It is elusive if musical-theory naïve individuals have the same emotional perception as professionals. This study aims to investigate emotions associated to music keys. We asked 40 musical-theory naïve individuals to label keys. Positive, negative, and neutral emotions were referred by 45, 20 and 34% of the participants for major keys and 20, 45 and 34% of the participants for minor keys. There was no correlation between key signature and emotion. Our study showed that music naïve individuals: associated major keys to positive emotions and minor keys to negative emotions in less than half of the time; associated neutral emotions to one third of the tonalities; minor keys tended to correlate with the number of accidentals in the key signature.
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