Comparision of Major and Minor Music with Vocalization in Different Emotional States

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From the course by Duke University

Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why

351 ratings

Duke University

Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why

351 ratings

The course will explore the tone combinations that humans consider consonant or dissonant, the scales we use, and the emotions music elicits, all of which provide a rich set of data for exploring music and auditory aesthetics in a biological framework. Analyses of speech and musical databases are consistent with the idea that the chromatic scale (the set of tones used by humans to create music), consonance and dissonance, worldwide preferences for a few dozen scales from the billions that are possible, and the emotions elicited by music in different cultures all stem from the relative similarity of musical tonalities and the characteristics of voiced (tonal) speech. Like the phenomenology of visual perception, these aspects of auditory perception appear to have arisen from the need to contend with sensory stimuli that are inherently unable to specify their physical sources, leading to the evolution of a common strategy to deal with this fundamental challenge.

From the lesson

Music, Emotion, and Cultural Differences

How emotion is conveyed by vocal similarity in music across cultures, and how the speech of a culture and its music are related. A summing up of the major points in the course follows.

Introduction to Emotion8:44

Emotions Elicited by Major versus Minor Scales14:49

Comparision of Major and Minor Music with Vocalization in Different Emotional States6:50

Expression of Emotion in Eastern and Western Music7:10

Language, Speech, and Cultural Differences in Music19:42

Mbira Music: Background and Cyclical Structures4:05

Mbria Music: Nonhamronic Frequencies3:47

Meet the Instructors

Dale Purves
M.D.
Duke Institute for Brain Sciences

So now, in this lesson, let’s turn to the critical question.

Do these differences in major and

minor music correspond to differences in the vocalization

of individuals when they're in different emotional states.

And is the reason that the excitement of the major scale and the subdued

nature of a minor scale in music is the reason that emotion is conveyed.

Because the music is imitating the tonal characteristics

of individuals that are expressing emotion, when they're excited or subdued.

And the various states that go with those two categorizations of emotion.

So let me begin by reminding you, I showed you this slide before,

that the vocal tract is a perfectly good musical instrument.

It has all the characteristics of a musical instrument.

A source of vibration, the vocal chords, modulation of that vibration

by the rest of the vocal tract above the larynx and that the phones.

The sound signals that come out of the mouth are not really any different than

the sound signals that are generated by the vibrating string and body of a violin.

Or the air column and reed in a wind instrument and

many other examples that you can think of.

So the question then is how do you compare a speech and

music in different emotional states?

So there's several ways in which this can be done.

And here, we're looking at speech and we're comparing it to music and

the metric in this example is the fundamental frequency.

So let's take speech.

So we're talking about, and this was done by,

again, using the database of actors in different emotional states,

expressing speech in different emotional states.

Excited versus subdued, the excited in red the subdued in blue

and the overlap between those in purple.

And what you see in either the expression of actors

uttering single words or monologues.

That is a few paragraphs of words spoken in one or another emotional states.

Is that when the speakers are in an excited emotional state,

again, those are the red columns here.

The fundamental frequency, whether it's a male or

female speaker, is considerably higher.

So, the fundamental frequency when people are actors in this database,

in an analysis of this database, are speaking in a subdued manner.

The fundamental frequencies tend to be low, as you might imagine, 100 Hz or

192 Hz on average for males and females respectively.

When they're excited, the fundamental frequency goes up.

And again, this is true whether it's in single words or monologues.

Well, why should that be?

I think the reason is pretty obvious.

Let's go back to this slide.

So, when a person is excited,

the tension on their vocal chords is increased by virtue of a muscular

tension on the vocal chords that changes their vibratory frequency.

That's what causes the fundamental frequency of

the harmonic series as being generated by

the vibration of the vocal cords to increase when a person is excited.

And to be less when that person is in a subdued,

relaxed, sad, unexcited state.

The rest of the vocal tract is then operating on vibratory power that's coming

from the vocal cords that's quite different giving these different

fundamental frequencies, whether it's single word, or a monologue.

Now the question is, does that characteristic, that tonal characteristic,

the fundamental frequency that's defining whether a person is excited,

or subdued in speech is that the same as music.

Well, let's make the comparison, so here is major music, here's minor music,

major music in red, minor music in blue, overlap in purple.

For classical melodies and for the folk melodies.

And again, you see what I said before, that for the major melodies,

the fundamental frequency, again, because we're talking about the dyad now.

That's the implied fundamental frequency of the two tones together,

is less in minor music than it is

in major music, and the same thing applies in folk music.

The fundamental frequency, the implied fundamental frequency,

is less in minor music than it is in major music,

when the composer intends to convey excitement versus a subdued emotion.

So, the general idea is then musical tonality conveys emotion by imitating

the tonality in speech or vocalization in different emotional states.

And the parallel is between music in major and

minor scales and speech in excited and subdued states.

And the reason I would argue and ask you to think about,

the reason that a major scale conveys the sense of brightness, excitement, etc.

And a minor scale conveys a sense of a lack of excitement,

a lack of arousal, sadness, is because those two scales are imitating

the emotional state in tonality that's expressed in speech

by the tones and their fundamental frequencies that are used in speech.

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