Rhetoric revisited: Cues to affective content in music and speech

Connections between music and oratory assumed by composers in the Renaissance and Baroque periods were explored in a cross-cultural investigation. Western listeners made continuous judgements of emotions (joy, sadness, anger) and acoustic properties (loudness, tempo, complexity) as they heard Western and Hindustani music. The extent to which acoustic judgements predicted emotion judgements was assessed using time series analysis. For both Hindustani and Western music, increases in loudness were associated with
perceived anger; decreases in loudness were associated with sadness; increases in tempo were associated with joy and anger; decreases in tempo were associated with sadness; and increases in complexity were associated with joy and sadness.
In a second study, listeners were presented short English and Tagalog phrases spoken in a joyful, sad, or angry tone of voice, and judged the loudness and speed (tempo) of each phrase. For both Tagalog and English speech, high ratings of loudness were associated with anger; low ratings of loudness were associated with sadness; and low ratings of speed were associated sadness. For Tagalog speech, the highest ratings of speed were assigned to angry speech; for English speech, the highest ratings of speed were assigned to joyful speech. Based on a comparison of the two studies, we argue that speech prosody and music are linked by acoustic parameters associated with emotional meaning.