Music and Emotion
This article takes as a pretext experiments conducted in 2011 by an ethnomusicologist and a team of music psychologists to raise issues related to interdisciplinary research. The subject of the research concerns emotions evoked by music and their relation to the expressivity of the music. The hypothesis that motivates this work is the potential existence of musical universals related to the expressive meaning of music. In fact, the approach is comparative and involves Pygmy and North American Western populations. Although the neuropsychology of music addresses both cognitive and physiological dimensions of musical phenomena, ethnomusicology is devoted to the analysis of musical discourse and behaviours that occur in a given socio-religious context. The article poses numerous challenges and advantages of the integration of knowledge and different disciplines. In questioning the contributions of nature and culture to human artistic productions, it emphasizes the anthropological perspective of the study, in order that the two disciplines can jointly position at the centre of debate questions of musical aesthetics, the function of music in society, and even the very definition of culture.