While certain musical genres and songs are widely popular, there is still large variability in the music that individuals find rewarding or emotional, even among those with a similar musical enculturation. Interestingly, there is one Western genre that is intended to attract minimal attention and evoke a mild emotional response: elevator music. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that elevator music consistently elicits low pleasure and surprise. Participants reported elevator music as being less pleasurable than music from popular genres, even when participants did not regularly listen to the comparison genre. Participants reported elevator music to be familiar even when they had not explicitly heard the presented song before. Computational and behavioral measures of surprisal showed that elevator music was less surprising, and thus more predictable, than other well-known genres. Elevator music covers of popular songs were rated as less pleasurable, surprising, and arousing than their original counterparts. Finally, we used elevator music as a control for self-selected rewarding songs in a proof-of-concept physiological (electrodermal activity and piloerection) experiment. Our results suggest that elevator music elicits low emotional responses consistently across Western music listeners, making it a unique control stimulus for studying musical novelty, pleasure, and surprise.

中文翻译：

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电梯音乐作为奖励定量表征的工具


尽管某些音乐流派和歌曲广为流行，但个人认为有益或情感丰富的音乐仍然存在很大差异，即使在具有相似音乐文化背景的人中也是如此。有趣的是，有一种西方流派旨在吸引最少的注意力并唤起温和的情绪反应：电梯音乐。在一系列行为实验中，我们表明电梯音乐始终会引起较低的愉悦感和惊喜感。参与者报告电梯音乐不如流行流派的音乐令人愉快，即使参与者不经常听比较流派的音乐。参与者报告说，即使他们之前没有明确听过所呈现的歌曲，电梯音乐也很熟悉。惊讶的计算和行为测量表明，电梯音乐比其他众所周知的流派更不令人惊讶，因此更容易预测。流行歌曲的电梯音乐翻唱被认为不如原版歌曲令人愉悦、令人惊讶和兴奋。最后，我们在概念验证生理（皮肤电活动和立毛）实验中使用电梯音乐作为自选奖励歌曲的对照。我们的研究结果表明，电梯音乐在西方音乐听众中始终引起低情绪反应，使其成为研究音乐新颖性、愉悦性和惊喜性的独特控制刺激。