Production In Music That Is Excessively Sentimental: Acoustics and Event-Related Potentials Evidence for Emotional Connotations of Musical Instrument Timbre in Comparison with Emotional Speech Prosody. In addition to their domain-specific information, music and speech also convey emotional connotations. Whether or not the two types of emotional meanings are connected is, however, unclear.
Through the lens of emotional speech prosody, we’re looking at the emotional implications of musical timbre in the context of single instrument sounds. Listeners classified the stimuli into three categories: anger, happiness, and sadness, based on the sound of the instruments and the emotional prosody of the spoken word. For both speech and music, we found that the timbral aspects of the stimuli were consistent in their relationship to the three emotions. The findings are consistent with the size-code concept, which states that different sound timbres reflect distinct body size projections.
A subsequent ERP experiment used a priming paradigm, with isolated instrument sounds as primes and emotive speech as targets. Instrument-speech pairings that were emotionally incongruent generated a bigger N400 reaction than those that were in harmony. This is the first study to demonstrate that the timbre of simple and isolated musical instrument sounds can express emotion in a fashion akin to emotional spoken prosody.
(Schutz et al., 2008). It is surprising that timbre has not received the same level of attention as pitch, intensity, or duration (Holmes, 2011; Eerola et al., 2012). Only recently has the study of timbre, particularly musical timbre, received scholarly attention. We will use emotional speech prosody as a point of reference as we explore musical timbre in greater depth, particularly in terms of the emotional connotations of the musical timbre of solitary instrument sounds.
The Connection Of Emotion and Musical Timbre
Hearing timbre demands the integration of spectral and temporal dimensions in perceptual perception (Griffiths and Warren, 2004). It has been shown that humans can differentiate and remember different types of timbre at an early age (Trehub et al., 1990) and that our brains are tuned for timbre differences when processing musical stimuli (Christmann et al., 2014), which indicates that our brains are tuned for timbre differences when processing music. A timbre is a powerful tool for conveying composers’ intentions and eliciting emotional responses from listeners in music theory (Boulez, 1987; Gabrielsson, 2001).
Introduction
Humans mostly use music and speech to convey their feelings (Buck, 1984). Psychoacoustic aspects, such as pitch, intensity, and length, have been extensively studied over a long period in terms of their cross-domain similarities between effective music and speech (cf. Juslin and Laukka, 2003). TIME BRIDGE, a multidimensional auditory feature, helps listeners discriminate between sounds with equal pitch, loudness, and duration, which is a significant acoustic dimension (Giordano and McAdams, 2010). Due to the fact that composers rely on instrumentation (i.e. the selection of various instruments) to express the color and emotion of their music, timbre plays a significant role in its composition (Menon et al., 2002).
Why Is Additional Research Necessary?
Emotion is strongly linked to musical timbre, according to the studies cited above. While this may be true, a difficulty with most of this research is that other auditory cues, such as pitch, length, and intensity, were not strictly controlled, which means that timbre was not examined as a separate, independent acoustic cue. Musical effects such as vibrato (and flutter) were not filtered out in the Eerola et al. (2012) study (discussed above). Vibrato and flutter are well-known examples of modulations in pitch and intensity (Olson, 2003).
These tests were so complex that it isn’t apparent if it was just the sound itself that had an impact on how people perceived emotions, or whether it was the combination of many other sound characteristics. As a result, improving our knowledge of the emotional implications of musical timbre will necessitate a lot more work and a lot more attention to timbre alone.
The Music is Described as “Sumptuous and so Happy.”
The Sound of Music premiered on Broadway 60 years ago. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Trapp Family Singers narrative became the most profitable film of the era, but the stage version, now overshadowed by the memory of the Julie Andrews mega-hit, was the first. A former member of the original cast recalls the show as a life-changing experience for him.
This sequence from The Sound of Music is forever etched into Tim Crouse. Andrews isn’t in his mind when he talks about the 1965 film. He was in the audience for a Sunday run-through for Broadway insiders as the son of Russel Crouse, who co-wrote the stage adaptation with Howard Lindsay. He was 12 years old at the time, in 1959. A piano was used to play the Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes during the show, which was completely empty. “Starting in a tree, this performance had Maria on a stepladder. The Sound of Music’s title song is sung by Mary Martin as she ascends a few steps. It was a peaceful moment, and I believe everyone involved recognized it.”
On October 3, 1959, the production premiered at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven before moving to Broadway a month later. “You have to be open to the play’s powerful emotions to enjoy it. Nevertheless, the Sondheim moment was drawing near, and the sophisticates weren’t too happy about it. Both Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Hammerstein have the unusual ability to link music and words to the human spirit.” Afterward, he traveled to England to appear in Cliff Richard’s film Summer Holiday, which he did for two years. Jon Voight, who had taken over the role of Rolf on stage, was her husband for a few years.
Do you think she’ll ever go see the movie The Sound of Music?
“No. After experiencing an original rainbow, there is no desire or need to experience another one in the same place. The fact that you were there suffices.” Exhilarating and emotionally intelligent pop music by Carly Rae Jepsen Pop diva Carly Rae Jepsen has created a career and reputation around a wide variety of emotions that could be referred to as “too much,” which is exactly right for some of us.
Carly Rae Jepsen, the singer, will occasionally close her eyes, lift her hands above her head, and swing her hips in one of her music videos or live performances. Or at least, it doesn’t appear to have been. As a result, Jepsen opts for a more hazy, improvised sound. At least until those brief pauses between verses or at the end of a song, when she appears to have withdrawn into a full-bodied state of emotional receptivity, she is singing to us and moving with us. For now, she’s both the giver and the receiver of her own music’s plenty, theorist and learner, reveling in the kaleidoscopic feelings it conjures.
Research Being Done at the Moment The study’s goal is to investigate the auditory qualities that music and speech used to convey emotional meaning. We used an affective priming paradigm that included audio presentations of both speech and music. If timbre is capable of conveying emotions in the same manner as human emotional speech prosody expresses them, then this study will examine how solitary musical instrument sounds, or timbre, can do so.
