music listening musical emotionsPeople often experience a variety of affective responses while listening to music.The study of this phenomenon has flourished during the last two decades; however, the theoretical frameworks that have attempted to explain this phenomenon have neglected the symbolic dimension of music and the effect of situational factors.The aim of the current article is to overcome these shortcomings by proposing a model based on contemporary constructionist theories of emotion.This novel approach proposes that listening to music activates automatic perceptual mechanisms that produce fluctuations of affect, and that the activation of associative and appraisal mechanisms transform the fluctuations of affect into a variety of emotional and nonemotional responses.The main proposal is that adopting this constructionist model constitutes a fruitful approach as it reinterprets past contradictory findings, resolves enduring debates, and provides a heuristic framework for future investigation of affective experiences with music.