Measuring Subjective Feeling in Qawwālī: Adapting a GEMS Approach to a Spiritual Context

Graves, T. (2022) Measuring Subjective Feeling in Qawwālī: Adapting a GEMS Approach to a Spiritual Context. SEMPRE 50th Anniversary Conference, London, UK, 02-03 Sep 2022.

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Research Questions: 1) Which emotion words are most relevant to qawwālī listening at the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya and how do these relate to each other? 2) Which factors can parsimoniously describe subjective feeling for qawwālī listeners at the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya? Background: Qawwālī is a Sufi (Islamic) music in India and Pakistan. It has its own theory of musical emotion relating to its functional role in the inducement of “spiritual arousal,” trance, and love in listeners, as explored by Qureshi (1986). This makes it a fascinating case study for musical emotion, as it involves emotional concepts that do not exist in other cultural contexts, and a clear emic concept for how these emotions are caused. Further, most theories of subjective feeling in music have taken Western, non-spiritual contexts as a basis, and often have WEIRD participant sets (Henrich et. al., 2010), including Zentner’s GEMS (2008). Aims: 1) Reduce large number of emotion terms to a small number of factors most relevant to emotions felt during qawwālī listening, for use as scales in future research. 2) Produce “conceptual maps” showing subjective and intersubjective proximity of various emotion concepts for qawwālī listeners. Content This paper presents the results of a two-stage questionnaire-based study of subjective feeling reported by attendees of qawwālī events at the Dargah (shrine) of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi. As such, this paper uses multidimensional scaling and exploratory factor analysis to visualize distances between the feelings of Sufi concepts such as hāl, and general emotion terms such as happiness, pride, or calm, as well as to suggest an intersubjective scale by which subjective feeling with qawwālī may be examined, in an approach loosely based on the method of Zentner et al. in developing their Geneva Emotions in Music Scale (GEMS).

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Additional Information: Research poster.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Graves, Mr Thomas
• Authors: Graves, T.
• College/School: University Services > Library and Collection Services > Library
• Copyright Holders: Copyright: © 2022 The Author
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced with permission of the author

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