Musical Listening Qualia: A Multivariate Approach

ABSTRACT

French and American participants listened to new music stimuli and evaluated the stimuli using either adjectives or quantitative musical dimensions. Results were analyzed using correspondence analysis (CA), hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), multiple factor analysis (MFA), and partial least squares correlation (PLSC). French and American listeners differed when they described the musical stimuli using adjectives, but not when using the quantitative dimensions. The present work serves as a case study in research methodology that allows for a balance between relaxing experimental control and maintaining statistical rigor.

KEYWORDS:

• Music cognition
• multivariate analyses
• correspondence analysis
• hierarchical cluster analysis
• multiple factor analysis
• partial least squares correlation

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

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Notes

1. In a real contingency table the observations are independent of each other and therefore one observation contributes to one and only cell of the table. By contrast with CATA one respondent provides a set of responses that therefore contributes to several cells of the data table – a pattern that breaks the independence assumption.

2. The results of the CA, on the other hand, are not affected by the fact that participants only rated half of the excerpts.