Salient sensory experiences often have a strong emotional tone. However the neuropsychological relations between perceptual characteristics of sensory objects and the affective information they convey remain poorly defined. Here we addressed the relationship between sound identity and emotional information using music. We investigated whether perception of emotions is influenced by altering the musical instrument on which the music is played. Forty novel melodies each representing one of four emotions (happiness, sadness, fear or anger) were each recorded on four different instruments (an electronic synthesiser, a piano, a violin and a trumpet), controlling for melody, tempo and loudness between instruments. Healthy subjects (23 young adults, aged 18 – 30, 24 older adults aged 58 – 75) were asked to select which emotion they thought each musical stimulus represented in a four-alternative forced-choice task. Using a mixed linear regression model we found a significant interaction between instrument and emotion judgment with a similar pattern in young and older adults. The effect was not attributable to musical expertise. Our findings show that timbre (instrument identity) affects the perception of emotions in music. Auditory object properties such as timbre may influence the emotional valence of other kinds of complex sounds.

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