ABSTRACT
Cultural studies are ripe with complex theoretical approaches to power, coming from French post-structuralism, feminism and queer theory, post-colonial and decolonial theories, just to name a few. Although music semioticians increasingly deal with cultural perceptions and cultural backgrounds and the way they affect the interpretation of music, their focus is mainly on musical texts, and they do not show a particular interest in the actual hearing subject. This chapter offers conceptual and methodological tools that are the result of trajectories derived from three different clusters of disciplines: music semiotics, the psychology of music, and the sociology of music. The musical expression of joy in Western societies is usually achieved by fast tempi, ascending melodic lines, brilliant timbres, loud dynamics, major mode, and simple harmonic progressions. Lawrence Zbikowski uses a multimodal simulator model proposed by Lawrence Barsalou to explain how certain features of music can be mapped onto a different mode, thus triggering simulations of emotions.
