewe et al., 2007; Guhn et al., 2007; Salimpoor et al., 2009). An alternative method of quantifying SCRs focuses on their instantaneous slope (Blain et al., 2008). Since a positive SCR slope reflects activity of sweat glands, the SCR slope may serve as an indicator of arousal. Aims The present study aims to explore the listening behavior of authentic cadences through combining music analysis and listeners’ physiological measures. A cadence is “a melodic or harmonic configuration that creates a sense of repose or resolution” (Randel, 1999: 105). In Western classical music, important musical events were often marked by an authentic cadence, which is a progression from the dominant chord to the tonic chord. We hypothesize that cognition of the dominant chord and the following tonic chord may engage mechanisms for ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’, respectively. The associated experiences of peak emotion may be detected by measuring skin conductance. Method Participants’ skin conductance was measured during music listening. In Experiment 1, we used 48 short music stimuli (<30 sec). In Experiment 2, we used long music stimuli, including complete popular songs (3-5 min) and excerpts of German art songs (Kunstlied) (50-100 sec). A moving window of 2 seconds was used to detect increases of skin conductance within this window. The SCR amplitude at the central point of this time window was the maximum increase within this window, and the instantaneous SCR slope was the first difference of the 10 Hz-sampling-rate SCR signal at this central point. Following Dawson et al. (2007), only supra-threshold SCRs were considered. We chose the thres- Figure 1. Example of the tension-resolution pattern in Experiment 1. The tonic chord at the 20.7 second induced a significant SCR slope peak at the 23.7 second (as indicated by the arrow). The average SCR slopes and the p-values were calculated across 41 participants. Dussek’s Sonata in B flat major, Op. 45, No. 1 (Allegro cantabile) 9 1022