The Influence of Situational Context in the Experience of Emotions in Music: The Framework for Adaptable Musical Emotions

The link between music and emotion suggests that music carries expressive cues which can convey or evoke emotional experiences in listeners. Research has explored how these responses converge or diverge among individuals, social groups, and cultures. However, results often vary widely between studies, with few compelling explanations for these inconsistencies. This paper proposes that emotional responses to music are adaptable, arising from a continuous conscious and subconscious processing of the broader situational context in interaction with psychophysical, cultural, and personal factors. By integrating theory and evidence from multiple domains, this paper presents the Framework for Adaptable Musical Emotions (FAME), which explains music-evoked emotions through the mechanism of emotion adaptabilityacross a spectrum of timescales ranging from evolutionary to momentary. FAME advances beyond models that mainly decode emotional signals from the music by explicitly integrating situational context and emotion adaptability. It offers testable propositions about how context modulates responses across time-scales, helping to explain previously observed variability and guiding future experimental and computational work.