Acoustic Concomitants of Emotional Dimensions: Judging Affect from Synthesized Tone Sequences

The ability of naive listener-judges to recognize the affective state of a speaker on the basis of nonlinguistic auditory cues independent of the verbal content of an utterance has been well established by a large number of studies. This study used artificial stimuli produced by a Moog synthesizer to vary pitch level and variation, amplitude level and variation, and signal duration and speed (tempo) systematically in a factorial design. The stimuli used, raters employed, procedure, and results are presented for two studies which were conducted. The results supported the contention that the attribution of emotional meaning from auditory stimuli is based on characteristic patterns of accoustic cues. This study suggested a rapproachement between studies on emotional expression in speech and the psychological investigation of emotion in music, with interesting implications concerning speculations on the common origin of music and speech in primitive emotional displays of our prehistoric ancestors