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

Musical emotions 253
for normal human listeners, then it can be concluded that the tonal combinations
that lead in three distinct stages toward the production of major or
minor chords are the essential auditory steps leading up to a resolved mood of
either positive or negative affect. If the establishment of a major mode has an
evolutionarily-deep connotation of “happiness” in the sense of denoting social
dominance, and a minor mode “unhappiness” in connoting social submission,
then it is a straight-forward task to delineate the individual affective tonal steps
along the way to such resolved moods.
As such, a rather simple dichotomous theory of musical emotions has been
arrived at – a theory in which positive emotions are associated with the feelings
inherent to social dominance, and negative emotions associated with subordinance.
(An in-between state of harmonic tension is also implied, but it is by
definition a state of vacillation or ambiguity between the poles. Harmonic tension
lacks the fixedness of major and minor chords, but is nonetheless itself
an explicit harmonic state: a condition of uncertainty and anxiety that is unresolved
with regard to a happy or sad affect.) Many theories of emotion that
include a happy-sad dimension include subcategories of the positive and negative
poles (e.g., happy, joyous, elated, ecstatic versus sad, mournful, depressed,
bored that differ with regard to activation, ego-involvement, etc.), but the pattern
outlined in Figure A1-3 suggests something quite different: that there are a
variety of transitional states prior to arriving at the resolved positive or negative
emotions or the explicit statement of unresolved tension.
Note that the steps shown in the figure are clearly not an exploration of
the social dynamics underlying emotions, but simply enumeration of the tonal
patterns that lead, step-by-step, to major, minor or tension chords. In principle,
it might be possible to elaborate on the nature of the corresponding types of
social interactions that lead up to social dominance or subordinance – events
that precede the resolution of a tension in either a positive or a negative way. In
such a psychological theory, the magnitude of the positive or negative emotions
inherent to resolution would be a function of the individual’s involvementin
the event. If there occurs a whole-hearted struggle implying heavy losses or
substantial gains, the emotional magnitude of the win or loss will necessarily
be great (and definable with different adjectives that indicate the strength of the
emotion). But the qualitative nature – thepositiveornegativecharacterofthe
emotion – does not change with quantitative differences. Suffice it to say that,
in the present theory of musical emotions, the magnitude of emotions will be
strongly context-dependent.
Nothing more needs to be said about the extremes of “resolved positive
emotion” and “resolved negative emotion” –other than that they are the psy-