4.1 Arousal Theory
People perceive music differently, and this determines how the music will affect their emotions. Thus music can arouse someone’s passion or make him express the feelings as interpreted from listening or watching a movie. Similarly, the music’s happiness or move performance frustration portrayed by the performer can lead to a source of happiness or sadness to the listener or viewer. Therefore, the music’s or performer’s expressiveness may or may not arouse the listener’s emotional state. This is why some listeners will shade tears when watching some movies or listening to music, while others will not be emotionally expressive or react (Wassiliwizky et al., 2017). The physiological arousal from the music expressiveness phenomenon is still unknown. The study by Wassiliwizky et al. (2017) shows that emotional expression to most viewers can be contagious, and that’s why filmmakers use this perception to facilitate the viewer’s emotional arousal state.
However, this theory does not explain how expressiveness does not contribute to music value. Then it means that while the importance of music expressiveness is allied to the music, it cannot be reclaimed otherwise unless it’s emotionally induced. According to Wöllner et al. (2018), music can influence emotions instead of conveying emotional state. Additionally, the theory does not explain why someone listening to music is expressive of fear and would not arouse the same expressive properties or similar emotional state or not refrain from listening to it altogether. Roholt, (2017); Bar-Elli, (2017); Bazemore, (2015), challenges the relationship between music expressiveness and emotions and musical experience or ontology on classical music. Based on this, it can be construed that while composing music, performing, and listening to it are part of musical practices, they all have different expressions; hence emotional arouse will be different.
The psychology behind how watching a sad film arouses ones’ aesthetic experience attracts psychologists to research more on this phenomenon. According to Hanich et al., (2014) research on this emotional complex state, it reviewed that there was a connection between melancholy and enjoyment, and these were mediated by arousal feeling state. The state of being moved by a piece of music or film is an induced positive feeling of the listener or viewer. It is an indicator of an affirmative value judgment that a movie can arouse such feelings as music. However, the state of being moved can be associated with knowledge one acquires through the world’s experience, making one mediate the film or music through his linguistic representation (Kuehnast et al., 2014; Menninghaus et al., (2015). Therefore, the phonological concept of being moved might not necessarily relate to the music or film expressiveness but on other psychological factors that are connected to the listener’s experience.
From the above analysis, the arousal theory fails to solve some philosophical music questions and fails to provide its basis. As a result, Levinson, (2015), argues that the theoretical distinction between how emotion is expressed and arousal analyzed should be different in the music context since they differ altogether. Hence some people will react in pity to another person’s sadness; thus, a similar reaction is expected when one listens or views sad music or film. Also, screen-based audiovisual with slow motions when convoyed in emotional music will be physiologically activated with time. According to Wöllner et al. (2018), time-spend and listeners’ emotional responses to video clips with slow human motion lowers listeners’ perceived arousal. Therefore, seemingly slow-motion scenes do not relate to high arousal; slightly, it affects the intellectual length of the observed time. It is believed that music influences the slow-motion experience and strengthens the effect of stretched time in film media.
4.2 Resemblance Theories
This theory denotes that expressive musical properties relate to human’s expressive behavior. This theory seems to get a lot of support from music philosophers because it is believed to give the right emotions in music. According to Levinson (2017), Kivy’s counter-theory of resemblance has that music expressiveness of emotion has some likeness between musical contour and a person’s emotional pattern of rhythm. Therefore, resemblance amongst music and someone’s behavior has some resemblance to his body behavior. For an instant, a piece of gloomy music or movie changes someone’s expressiveness. Consequently, a bit of lively music or film will remain active in the expressiveness of emotions. Also, the body behavior of a happy person or movie describes happiness.
However, a similar challenging theory (Davie’s theory) argues that music is expressive in its form represents an emotional characteristic since its manifestation of visible human emotions (Young, 2012). Thus, this stresses the resemblance of human expressive behavior as that of the singing. Music passionate character depends on its similarity to human expressive behavior and any actual emotion from the composer or the listener. Thus as Gracyk and Kania (2011) analyses Davie’s theory, it’s clear that music does not only express emotions but presents the appearance of expressive behavior. Also, music shows attitudes that require components like appreciation, superiority, and optimism. Therefore, this can be achieved by suitable music passages that bear feelings and behavioral modules of such attitudes.
So music is perceived as an emotional expression of inappropriate content. However, much Davies explains the resemblance theory, and it has also been criticized on various perceptions Gracyk and Kania, (2011); (Granata, 2020). The critics show that while resemblance theories may be characterized as human expressive behavior, they fail to describe the experience of musical articulateness. This is because while actors can express sadness or anger in a video, their facial expressions or gestures may not get the same unmoving or theatrical feeling from spectators. Thus the notion of similarity between music and emotion does not seem to exist; hence expressive properties in videos are different altogether.