If you read to the end, "musilanguge" is mentioned, which may tie into
Ray's posting on origins of language.
Natalia
From Scientific American, Observations:
Jun 17, 2010 05:45 PM in Mind & Brain
<http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/index.cfm?category=mind-and-brain>
| 36 comments
<http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=music-and-speech-share-a-code-for-c-2010-06-17#comments>
Music and speech share a code for communicating sadness in the minor
third
By Ferris Jabr
<http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/index.cfm?author=2323>
Here's a little experiment. You know "Greensleeves
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensleeves>"---the famous English folk
song? Go ahead and hum it to yourself. Now choose the emotion you think
the song best conveys: (a) happiness, (b) sadness, (c) anger or (d) fear.
Almost everyone thinks "Greensleeves" is a sad song---but why? Apart
from the melancholy lyrics, it's because the melody prominently features
a musical construct called the minor third, which musicians have used to
express sadness since at least the 17th century. The minor third's
emotional sway is closely related to the popular idea that, at least for
Western music, songs written in a major key (like "Happy Birthday") are
generally upbeat, while those in a minor key (think of The Beatles'
"Eleanor Rigby") tend towards the doleful.
The tangible relationship between music and emotion is no surprise to
anyone, but a study <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20515223> in the
June issue of /Emotion/ suggests the minor third isn't a facet of
musical communication alone---it's how we convey sadness in speech, too.
When it comes to sorrow, music and human speech might speak the same
language.
In the study, Meagan Curtis of Tufts University's Music Cognition Lab
recorded undergraduate actors reading two-syllable lines---like "let's
go" and "come here"---with different emotional intonations: anger,
happiness, pleasantness and sadness (listen to the recordings here
<http://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/music-cognition/emotion2009.html>). She
then used a computer program to analyze the recorded speech and
determine how the pitch changed between syllables. Since the minor third
is defined as a specific measurable distance between pitches (a ratio of
frequencies), Curtis was able to identify when the actors' speech relied
on the minor third. What she found is that the actors consistently used
the minor third to express sadness.
"Historically, people haven't thought of pitch patterns as conveying
emotion in human speech like they do in music," Curtis said. "Yet for
sad speech there is a consistent pitch pattern. The aspects of music
that allow us to identify whether that music is sad are also present in
speech."
Curtis also synthesized musical intervals from the recorded phrases
spoken by actors, stripping away the words, but preserving the change in
pitch. So a sad "let's go" would become a sequence of two tones. She
then asked participants to rate the degree of perceived anger,
happiness, pleasantness and sadness in the intervals. Again, the minor
third consistently was judged to convey sadness.
A possible explanation for why music and speech might share the same
code for expressing emotion is the idea that both emerged from a common
evolutionary predecessor, dubbed "musilanguage" by Steven Brown, a
cognitive neuroscientist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby
(Vancouver), British Columbia. But Curtis points out that right now
there is no effective means of empirically testing this hypothesis or
determining whether music or language evolved first.
What also remains unclear is whether the minor third's influence spans
cultures and languages, which is one of the questions that Curtis would
like to explore next. Previous studies have shown that people can
accurately interpret the emotional content of music from cultures
different than their own, based on tempo and rhythm alone.
"I have only looked at speakers of American English, so it's an open
question whether it's a phenomenon that exists specifically in American
English or across cultures," Curtis explained. "Who knows if they are
using the same intervals in, say, Hindi?"
/Image courtesy of iStockphoto/biffspandex/
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