Tone of Voice and Mind : The Connections between Intonation ...

The coding of human emotions 99
channels, the fundamental frequency of the voice is more important than other
auditory and visual signals in establishing social relations.
The general ease with which people judge whether or not others “mean
what they say” and the use of intonation in both active and passive ways is
strong indication that, by and large, we are not robotic “word-processors” relying
solely on the decoding of literal word-strings, but rather that we often rely
on and act on the basis of the information obtained on hearing another’s tone
of voice – the most important component of which is fundamental frequency.
Here, individual differences are large – both in the sending and receiving of intonational
meaning – and the developmental learning curve is perhaps as slow
as the acquisition of any psychological skill. But regardless of our individual
successes and failures in judging the meaning of the tone of voice of others and
regardless of where we are on the learning curve, deciphering the information
contained in the tone of voice is an active concern for most people.
The linguist will immediately counter with, “Yes, OK, intonation is important,
but every linguistic culture and indeed every subculture and maybe every
family has its own ‘intonational system’ that makes the search for cross-cultural
universals futile.” In response, I maintain only that there is a small number of
intonational universals. Of course there are individual and cultural differences,
and even a fully-acculturated, finely-tuned musician’s ear may not be able to
distinguish between a friend’s joy, happiness and elation solely on the basis
of pitch. At a much cruder level of discrimination, however, I will argue that
there are four universals of intonational phenomena that all normal people understand
in a similar way: (i) interval dissonance, (ii) the movement away from
dissonance (toward unison or toward consonance), (iii) harmonic tension, and
(iv) the movement away from tension (toward major or minor resolution).
It is only with regard to the fourth universal concerning the major and minor
modes in traditional diatonic music that the link with human emotions
becomes obvious, and that is because there is a popular conception that major
harmonies are “positive, happy, bright, cheerful and optimistic” and minor
harmonies are “negative, sad, dark, gloomy and pessimistic.” That statement
requires some qualification and the meaning of major and minor must be reformulated
within the framework of the psychophysical model of Appendix 2,
but the central argument remains that pitch combinations are important for
sending and receiving affective information. Just as no sensible music psychologist
would attempt to describe the affective content of music in terms
of mean pitch, pitch range or other first order statistic concerning the tones in
the melody, I maintain that linguists must face the more difficult issue of pitch
combinations – musical intervals and, most crucially, musical chords.