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Why is it that we use musical terms to describe feelings and moods? We often speak of people as low key, high strung, or having a bad temper, referring to their temperament or tuning as though they themselves were an instrument. As it turns out, several theories of the basic human emotions—or the affects as they’re also called—have musical origins. To understand the connection, we can pay particular attention to a moment during the eighteenth century when affect theory and music theory were mutually entangled.

Roger Mathew Grant is Associate Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. His first book, Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, won the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory. His second book, Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical, will appear with Fordham University Press this Spring.


Recorded live on October 18, 2019.

*There was a brief connectivity issue during the recording, which has been edited out. The conversation has otherwise not been altered from the original.

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