Abstract

Instrumental music expresses emotions such as sadness and happiness and the music of different cultures share important organizational and other features. If music's expressiveness is grounded in these musical universals, we might speculate that musical expressiveness, like displays of the basic affect programs discussed by psychologists, are appreciable across cultures. A critical review of psychologists' cross-cultural studies of recognition of music's expressive qualities is equivocal, however. The low number of such studies and their methodological weaknesses leave the issue in doubt.