Coutinho, E

Dibben, N

University of Liverpool Repository

Submission  to  CIM2010  Nature  versus  Culture    Music,  Speech  and  Emotion:  psycho-­physiological  and  computational  investigations    Dr  Eduardo  Coutinho,  University  of  Sheffield,  UK  (Computer  Science)  Dr  Nicola  Dibben,  University  of  Sheffield,  UK  (Musicology)      1.   Background  in  Music  Cognition.      There  is  growing  evidence  that  perception  of  emotion  expressed  in  vocal  prosody  and  in  music  shares  certain  psychoacoustic  attributes  (Juslin  &  Laukka  2003).    From  the  perspective  of  musicology  these  findings  are  significant  because  they  indicate  that  listeners’  affective  responses  to  music  can  be  accounted  for  at  least  in  part  by  “basic”  acoustic  cues.    2.   Background  in  Computer  Science.    Previous  research  has  shown  that  a  large  part  of  listeners’  affective  response  to  music  can  be  predicted  from  a  small  set  of  psychoacoustic  cues  (Coutinho  &  Cangelosi,  2009),  and  physiological  variables  (Coutinho  &  Cangelosi,  in  press).      3.  Aims    Our   goal   is   to   better   understand   the   way   people   perceive   emotion   in  music   and  speech   prosody,   i.e.   the   way   people   infer   the   emotional   state   of   others   from  nonverbal  aspects  of  speech.      4.  Main  Contribution    The  method  involves  asking  participants  to  listen  to  a  set  of  music  pieces  and  speech  excerpts,  while  reporting  their  emotional  experience  using  a  computer  framework  interfaced  with  a  device  that  controls  the  movement  of  the  cursor  or  pointer  on  a  display  screen.  At  the  same  time  we  measure  participants’  physiological  reactions  during  listening,  namely  heart  rate,  skin  conductance,  respiration  and  blood  volume  pressure.  The  data  collected  from  the  mouse  position  and  the  physiological  readings  is  used  to  analyze  the  participants’  psychological  and  physiological  reactions  to  the  stimuli  and  to  compare  them  with  the  psychoacoustic  properties  of  the  music  and  speech.  Each  participant  also  completes  a  set  of  short  questionnaires  that  gather  relevant  personal  information,  such  as  age  and  gender  (and  other  demographic  variables),  exposure  to  music,  years  of  musical  training,  personality  traits  and  mood  state.  This  information  is  used  to  test  various  sub-­hypotheses  about  the  factors  influencing  perception  of  emotion  in  music  and  speech  prosody.    This  is  the  first  time  that  an  attempt  has  been  made  to  study  the  relationship  between  expression  of  emotion  in  music  and  speech  prosody  in  longer  excerpts  of  music  and  speech.    5.  Implications      Evidence  that  the  perception  of  emotion  conveyed  by  music  and  speech  relies  on  shared  psychoacoustic  characteristics  lends  credence  to  the  idea  that,  to  some  extent  at  least,  emotion  perception  relies  on  ‘basic’  attributes  that  are  adaptive  responses  to  environmental  cues.    This  emphasises  the  role  of  the  natural  in  emotional  expression  in  music,  contrary  to  the  predominance  of  cultural  (semiotic)  models  of  musical  expression.    Furthermore,  the  identification  of  shared  characteristics  of  emotion  expression  in  music  and  speech  prosody  may  contribute  to  evolutionary  perspectives  on  music  and  language.      6.  References    Coutinho,   E.,   &   Cangelosi,   A.   (2009).   The   use   of   spatio-­temporal   connectionist  models   in  psychological  studies  of  musical  emotions.  Music  Perception,  27   (1),  1-­15.  Coutinho,  E.,  &  Cangelosi,  A.   (in   press).  Musical   emotions:   predicting   second-­by-­second   subjective   feelings   of   emotion   from   psychophysiological   measurements.  Manuscript  submitted  for  publication.  Juslin,  P.,  &  Laukka,  P.  (2003).  Communication  of  emotions  in  vocal  expression  and  music  performance:  Different  channels,  same  code?  Psychological  Bulletin,  129  (5),  770-­814.    7.  Biographies    Dr  Eduardo  Coutinho  is  a  Postdoctoral  Research  Fellow  at  the  University  of  Sheffield,  and  his  research  centres  on  investigating  the  relationships  between  the  dynamics  psychoacoustic  features  in  music  and  speech  and  the  communication  of  emotion.  In  2008,  he  completed  his  doctorate  in  cognitive  sciences  at  the  University  of  Plymouth  with  a  thesis  on  the  effects  of  music  in  human  emotions  by  means  of  psycho-­physiological  empirical  experiments  and  computational  models.      Dr  Nicola  Dibben  is  a  Senior  Lecturer  in  Music  at  the  University  of  Sheffield,  and  has  published  over  25  papers  and  book  chapters  in  musicology  and  music  cognition.    She  has  recently  published  two  books:  Björk  (Equinox  Press,  2009)  and  Music  and  Mind  in  Everyday  Life  (Oxford  University  Press,  2010).      

Music, Speech and Emotion: Psycho-physiological and Computational Investigations

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