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

242 Chapter 9
in the complex, troublesome and time-consuming human relations that real
emotions necessarily imply!
By focusing on what is well-known within the framework of traditional diatonic
music theory, it has been possible to generalize the regularities inherent
in harmony theory and apply them to the pitch phenomena in normal speech.
By then pursuing the likely mechanisms by which the human brain is able
to decipher the meaning of pitch and to use that information in the delivery
of emotional speech and music, some conclusions concerning the underlying
brain structures and processes have been suggested. Most importantly, since
pitch information is known to be represented cortically in the form of twodimensional
tonotopic maps, mechanisms for transmitting and transforming
patterns of cortical activity provide the basis for a physiological code through
which the brain detects emotions in the right hemisphere, conveys that information
to the left hemisphere via the corpus callosum, and expresses the
affective state through the speaker’s tone of voice.
Details of the code remain to be empirically confirmed, but it is certain
that the issues discussed in the first five chapters will remain the focus of experimental
and theoretical work. Asymmetrical cerebral activity, cortical maps,
synaptic inhibition and excitation, and the timing of neuronal activity simply
are – and are likely to remain – the essence of modern human neuroscience.
The neuronal phenomena that produce cognition, affect and behavior might
be reconfigured in different ways to spell out different brain codes for different
species or different types of information-processing, but it is difficult to imagine
how the mechanisms of mind could be explained without those neuronal
phenomena playing a central role. Stated negatively, a dopamine or chromosomal
or hippocampal theory of the human mind will not suffice. Those and
many other material structures may be relevant components in a scientifictheory
of the human mind, but they will attain importance by fitting into the
cerebral hemispheric specialization framework (not vice versa).
Yet, even if it can be said that some progress has been made in deciphering
the brain code, an irritating question immediately arises whenever there is
talk about deciphering how the human brain works. If linguistic cognition and
pitch-based emotion are simply a matter of certain processes of cortical activation
and information flow within the brain, why couldn’t computerswith
virtually identical mechanisms of information-processing become psychologically
fully human? Why would such machines not be conscious “feeling” beings
whose power switch is as untouchable as human murder is unthinkable?
Most psychologists probably do not take artificial intelligence seriously
enough to worry about such questions, but the logic is forceful. Is current