“What is this Music Doing to Me?”

The chapter deals with psychological research on the organic and, mainly, emotional effects of music during the 1920s, mostly in the United States, and introduces the reader to a not well-known episode in the history of the psychology of music. It takes as a starting point the collection Theeffects of music, which illustrates some of the experimental procedures that were developed at the time, and the key role of the phonograph in them. It addresses the concepts of mood, pleasantness, and relaxation, and analyses various attempts to classify and measure music’s effects—a project that stood in conflict with traditional notions about the value of musical taste, but was associated with contemporary conceptions of the nervous body.