Wing-Sze Dorothy Tse

Boston University
USA

Abstract Title:

A Call to Re-evaluate the Music–Body–Emotion Lever and Current Research Designs for Studying the Chinese Five-Tone Musical–Medical–Affective Philosophy

Biography:

Wing-Sze Dorothy Tse is a Hong Kong-raised ethnomusicologist and graduate student in the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at Boston University. Dorothy’s research interests include medical and cognitive ethnomusicology. She explores connections between music and health, with an emphasis on musical affect and personalized and culturalized thanatology. She uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines ethnomusicology with music cognition theories and methods. Tse’s two most current research projects focus on developing a research framework for studying the traditional Chinese music-medical Five-Tone Music philosophy, and evaluating the benefits and concerns of AI recreation of a deceased voice for grief recovery purposes.

Research Interests:

In ancient Chinese Five-Tone music-medical philosophy, the five musical modes are linked to specific emotions. By performing and listening to music in different modes, emotions can be regulated and bodily harmony achieved through the therapeutic use of music. This paper critically engages with current scholarship and advocacy on this music-medical philosophy by using a hybrid research approach that combines a literature review with digital ethnography of academic communities. It finds a surge since the early 2000s in experimental studies using Five-Tone Music for therapeutic interventions targeting negative emotions. Through the lens of ethnomusicology—the study of music in its social and cultural context—this paper argues that current research designs too often treat mode–affect correlations as natural and universal, while under-theorizing the human body as a culturally shaped mediator through which music elicits affect and emotion. It rejects the notion of a transcultural and transhistorical human body, rendering rigid theories of music–emotion correlation likely invalid. To synthesize tensions among the nature of music, human bodies, and affective responses, the article proposes a “Music–Body–Emotion Lever” model that positions the body as the fulcrum conditioning the relationship between musical stimulus and affective load, and extends the anthropological nature–nurture debate through insights from cultural neuroscience and gene–culture coevolution. The paper also critiques prevailing methodologies for reproducing Western-universalist and decontextualized experimental paradigms, and hence calling for interdisciplinary, culturally situated, and decolonial research designs that take lived environmental, historical, and embodied differences seriously.