In his autobiography Pandit Ravi Shankar writes, “A raga is an aesthetic projection of the artist’s inner spirit, it is a representation of his most profound sentiments and sensibilities, set forth through tones and melodies….I may play raga Malkauns, whose principal mood [rasa] is veera [heroic], but I could begin by expressing shanta [serenity] and karuna [compassion] in the alap and develop into veera [heroic] and adhbuta [astonishment] and even raudra [anger] in playing the jor and jhala”.

 

The specific aims of this project are as follows:

 

• Identifying a set of musical stimuli, which will consist of instrumental Hindustani Classical Raga’s capable of inducing emotional states.

 

North Indian Classical music (NICM), born out of a cultural synthesis of the Vedic chant tradition and traditional Persian music has been known to induce emotions (Kaufmann, 1965). The central notion in this system of music is that of a raga. An extensive body of ancient Indian scripts belonging to the early centuries A.D. have documented that emotions are associated with ragas (Bhatkhande, 1934; Natyashastra by Bharata translated by Vatsyayan, 1996), each raga being a deliberate combination of notes used to create a particular mood. Although ancient Indian texts purports that raga induces emotions, there does not exist a standardized set of ragas that can be used as emotional stimuli. In this project we aim to identify ragas as a set of emotional stimuli for experimental purpose. Also, to investigate the effects of musical properties like rhythmic regularity, tempo and tonality, on the emotions experienced while listening to ragas.

We have established a standardized set of raga stimuli through our  first study (Mathur, Vijayakumar, Chakrabarti, & Singh, 2015) conducted as an online survey (http://emotion-in-music.nbrc.ac.in/p1/), where 12 ragas (played in both slow arrhythmic alaap and faster rhythmic gat) were rated by 122 Indian participants. We found that emotions experienced by listeners differed across the presentation mode of ragas, for instance, raga Hansadhwani rated as ‘calm’ during the slow arrhythmic alaap was rated as ‘Happy’ during faster rhythmic gat. We also showed that specific tonic intervals are robust predictors of emotional response. Specifically, our results showed that the ‘minor second’ is a direct predictor of negative valence. Our results indicate that tonality determines the emotion experienced for a raga where as rhythmic regularity and tempo modulates the levels of arousal.            

 

• To decode the neural networks underlying emotion perception.

 

The differentiable neural correlates for emotions have been examined and contrasted using stimuli like emotional film clips, facial expressions of emotion, emotional pictures and scripts but neuroimaging studies using music as stimulus are relatively very limited and have not tapped into the emotions evoked by music. In this project we aim to identify the neural networks underlying emotion perception using as stimulus.

 

To participate in an ongoing study :

Email to : avantika@nbrc.ac.in

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