Investigating cross-cultural emotional responses to world music under simulated hearing loss

In today’s dynamic and interconnected world, emotional response to music is an experience that connects people across cultures. Regardless of cultural background, the music listening experience is impeded for people facing hearing loss. Hearing loss is quite prevalent, yet little is known about how those with impaired hearing experience emotions in response to music. This project’s objective was to understand cross-cultural emotional responses to music and how they are altered under hearing-impaired conditions. We studied emotions expressed by people from two different countries after listening to world music and investigated how these emotions varied under simulated hearing loss. We first hypothesized that emotions elicited by music would be similar across people from the U.S. and India. We next hypothesized that emotions found to be elicited similarly across cultures would continue to be experienced when listening to music under simulated hearing loss conditions. In this study, we surveyed 984 participants from the two countries, asking them to identify the emotions elicited by 100 world music clips. We then repeated the survey with an additional 886 participants using clips in which the music was modified to simulate hearing loss. Our results indicated that, of the 20 emotions studied, 8 were prominently positively correlated across both countries. Furthermore, we found that these emotions differed from the emotions correlated across the two countries under simulated hearing loss, potentially providing new insight into how hearing loss affects emotional perceptions of music. The conclusions have implications in audiology, psychology, and for the music industry as it relates to hearing loss.