Sound Sentiment

Discussing how music possesses expressive properties, this title incorporates the text of The Corded Shell, answering various criticisms.

A new, thirtieth-anniversary edition of the landmark ethnography that introduced the anthropology, or the cultural study, of sound.

How does a work of music stir the senses, creating feelings of joy, sadness, elation, or nostalgia? Though sentiment and emotion play a vital role in the composition, performance, and appreciation of music, rarely have these elements been fully observed. In this succinct and penetrating book, Charles Rosen draws upon more than a half century as a performer and critic to reveal how composers from Bach to Berg have used sound to represent and communicate emotion in mystifyingly beautiful ways.Through a range of musical examples, Rosen details the array of stylistic devices and techniques used to represent or convey sentiment. This is not, however, a listener’s guide to any “correct” response to a particular piece. Instead, Rosen provides the tools and terms with which to appreciate this central aspect of musical aesthetics, and indeed explores the phenomenon of contradictory sentiments embodied in a single motif or melody. Taking examples from Chopin, Schumann, Wagner, and Liszt, he traces the use of radically changing intensities in the Romantic works of the nineteenth century and devotes an entire chapter to the key of C minor. He identifies a “unity of sentiment” in Baroque music and goes on to contrast it with the “obsessive sentiments” of later composers including Puccini, Strauss, and Stravinsky. A profound and moving work, Music and Sentiment is an invitation to a greater appreciation of the crafts of composition and performance.

Awarded the J. I. Stanley Prize of the School of American Research.

How can we account for the persistent appeal of glossy commercial pop music? Why do certain performers have such emotional power, even though their music is considered vulgar or second rate? In The Persistence of Sentiment, Mitchell Morris gives a critical account of a group of American popular music performers who have dedicated fan bases and considerable commercial success despite the critical disdain they have endured. Morris examines the specific musical features of some exemplary pop songs and draws attention to the social contexts that contributed to their popularity as well as their dismissal. These artists were all members of more or less disadvantaged social categories: members of racial or sexual minorities, victims of class and gender prejudices, advocates of populations excluded from the mainstream. The complicated commercial world of pop music in the 1970s allowed the greater promulgation of musical styles and idioms that spoke to and for exactly those stigmatized audiences. In more recent years, beginning with the “Seventies Revival” of the early 1990s, additional perspectives and layers of interpretation have allowed not only a deeper understanding of these songs' function than when they were first popular, but also an appreciation of how their significance has shifted for American listeners in the succeeding three decades.

Sound Sentiments seeks to open a new path in the philosophy of emotion. The focus of most recent work on the philosophy of emotion has been on the nature of emotion, with some attention also to the relation of emotion to ethics. This book explores the idea that emotions admit of valuation, of degrees of adequacy. We cannot just decide what to think, or to desire, or to feel, as we can decide to act, and these attitudes are integral to emotions. Nonetheless, emotions can have normative characteristics that resemble virtues. Philosophers are familiar with the notion that emotions are valuational. But how well they serve that function determines the value they themselves have. The book opens with an account of the theory of emotion, reflecting recent work on that, and considers the way in which emotions are valuational (with reference to the contributions of writers such as de Sousa, Gibbard, and McDowell). The worth of an emotional experience depends on the quality of the valuation it itself achieves. Most of the book is then devoted to a set of interconnected themes. Some of these concern properties that emotions can have which can variously enhance or detract from them: profundity, social leverage, narcissism, and sentimentality. Others are attitudes with characteristic emotional loadings, and sometimes motivations, that raise similar questions: cynicism, ambivalence, and sophistication. David Pugmire's general approach is indirect and negative: to analyse emotional foibles, which tend to elude us as we succumb to them, and thereby to point to what soundness in emotion would be. He also elicits connections amongst these aspects of the emotional life. The most pervasive is the dimension of profundity, which opens the discussion: each of the subsequent problems amounts to a way in which emotion can be shallow and slight and so amount to less than it seems; and accordingly, each identifies a form of integrity in the emotions.

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from written language. It is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing and is also widely studied in data mining, Web mining, and text mining. In fact, this research has spread outside of computer science to the management sciences and social sciences due to its importance to business and society as a whole. The growing importance of sentiment analysis coincides with the growth of social media such as reviews, forum discussions, blogs, micro-blogs, Twitter, and social networks. For the first time in human history, we now have a huge volume of opinionated data recorded in digital form for analysis. Sentiment analysis systems are being applied in almost every business and social domain because opinions are central to almost all human activities and are key influencers of our behaviors. Our beliefs and perceptions of reality, and the choices we make, are largely conditioned on how others see and evaluate the world. For this reason, when we need to make a decision we often seek out the opinions of others. This is true not only for individuals but also for organizations. This book is a comprehensive introductory and survey text. It covers all important topics and the latest developments in the field with over 400 references. It is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners who are interested in social media analysis in general and sentiment analysis in particular. Lecturers can readily use it in class for courses on natural language processing, social media analysis, text mining, and data mining. Lecture slides are also available online. Table of Contents: Preface / Sentiment Analysis: A Fascinating Problem / The Problem of Sentiment Analysis / Document Sentiment Classification / Sentence Subjectivity and Sentiment Classification / Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis / Sentiment Lexicon Generation / Opinion Summarization / Analysis of Comparative Opinions / Opinion Search and Retrieval / Opinion Spam Detection / Quality of Reviews / Concluding Remarks / Bibliography / Author Biography

Emotion in Aesthetics is the first book on aesthetics to provide an extensive theory of emotion; application of the cognitive-emotive theory to aesthetics; analysis of the relationship between aesthetics, metaphor and emotion; a full theory of meaning and its application to aesthetics; discussion of the relationship between aesthetics, music and language in terms of phonetics, phonology and intonation; an analysis of humanistic aesthetics; a well-developed naturalistic theory of ethics as applied to aesthetics and emotion. Stress is placed on the views of contemporary philosophers as well as some of the main historical accounts of emotion in aesthetics. The important recent work on emotion has not hitherto been applied to aesthetics. As a result there is still much confusion in aesthetics about aesthetic emotion and related concepts, such as the expression theory of emotion. The present book has been written to show how the theory can be used to clarify the issue, resulting in a major breakthrough in aesthetics. In addition, the theory presented is valuable in relating aesthetics to ethics and humanism.

This latest volume in the series, Socio-Affective Computing, presents a set of novel approaches to analyze opinionated videos and to extract sentiments and emotions. Textual sentiment analysis framework as discussed in this book contains a novel way of doing sentiment analysis by merging linguistics with machine learning. Fusing textual information with audio and visual cues is found to be extremely useful which improves text, audio and visual based unimodal sentiment analyzer. This volume covers the three main topics of: textual preprocessing and sentiment analysis methods; frameworks to process audio and visual data; and methods of textual, audio and visual features fusion. The inclusion of key visualization and case studies will enable readers to understand better these approaches. Aimed at the Natural Language Processing, Affective Computing and Artificial Intelligence audiences, this comprehensive volume will appeal to a wide readership and will help readers to understand key details on multimodal sentiment analysis.