Dr. David Bard-Schwarz, CEMI October 19, 2015
Emotion and Affect as synonyms:
Aristotle, Rhetoric; René Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme (1649); Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739)
Basic Emotions Paradigm (Descartes to the present)
6 emotions = sadness, surprise, happiness, disgust, anger, fear are hard-wired, neurological responses (amygdalae) to experience that are immediate, automatic, unmediated, reflected and understood socially in facial gestures
4 emotions = happy, sad, afraid/surprised, angry/disgusted; out of favor in late 20th Century post-structuralism and deconstruction as essentialist (culture as necessary / contingent)
Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (1955)
Emotion and Affect differentiated
emotion (neurologically "slow", language-based, subjective, social)
affect (neurologically "fast", unconscious, non-signifying, at the skin (goodbumps, for example))
between emotion and affect = the "missing ½ second"
Brian Massumi, Eric Shouse: “the body has a grammar of its own that cannot be captured in language”
ideological implications
music in which familiarity and memory bridge the ½ second gap
music in which lack of familiarity lets the ½ second gap resonate