EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF PITCH ON MUSIC & LANGUAGE 1 The Effect of Pitch on the Creation of Emotional Meaning in Music and Language

Music and language are two human media known to communicate emotion. Burgeoning research comparing music and non-verbal language has identified acoustic characteristics, like pitch, that both media share. This study seeks to determine whether pitch functions similarly in music and language to communicate emotion. Participants listen to four actors’ readings of the same Shakespearean monologue and to eight other sound files: a derived prosody file and a transcribed music file for each of the four monologues, for a total of 12 sound files. This produces four sets of three sound files that preserve the pitch movements of the actor’s voice in three types of sound, yielding stimuli that can be directly compared for pitch’s effect on a listener’s perception of emotion in different communication media. Emotion is measured in two response forms: participants’ subjective ratings and physiological recordings. Results show that participants’ ratings of activation and efficiency of emotional communication are preserved across the three communication media, suggesting that pitch differences from the four actors’ readings influence these ratings for music and language. Other findings indicate that speech stimuli generate the strongest emotional ratings of the three media types. Results for activation also corroborate past literature which shows women have stronger responses to emotional communication than men. Discussion covers how the importance of activation in this study may be due to the focus on the emotion of anger in the stimuli to which participants listened. EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF PITCH ON MUSIC & LANGUAGE 3 The Effect of Pitch on the Creation of Emotional Meaning in Music and Language Effective communication comes from more than just words. Most anyone can defend this claim with anecdotal experience in which, for example, the response "I'm fine" means dramatically different things depending on the tone of voice the speaker uses. The same words convey different meanings depending on where, how and with whom they are spoken. More support for extra-verbal communication structure is the human experience of music. Oliver Sacks in says that "we humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic one" (p. 1). Most people experience profound emotional connection to some kind of music: a kind of connection that aches, raises the hair across the arms and neck, and rejuvenates when little else could. Music also seems to mean something. It is a brand of communication. These phenomena suggest that human communication, though increased in precision of meaning and valence by words, produces some level of meaning though nonverbal cues and channels. Understanding the mechanism of creating meaning nonverbally is potentially useful to manifold areas of music and communication, including, but not limited to, public speaking, music composition, music and language education, neurological research, music and speech/language therapy and artificial intelligence. Beyond complex research and practical applications, this question also engages us at a natural level; as users of these two communication types and as creatures sensitive to emotion, how can we help but be interested in the ways we create meaning via these media? Though extrinsic elements of communication like speaker-audience relationship and location are undoubtedly influential on meaning, the thrust of this research is aimed at meaning created by more intrinsic, nonverbal characteristics of two human media of communication: speech and music. Specifically, literature was examined concerning the effect of pitch on emotional meaning derived from nonverbal speech and music. Relevant literature to this study EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF PITCH ON MUSIC & LANGUAGE 4 can be broken into several subcategories and sub-subcategories to articulate the depth and breadth of scholarship that supports the comparability of pitch's contributions to emotion content in speech and music. They include the following: • Communication Frameworks • Affect, Emotion, & Valence Studies o Prosody & Emotion o Music & Emotion • Music/Language Comparison Literature (which can be examined specifically with) o Neurological/Physiological Arguments o Interrelated Effects of Music and Language Literature detailing methodologies for exploring music/language interactions and influential for the procedure of this research are described in the Methods section. Reviewing this literature also informs the relevance of the original experiment conducted on pitch's contribution to emotional meaning and response in speech and music.