AccScience Publishing / AC / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/ac.6009
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ARTICLE

Emotional experience of listening to music among Croatian music school students

Amir Begić1* ,  Jasna Šulentić Begić1 ,  Želimir Stehlik2
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1 The Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Osijek, Croatia
2 Department of Music Theory and Singing, Požega Music School, Požega, Croatia
AC, 6009 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.6009
Submitted: 15 November 2024 | Revised: 13 February 2025 | Accepted: 18 February 2025 | Published: 11 March 2025
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
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Abstract

The experience of listening to music implies the evocation of pleasant and unpleasant emotions in everyday life and music teaching. During music lessons, music can stimulate or regulate students’ emotions, thereby promoting children’s emotional development. This study discusses research conducted in 2024 to determine the emotions evoked by different compositions in music school students and investigate potential differences in emotional experiences based on sex, grade level, and familiarity with the composition. In total, 134 students from primary and secondary music schools in the Republic of Croatia participated in a survey. They listened to eight different compositions for approximately 1 min. For each composition, they noted whether they have heard it before, picked one of four emotions (happiness, sadness, calmness, and anger/anxiety) that they felt the strongest, and rated the strength of that emotion on a scale of 1 – 3. Over half of the participants concurred on the emotions elicited by each composition. There were no statistically significant differences in the expressed emotions among the students based on their sex, grade level, or familiarity. The results reflected high levels of consensus about the emotions evoked by musical pieces between individuals from the same cultural backgrounds and general age groups.

Keywords
Emotions
Listening to music
Music school
Music and emotion
Psychology of music
Funding
The research, analysis, and publication of the article were financed by the authors of the article.
Conflict of interest
Amir Begić and Jasna Šulentić Begić are Editorial Board Members of this journal but were not in any way involved in the editorial and peer-review process conducted for this paper, directly or indirectly. Separately, other authors declared that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have influenced the work reported in this paper.
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