Melodic and Rhythmic Contrasts in Emotional Speech and Music

2013

Many cues convey emotion similarly in speech and music. Researchers have established that acoustic cues such as pitch height, tempo, and intensity carry important emotional information in both domains. In this investigation, we examined the emotional significance of melodic and rhythmic contrasts between successive syllables or tones in speech and music, referred to as Melodic Interval Variability (MIV) and the normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI). The spoken stimuli were 96 tokens expressing the emotions of irritation, fear, happiness, sadness, tenderness and no emotion. The music stimuli were 96 phrases, played with or without performance expression and composed with the intention…