When designing a new study regarding how music can portray and elicit emotion, one of the most crucial design decisions involves choosing the best stimuli. Every researcher must find musical samples that are able to capture an emotional state, are appropriate lengths, and have minimal potential for biasing participants. Researchers have often utilized musical excerpts that have previously been used by other scholars, but the appropriate musical choices depend on the specific goals of the study in question and will likely change among various research designs. The intention of this paper is to examine how musical stimuli have been selected in a sample of 306 research articles dating from 1928 through 2018. Analyses are presented regarding the designated emotions, how the stimuli were selected, the durations of the stimuli, whether the stimuli are excerpts from a longer work, and whether the passages have been used in studies about perceived or induced emotion. The results suggest that the literature relies on nine emotional terms, focuses more on perceived emotion than on induced emotion, and contains mostly short musical stimuli. I suggest that some of the inconclusive results from previous reviews may be due to the inconsistent use of emotion terms throughout the music community.

中文翻译：

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选择正确的音调

在设计有关音乐如何描绘和引发情感的新研究时，最关键的设计决策之一就是选择最佳刺激。每个研究人员都必须找到能够捕捉情绪状态，适当的时长并且对参与者产生偏见的可能性最小的音乐样本。研究人员经常利用以前被其他学者使用过的音乐摘录，但是适当的音乐选择取决于所研究的特定目标，并且可能会在各种研究设计中发生变化。本文旨在探讨从1928年至2018年的306篇研究论文的样本中如何选择音乐刺激。针对指定的情感，刺激的选择方式，刺激的持续时间，刺激是否是更长篇文章的摘录，以及这些段落是否已用于有关感知或诱发情绪的研究中。结果表明，文献依赖于九种情感术语，更多地关注感知的情感而不是诱发的情感，并且主要包含简短的音乐刺激。我建议以前的评论中某些不确定的结果可能是由于整个音乐界对情感术语的使用不一致。