Major and minor music compared to excited and subdued speech.
Abstract
The affective impact of music arises from a variety of factors, including intensity,
tempo, rhythm, and tonal relationships. The emotional coloring evoked by intensity,
tempo, and rhythm appears to arise from association with the characteristics of human
behavior in the corresponding condition; however, how and why particular tonal relationships
in music convey distinct emotional effects are not clear. The hypothesis examined
here is that major and minor tone collections elicit different affective reactions
because their spectra are similar to the spectra of voiced speech uttered in different
emotional states. To evaluate this possibility the spectra of the intervals that distinguish
major and minor music were compared to the spectra of voiced segments in excited and
subdued speech using fundamental frequency and frequency ratios as measures. Consistent
with the hypothesis, the spectra of major intervals are more similar to spectra found
in excited speech, whereas the spectra of particular minor intervals are more similar
to the spectra of subdued speech. These results suggest that the characteristic affective
impact of major and minor tone collections arises from associations routinely made
between particular musical intervals and voiced speech.
Type
Journal articleSubject
Acoustic StimulationAcoustics
Adolescent
Adult
Aged
Databases as Topic
Emotions
Female
Humans
Male
Middle Aged
Music
Psychoacoustics
Sound Spectrography
Speech
Speech Acoustics
Young Adult
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/4233Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1121/1.3268504Publication Info
Bowling, Daniel L; Gill, Kamraan; Choi, Jonathan D; Prinz, Joseph; & Purves, Dale (2010). Major and minor music compared to excited and subdued speech. J Acoust Soc Am, 127(1). pp. 491-503. 10.1121/1.3268504. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/4233.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Dale Purves
Research Professor Emeritus of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences
The Purves Laboratory is continuing to study visual perception and its neurobiological
underpinnings. Ongoing investigations include understanding the perception of brightness,
color, orientation, motion, and depth. The unifying theme of these several projects
is the hypothesis that visual percepts are generated according to a wholly empirical
strategy. The strategy represents in perception the empirical significance of the
stimulus rather than its properties. This theory of vision and its

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