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

The coding of human emotions 101
ically the production and understanding of emotional, pragmatic, prosodic
and metaphoric speech. Conversely, other types of brain damage can greatly
impair language input and/or output, and yet leave certain kinds of paralinguistic
(prosodic) understanding relatively unimpaired. The dissociation between,
broadly speaking, denotation and connotation is strong indication that
at least a part of the meaning in normal human communications is carried in
the prosody of speech.
Prosody itself is normally divided into three distinct parts: (i) the rhythm
or tempo of speech, (ii) changes in the intensity or loudness of the voice, and
(iii) changes in pitch (i.e., intonation). These are three of the four lowest-level
factors studied in music theory in deciphering the “meaning of music” (see, for
example, Scruton 1997). The fourth factor in music is timbre, or pitch quality.
Timbre in speech is related to the so-called formants, known to play an important
role in distinguishing among vowels. As central as they are for vowel
structure, they can be safely ignored in a first-order examination of pitch in
speech, primarily because fundamental frequency is largely unaffected by formant
structure and most of the energy in vowels lies in the F0. Itisrelevant
to note that most regional accents (as distinct from dialects) differ from one
another most clearly in terms of the pronunciation of vowels, i.e., systematic
changes in formant structure do not make the language unintelligible to native
speakers of the same language (provided that consonant structure remains intact).
Indeed, in Hebrew, Urdu and related written languages, specifying vowels
is entirely unnecessary, and in that respect formant structure is considered simply
irrelevant. In any case, the present focus on F0 means that the entire issue
of higher frequency formants will not be addressed.
Within the tradition of Western music theory, rhythm, intensity and timbre
are usually considered as factors that modulate the emphasis on certain
pitches within a musical composition, and are consequently taken as secondary
relative to the important issues of pitch (Schenker 1954; Cooke 1959; Scruton
1997). Pitch itself is studied in two main aspects: the serial changes referred
to as melody, and the relations among simultaneous pitches, referred to as
harmony. In speech, only melody is relevant, but, in either case, the degree
of consonance and/or dissonance among different pitches and the harmonic
configuration of three or more pitches are the fundamental issues.
In the present chapter, the focus is on the intonational (pitch) aspects of
prosody in relation to music theory, and their emotional meaning. While a
complete theory of intonation would necessarily include the modulating effects
of tempo and intensity, those aspects have already received a relatively
large amount of attention (e.g., Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983). Pitch has of course