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It is rumoured that Alexander the Great used music to psych him up before he went into battle and again after the event, to calm him down.

"It's just a myth, but a very powerful one," said musicologist Tim Carter, one of four keynote speakers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions' second international conference recently.

The tale is one that highlights the conflicting emotions that music has inspired through the centuries.

"It is a fascinating melting pot, considering the pleasures, perils and dangers of music," said Professor Carter from North Carolina University, who is also a Distinguished International Visiting Fellow in the Centre.

"Music was considered dangerous in the 17 ^th century because it could not be processed by the brain, but through the heart. And they didn't like that in those days. There was also the fear of emasculation.  Men were not supposed to like music; they were meant to be made of sterner stuff."

Professor Carter said that, even now, academics did not generally like talking about emotions. "As scholars, we tend to take a step back and say: ‘Let's keep this academic.'

"But the Centre's research and this conference force us to confront a whole set of issues and it's very exciting."

One of the most popular presentations at the conference was Andrew Lawrence-King's workshop on Hamlet's famous soliloquy.  He had actors on one side of the stage and musicians on the other, comparing the emotions evoked by the different performances.

Professor Carter spoke about a 17 ^th century clash between composers and performers of music. "For the first time, there were debates about which one commandeered the emotions: the person who wrote the music or the person who performed it," he said.

More than 100 researchers from widely diverse disciplines attended the three-day conference at UWA, with about double the number of people taking part in live-streaming of sessions and tweeting around the world.

"This conference set out to cover the wide range of historical sources that tell us about emotions in the past-and it certainly delivered on its promise," said Centre director, Winthrop Professor Philippa Maddern.

"We covered everything  from 11th century runestones to 17th century sailing journals, from Shakespeare to the Bayeux Tapestry, from poetry to criminal trials, speakers elucidated emotions of greed, fear, honour,triumph, embarrassment, compassion, exaltation, despair, and many more. As plenary speaker James Amelang (Universidad Autonoma, Madrid)pointed out, even suposedly well-known sources, such as letters, have many variants, from highly-crafted state correspondence to much more down-to-earth sailors'home letters--all with different emotional valence."

Deputy director, Winthrop Professor Jane Davidson said that significantly, a strong emphasis developed not on what emotions were felt, but the ways in which they were generated, expressed and conveyed.

"As Professor Sarah McNamer (Distinguished International Visitor to CHE) remarked in discussing late medieval English poetry, drama and devotional literature, we often ask 'How did these people feel?'; but we too often answer with a statement of what emotions we think they felt, instead of concentrating on the processes of feeling, and of the emotional relationships between texts, readers and viewers," she said.