Emotional Connotations of Musical Instrument Timbre in Comparison With Emotional Speech Prosody: Evidence From Acoustics and Event-Related Potentials.

Xiaoluan Liu,Yi Xu,Kai Alter,Jyrki Tuomainen

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00737

Xiaoluan Liu, Yi Xu + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00737

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Abstract

Music and speech both communicate emotional meanings in addition to their domain-specific contents. But it is not clear whether and how the two kinds of emotional meanings are linked. The present study is focused on exploring the emotional connotations of musical timbre of isolated instrument sounds through the perspective of emotional speech prosody. The stimuli were isolated instrument sounds and emotional speech prosody categorized by listeners into anger, happiness and sadness, respectively. We first analyzed the timbral features of the stimuli, which showed that relations between the three emotions were relatively consistent in those features for speech and music. The results further echo the size-code hypothesis in which different sound timbre indicates different body size projections. Then we conducted an ERP experiment using a priming paradigm with isolated instrument sounds as primes and emotional speech prosody as targets. The results showed that emotionally incongruent instrument-speech pairs triggered a larger N400 response than emotionally congruent pairs. Taken together, this is the first study to provide evidence that the timbre of simple and isolated musical instrument sounds can convey emotion in a way similar to emotional speech prosody.

Highlights

Music and speech are primary means for humans to communicate emotions (Buck, 1984)
We aimed to explore emotional connotations of musical timbre of isolated instrument sounds through the perspective of emotional speech prosody
Angry instruments and angry speech were characterized by acoustic features that indicate a rough sound quality while happy instruments and happy speech were characterized by features suggesting a pure-tone like sound quality

Summary

Introduction

Music and speech are primary means for humans to communicate emotions (Buck, 1984). A considerable amount of studies have shown that affective music and speech are similar in many psychoacoustic dimensions, e.g., pitch, intensity and duration, which have been given extensive attention over a long period in terms of their cross-domain similarities (cf. Juslin and Laukka, 2003). A considerable amount of studies have shown that affective music and speech are similar in many psychoacoustic dimensions, e.g., pitch, intensity and duration, which have been given extensive attention over a long period in terms of their cross-domain similarities (cf Juslin and Laukka, 2003). Another important acoustic dimension is timbre, which is a multidimensional auditory property enabling listeners to distinguish between sounds that have equal pitch, loudness and duration (Giordano and McAdams, 2010).

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