Psychomusicology, 13,154-165

© 1994 Psychomusicology

FILM MUSIC AND HEINZ WERNER'S THEORY OF

PHYSIOGNOMIC PERCEPTION
William H. Rosar
The Claremont Graduate School
Claremont, California
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Physiognomic perception, a term coined by Heinz Werner, refers to a mode of

perception attuned to expression or expressive attributes. The term ap-
plies readily to the perception of faces, gestures, intonation, and mood. It has
also been implicated in the perception of the arts and music and is therefore
relevant to understanding the perception of film that is accompanied by music.
The concept of physiognomic perception distinguishes perceptual experience
from emotional response. It is proposed that this distinction must be main-
tained in analyzing the film-music experience and its dynamics in order that
perceptual properties of music and film be identified as such instead of spuri-
ously attributed to emotional responses on the part of the film spectator. Fur-
thermore, the concept of physiognomic perception provides an alternative to
the view that music contributes to film perception by simply adding associa-
tions. In making this argument, the paper reviews the theory of physiognomic
perception, citing historical antecedents in classical Greek philosophy relative
to physiognomy and physiognomies, and ideas subsequently derived from that
intellectual tradition in terms of the musical modes and affections in music, as
formulated in medieval and baroque music theory, respectively. Connections
are also made with the general notion of "aesthetic perception," Lipps' theory
of "empathy," and more contemporary psychological aesthetic ideas of Arnheim
and Gibson.

A moment's reflection on the phenomenology of musical experience

reveals that music is expressive, whether or not one responds to it emotion-
ally. For example, although a piece of music is sad-sounds sad-the listener
is not necessarily also sad. Of course, the listener may become sad in re-
sponse to the sad quality of the music (at least, so it seems). Perceptually,
this seems to be no different than seeing a person with a sad face and hearing
that person cry, literally seeing the sad expression on the face and hearing
the sadness in the voice. The other person's face is perceptually sad-the
sadness is localized on the other person's face, as is the sadness in the voice.
One's own sadness, however, is felt within oneself, in one's body percept
(Wapner & Werner, 1965). The distinction is one between different percep-
tual points of view, that is, points of view within the perceptual world.1 I
can see and hear that another person is happy, sad, or angry, without neces-
sarily feeling happy, sad, or angry myself (cf. Neisser, 1976). Conversely,
I can be sad without others around me being sad. And this is true of music as
well: I can hear a piece of sad music without being sad myself, as Sloboda
(1985), for one, has observed.

154 Psychomusicology • Spring/Fall 1994

 Koffka (1935) and Pratt (1962) showed how language partially hampers
this distinction. The dual or ambiguous reference of words that describe
expressive qualities can confuse predicates referring to oneself and with
those referring to non-self (e.g., another person). For example, the state-
ment, "It is sad" can mean either that one perceives something sad (e.g.,
another person) or that one feels sad personally, or even both. A more
explicit statement is "I am sad" or "I feel sad." Such dual reference applies
only to certain predicates. For example, whereas one might say, "It is mys-
terious," one probably would not mean "I am mysterious" or "I feel myste-
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rious." The quality of being mysterious, and the word mysterious itself, is
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customarily reserved for other people and objects, not oneself. So the ambi-
guity of expression predicates in language itself has hindered the analysis of
expression and expressive properties in general.
From antiquity people have reported experiencing music as being pos-
sessed of something like an invisible, inner emotional substance, or charac-
ter, of which music is the outward expression. In their writings, Plato and
Aristotle appear somewhat puzzled by this phenomenon. For example, Aristotle
asks his reader, "How is it that rhythms and melodies, although only sound,
resemble states of the soul [ethos]; while this is not the case for tastes,
colors, or smells?" (quoted by Schopenhauer, 1966, p. 260).
The Greeks believed that music contained intrinsic qualities similar to
human character, which could in turn influence the character of the listener.
Their word for character (or character traits) was ethos (Anderson, 1966,
1980; Francfes, 1988; West, 1992), and was a central idea in Greek culture
and civilization. They held that different types of music possessed different
character traits. The different types of music were named after ancient
Greek peoples: Aeolian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Ionian. These mu-
sical "modes," so named, were thought to be characteristic of the tempera-
ment or character (ethos) of these peoples, each expressed by a distinctive
musical "manner" or "style." In a sense the musical modes were like dia-
lects of speech (Anderson, 1966). In terms of perceiving character traits the
Greeks formulated a science (art or skill) of discerning and judging ethos on
the basis of facial features, physique, gestures, vocal quality, and so forth.
They called this science (art or skill) physiognomies. In discussing the
treatises they wrote on physiognomies, Evans (1969) noted a "physiogno-
mic consciousness" on the part of many Greek writers.
With the gradual discovery of Plato's and Aristotle's writings by medi-
eval scholars in Europe, the idea of ethos (translated as habitus in Latin)
became a dominant theme in medieval thinking about music. Medieval
writers wrote how the musical modes contained attributes like personal char-
acter which were recognizable through characteristic musical ("modal")
gestures, much as a person's ethnic identity or temperament is often recog-
nizable by their clothing and manner (Van Deusen, 1989).
In the 17th century, under the influence of Aristotelean philosophy, the
old doctrine of ethos formed the basis of the "Doctrine of Affections" (Affektenlehre)
which, along with the "Doctrine of Figures" (Figurenlehre) derived directly

Rosar 155
 from Aristotle's theory of rhetorical figures expounded in hisRhetoric, domi-
nated music theory of the baroque period. It maintained that an individual
piece of music should consciously express a certain affection (or affect),
preferably one at a time, rather than several simultaneously.
At the turn of the present century, Kretzschmar (1990ab) sought to re-
vive the baroque Doctrine of Affections with what he called Musical Herme-
neutics, a discipline which sought to cultivate listening so as to discern the
affect in a piece of music. Kretzschmar laments the music criticism of his
day as lacking words for the seed offeeling in a piece of music or for the
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"outstanding features which give it its own physiognomy [italics added]"

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(Kretzschmar, 1990b, p. 44). In a sense, Kretzschmar was expounding some-

thing like a musical physiognomies', that is, interpreting the character (what
he called affect) of music based on its musical features. Later writers have
also explicitly used the phrase "musical physiognomy," for example, Adorno
(1992), Sabaneev (1929), and Stravinsky (1970).
At about the same time that Kretzschmar was promoting his musical
hermeneutics, the notion of aesthetic perception came into usage, suggest-
ing a special form of perception for art and the beautiful. Theodor Lipps
explained expressive qualities in art and music in terms of empathic apper-
ception or aesthetic empathy. In his theory of empathy (Einfiihlung), the
expressive qualities in art objects were illusions resulting from the projec-
tion of the perceiver 's internal bodily (or affective) states onto the art object
(or music) through the psychological mechanism of projection (Hunsdahl,
1967; Gladstein, 1984). For Lipps, a marble column looks strong, because
the perceiver unconsciously projects onto the column his own kinesthetic
experience of what it would feel like-the muscular "might" which would be
needed in his limbs-to hold up a roof (Arnheim, 1972). But as Neisser (1976)
noted, "Surely we can perceive hostility without being hostile or passion
without being impassioned. The empathy theory has the same logical form
as the motor theory of speech perception, and suffers from essentially the
same defects" (p. 189).
Heinz Werner (1948,1955,1978), who was a student of Lipps, provided
a more plausible explanation of aesthetic experience than Lipps' aesthetic
empathy with its hypothetical process of projection (Koffka, 1940;Smythies,
1954; Werner, 1956). He saw physiognomic perception as playing a central
role in the experience of art and music. Werner observed that objects per-
ceived physiognomically expressed an inner life, much in the same way
faces and bodily gestures are ordinarily perceived as expressive. Things in
a world perceived physiognomically axeface-like, they have faces or physiogno-
mies (Werner, 1978). By being face-like Werner does not mean faces (or
facial features) in terms of their configuration (or Gestalten), or the ability
to imagine or see faces in rock or cloud formations.
Werner explained physiognomic perception in terms of his holistic or
organismic theory of perception in which the perceiver's body participates
in perceptual-motor activity as a totality. His theory was mainly derived
from Ganzheit psychology (Ganzheitspsychologie), a holistic theoretical

156 Psychomusicology • Spring/Fall 1994

 framework advanced by Felix Krueger (1928), which paralleled and comple-
mented Gestalt theory (Werner, 1978).
In his theorical framework, Werner contrasted physiognomic percep-
tion with its antithesis or opposite, namely, objective-technical or geomet-
ric-technical perception. He claimed the latter is oriented to a different class
of perceptual attributes; that is, those corresponding to the traditional pri-
mary and secondary qualities of Galileo and Locke (i.e., primary qualities
being attributes of objects-size, shape, motion, and number-and secondary
qualities being sensory attributes such as color, sound, taste, etc.).
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The perception of faces illustrates how these two modes of perception

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differ in that they are attuned to different perceptual attributes (or informa-
tion). Werner writes: "One cannot totally define a face by objective charac-
teristics such as a crooked nose, a facial angle of x degrees, blue eyes, white
skin, and so forth. Those are physical or geometric properties. But the face
also has physiognomic properties. It is either grumpy or cheerful, energetic
or tired, lascivious or pure. These qualities are not feelings but, rather, are
perceptions" (Werner, 1978, pp. 149-150). It has been found that measures
of physiognomic perception are positively correlated with measures of em-
pathy (Olesker, 1977). This is not surprising because one of the reasons for
the theory of empathy was to explain what Werner subsequently called
physiognomic perceptual phenomena.
Werner (1978) stressed that while correlated with shapes, configura-
tions, colors, or sounds (i.e., primary and secondary qualities), physiogno-
mic qualities are not reducible to them:
[Physiognomic properties] are nothing derivative, but are the most primi-
tive perceptions of all. The most primordial objects of awareness (for
children and primitive peoples) are not thinglike but facelike. It is errone-
ous to believe that physiognomic qualities which we attribute to nonhu-
man things are transferred from [the perception of] human faces. The
physiognomic perception of human faces is only a meager remnant of an
original mode of perception by which naive peoples look at objects, (pp.
149-150).

In differentiating physiognomic properties of perception from Gestalten

and holistic properties, Werner (1955) noted, "Notions such as 'wholeness'
or 'Gestalt' are not sufficient for characterizing physiognomic percepts:
Any geometric figure per se, or the external form of the human body disre-
garding its physiognomic qualities, is of a unitary character" (pp. 280-281).
In sum, then, Werner argued th&t physiognomic qualities are neither
caused nor determined by objective-technical perceptual attributes (i.e.,
primary and secondary qualities); rather, they coexist with them. To say
that physiognomic qualities are derivative is like arguing that hue is deriva-
tive from color, rather than a defining, intrinsic property of color. For
Werner, physiognomic qualities are as intrinsic to perceptual experience as
so-called primary and secondary qualities. One way of thinking about this,
I propose, is that these qualities might be conceived as an additional param-
eter or dimension inherent in all the sensory modalities (cf. Dershowitz,
Rosar 157
 1973; Marks, 1978), perhaps analogous to intensity. Along these lines,
Wellek (1982) proposed the concept of Gestalt depth as a special dimension
of Gestalt perception, in that a Gestalt exhibits various degrees of expres-
siveness or possesses a physiognomic quality in addition to purely figural
attributes such as shape.
For these reasons and others, Gestalt psychologists, who adopted the
notion of physiognomic perception from Werner, called physiognomic quali-
ties (or physiognomic characters) "tertiary qualities" (Koffka, 1935; K6hler,
in Henle, 1971; Pratt, 1962, 1964), to distinguish them from primary and
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secondary qualities. They also argued that tertiary qualities were percep-
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tual patterns localized in and on percepts (KGhler, in Henle, 1971). They

argued against the view that tertiary qualities are feelings or emotions su-
perimposed on perception.2 From a Gibsonian standpoint, Neisser (1976)
claimed that "The friendliness of a gesture is 'encoded' just as deeply in the
changing optic array as a word is in the acoustic waveform" (p. 159). He
saw physiognomic perception as perception in general in terms of informa-
tion pick-up. Gibson (1975) expressed much the same opinion of aesthetic
perception:
No one has been able to say just what esthetic perception is in traditional
terms. Is it perception plus emotion? Plus significance? Plus feeling?
Plus beauty? Plus truth? My suggestion is that it is just perception, not
plus anything. If this is true, ordinary perception includes . . . esthetic
perception, (p. 8)

With respect to child development, Werner (1948) and others (e.g., Engel,
1991) showed that physiognomic perception precedes the perception of ob-
jects in terms of formal, objective properties: Werner's objective- or geo-
metric-technical perception. Even in adults there is evidence of the priority
of physiognomic perception, again as indicated in the perception of faces.
As art theorist Ernst Gombrich (1961) noted:
We see a friendly, dignified, or eager face, sad or sardonic, long before we
can tell what exact features or relationships account for this intuitive im-
pression. I doubt if we could ever become aware of the exact changes that
make a face light up in a smile or cloud over in a pensive mood simply by
observing the people around us. (p. 334)

In the context of the psychology of art, Arnheim (1971) commented on

the possible evolutionary value for the developmental primacy of physiog-
nomic perception:

The priority of physiognomic properties should not come as a surprise.

Our senses are not self-contained recording devices operating for their
own sake. They have been developed by the organism as an aid in properly
reacting to the environment. The organism is primarily interested in the
forces that are active around it-their place, strength, direction. Hostility
and friendliness are attributes of forces. And the perceived impact of forces
makes for what we call expression, (p. 430)

158 Psychomusicology • Spring/Fall 1994

 Physiognomic perception is not confined to faces and bodily gestures,
but often applies to inanimate objects as well. In art criticism, Ruskin (Pratt,
1968) coined the term pathetic fallacy for the attribution of human qualities
to natural landscapes. Werner (1948) notes:

Things perceived in this way may appear 'animate' and, though actually
lifeless, seem to express some inner form of life. A landscape, for in-
stance, may be seen suddenly in immediacy as expressing a certain mood-
it may be gay or melancholy or pensive, (p. 69)
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According to Werner (1978) "Physiognomic qualities are not limited

to any particular sphere of objects, nor are they limited to specific areas of
sensory perception, nor to specific expressions of feelings" (p. 150).
Werner (1978) maintained that aesthetic perception was simply a spe-
cial case of physiognomic perception in the "physiognomic aspect there
is . . . dominated by the particular orientation toward the artistic" (p. 150).
As he explained it, "The building elements of art and aesthetic experience
are physiognomic characters and physiognomic relations." Moreover, with
respect to music and poetry, he noted:

Pitches, and intensities are elements of acoustics; tones and tone combina-
tions of music are audible mood-patterns, configurations of tension and
inner motion. Words of poetry are not abstract tokens that communicate
emotion or thought but are seen and heard physiognomic sound figures, (p.
150)

Werner (1948,1955) observed that artist's perception is often dominated by the

physiognomic, citing in particular the painter Kandinsky, whose introspections
were consistent with this view.
In the context of perceiving musical intervals, Makeig (1982) suggests
that there are two different modes of listening, which he calls analytic and
affective. Although Makeig does not mention Werner, the two modes of
listening parallel Werner's objective-technical and physiognomic modes of
perception, respectively, in the auditory domain. For example, Makeig dis-
cusses the literature on the interval of the major third. Depending on tuning
it is either sweet, suave, strained or restless (p. 229). Makeig calls these
qualities interval affect, whereas Werner would call them physiognomic
qualities of tones and musical sonorities. Wellek conceptualized physiog-
nomic qualities in terms of his concept of Gestalt depth and expressive form
in music. It is interesting that film composers often comment that music
seems to add depth to a film, which can be a third or emotional dimension
(Hagen, 1971).3
A common experimental method to study physiognomic perception
(Schlesinger, 1980) requires that listeners select those adjectives from a list
of expressive qualities which best match the qualities of a musical excerpt
presented auditorily. It is sometimes called the Hevner method after Hevner
(1936) who popularized it. From the judgments, experimenters infer the
structural attributes (or elements) in the music that correspond to each of
Rosar 159
 the various expressive attributes. Such an approach can establish correla-
tions between musical features and concomittant expressive qualities.
However, it yields no information about why certain musical structures
should be correlated with certain kinds of expression.
Levi (1978,1982) used this method and explicitly related the problem
of understanding musical expression to physiognomic perception and phys-
iognomic qualities. He hypothesized that the use of emotion terms (e.g., the
word sad) in describing music was sufficient evidence that a perceiver is
perceiving physiognomic attributes of music. He concluded that it is pos-
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sible to predict which expressive (or physiognomic) words will be chosen

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by subjects, given certain musical structures. For example, Levi (1982)

notes seven musical specifications for the musical expression of sorrow: a
prevailing descending frequency line with little internal differentiation, a
motif containing descending intervals, notes of relatively long duration,
slow tempo, and so forth, (pp. 28-29). In Werner's view, this describes the
objective-technical features of a melody that are correlated with the expres-
sive quality of sorrow. We can find virtually identical prescriptions for
composing sorrowful melodies from baroque authors writing relative to the
Doctrine of Affections. For example, Affektenlehre theorist Johann Mattheson
commented that "If one knows that sadness is a CONTRACTION of [the]
subtle parts of our body, then it is easy to see that the SMALL and SMALL-
EST intervals are the most suitable for this emotion" (Harriss, 1981, p. 132).
In the context of film music, Marshall and Cohen (1988) investigated
"affective and connotative aspects of musical information" (or of "musical
stimuli") as a variable in the perception of film scenes. Experimental sub-
jects characterized musical selections on the basis of adjectives and ad-
verbs, using a series of bipolar rating scales. The procedure was typical of
the semantic differential technique of Osgood, Suci & Tannebaum (1957).
Such affective terms are examples of what Werner defined as expressive or
physiognomic qualities (although Marshall & Cohen do not state this): calm-
agitated, submissive-aggressive, relaxed-tense, cheerful-sad, and so forth,
calling them instead "connotations," "impressions," or "meanings." The
results they obtained from the rating scales, and by using Osgood et al.'s
semantic differential technique, indicated that the music influenced the af-
fective interpretation of the film scenes. They also suggested that music
directs attention to visual events and thereby influences how the scenes are
encoded.
Using a similar approach, Lipscomb (1990, Lipscomb & Kendall, 1994)
sought possible musical correlates ("musical parameters") of perceptual
judgments made by experimental subjects in response to viewing scenes
accompanied by music in the film Star Trek-The Voyage Home (music by
Leonard Rosenman). Lipscomb found a positive correlation between cer-
tain musical parameters and values obtained on semantic differential fac-
tors, derived from ratings made by his subjects on bipolar adjective scales
(they judged selected scenes with music from the film). Lipscomb (1990)
refers to these musical parameters as being possible determinants of the

160 Psychomusicology • Spring/Fall 1994

 affective response to musical stimuli. This suggests that rather than musi-
cal expression being measured (as in the studies by Hevner and others), it is
the affective response of the perceiver to music that was measured in his
experiments. Although Lipscomb subsumes what Hevner called elements
of expression in music [emphasis added] among his musical parameters,
expression is apparently not a perceptual property of music in Lipscomb's
view, but rather (somehow) the perceiver's affective response to it.
Similarly, Boltz, Schulkind, and Kantra (1991), who studied the effect
of music on memory for film scenes, use phrases such as "music's (inherent)
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affect (or mood)," "mood dimensions of music," "emotional reactions" to

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music, and "emotional reactions of an audience."

Werner's theory of physiognomic perception is useful in studying the
perception and cognition of film music because it makes a fundamental
distinction, that between ascertaining what are expressive-perceptual at-
tributes of music percepts (physiognomic properties) and perceiver's emo-
tions. It predicts that while they may be correlated, the relationship be-
tween perception and emotional response is by no means a simple stimulus-
response relationship. One can perceive, for example, the physiognomic
qualities of a piece of music, yet have no emotional response to it on one
hearing, though a strong emotional response to it on another hearing (Sloboda,
1985). The same should be true of the perception of films (and film music)
and audience responses to them. Consequently there is a need for care and
accuracy in the use of phenomenological and theoretical terminology in the
analysis of the relationship between perceptual properties and emotional
responses to them-as they apply in studying film music.
Physiognomic perception predicts that audience responses to music in
film are preceded by perceiving expressive perceptual properties of the music
in a film. In some way, music in film affects the physiognomic perception
of the film as a whole, and thereby affects audience response as well. Gen-
erally, to my mind, music seems to intensify (or perhaps even exaggerate)
the physiognomic qualities or the tendency to perceive films physiognom-
ically-it seems to bring out the physiognomic qualities in the overall per-
ceptual experience of a film, which in turn tend to lead to greater audience
involvement in the film experience. One could hypothesize that the greater
the physiognomic experience of film for an audience, the greater likelihood
of it eliciting an emotional reaction from the audience. This is often charac-
terized by observations that music in films enhances, underlines, empha-
sizes, or dramatizes film action, or increases dramatic tension in a film.
Such remarks refer to perceived attributes cf the film (or music-film
composite), or changes in perceptual quality, not the perceiver*s emotional
response to it. Why music in particular has this effect on film action and
drama, and whether the pairing of music with other film elements (visual,
sound) increases the physiognomic effect in the process additively or multi-
plicatively, are questions for empirical investigation.
What Gombrich (1961) said about the perception of faces also seems
true of musical expression: We are probably aware of the mood of a piece of

Rosar 161
 music before we can identify or specify which musical features characterize
the mood, rather than first noticing certain musical features and then some-
how inferring expression from them. With film music, we may not even be
conscious of the presence of music, let alone whether dramatic qualities are
referable to it or the film as a whole.
As Arnheim (1972) observed: "The artist's, writer's, [and] musician's
approach to their subject is principally guided by expression [which] has led
to the erroneous notion that all perception of expression is aesthetic" (p.
63). Koffka (1935) noted, "The artist constantly creates physiognomic char-
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acters, but scientifically speaking, neither he nor the psychologist knows

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much about the way in which he achieves this result" (p. 220). Now, more
than 50 years after Koffka made this remark, we are hopefully in a better
position to begin to understand how physiognomic perception works for
film and film music.
In conclusion, Werner's theory of physiognomic perception accounts
for musical expression as evidence of the physiognomic qualities of musical
percepts. Such physiognomic characters likely represent the same phenom-
enon as the character in music which the Greeks called ethos (formalized
with their science of physiognomies) and as affect in music, according to the
baroque Doctrine of Affections. Similarly, the delineation of character and
mood in films by music can be seen as the effects of physiognomic percep-
tion, resulting from physiognomic qualities in the music. This view con-
trasts with that of several contemporary researchers who instead emphasize
associationist accounts of the effect of film music on film interpretation.

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Footnotes
1
The body percept is distinguished from the physical body in the representa-
tive theory of perception, as part of the distinction between the perceptual and physical
worlds. For a discussion, see Beloff (1961), Brain (1959, 1960), Russell (1948),
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

Schilder (1970), and Smythies (1954, 1956).

This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

2
Physiognomic perception was first studied experimentally by Werner and his
associates (for a review, see Schlesinger, 1980), and recently, most notably by Mar-
tin Lindauer (see Lindauer, 1994). These studies investigated physiognomic per-
ception in relationship to color perception (Lindauer, 1991; Werner 1978), the per-
ception of line drawings (Krauss, 1930; Lindauer, 1990), expression in language
(Werner, 1955; Werner, 1978; Werner & Kaplan, 1963), semantic satiation (Wertheimer,
1960), metaphor (Arnheim, 1972; Haskell, 1989; Lindauer, 1986), comparative studies
of physiognomic perception across different sense modalities (Dershowitz, 1973),
its relationship to empathy (Olesker, 1977), creativity (Charlton & Bakan, 1990),
and as a perceptual process in the psychology of art (Arnheim, 1971,1972; Gombrich,
1961; Langer, 1967; Pratt, 1962, 1964; Werner,1978,1948, 1956) and music (Dor-
Shav, 1976; Levi, 1978, 1982; Pratt, 1962, 1964; Wellek, 1982). Possible sensory
neurophysiology underlying physiognomic perception is unknown because it has
not been studied.
3
Long after many major studies on physiognomic perception had been pub-
lished, the phenomenon was rediscovered (but not the work of Werner and his col-
leagues) by Kivy (1989), who discusses it in the context of the "Physiognomy of
Musical Expression."

(Manuscript received August, 1994; revision accepted June, 1995)

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