Melodic and Rhythmic Contrasts in Emotional Speech and Music

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 of communicating similar emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, tenderness and no emotion). The results showed that speech, but not music, was characterized by changes in MIV as a function of intended emotion. However, both speech and music, showed similar changes in nPVI. Emotional portrayals, both spoken and musical, had higher nPVI values than stimuli convey-ing “no emotion”. The results suggest that MIV may function differently in speech and music, but that there may be similarities between the two domains with respect to nPVI.