Assessment of the Affective Response to Music with Clynes’s Sentograph

This study investigates the possiblity of measuring affective responses to sounding music with the “sentograph” developed by Clynes. This instrument measures dynamic motor behaviour, which is known to be influenced bs affective state. 30 subjects responded on the sentograph to 11 short (ctl. 3() sec.) music excerpts. The subjects also filled out a questionnaire regardine the emotional content of each piece, their familiarity with it and their evaluation of it., It was found that (1) the responses on the sentograph were fairlv similar between subjects, (2) the responses were not affected by a subject’s familiarity with or evaluation of a piece and (3) the sentograph indeed measures the affective response to the music. These findings are related to general emotion theory to construct a tentative model that accounts for certain aspects of the affective response to music.