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Psychoacoustic cues to emotion in speech prosody and music

This is a "reserve" item. The research reported here is part of an ongoing larger-scale project investigating the extent to which listeners use the same acoustic cues when judging emotion in music and in speech prosody. This is important for basic psychological research because it will shed light on the shared processing, and potentially the shared evolutionary basis, for emotional expression in music and speech. The insights here are also important to applied research because they contribute to development of a computational model to be used for automated music/speech selection and therapeutic purposes. An important methodological innovation here is the combination of computational and experimental methods which are relatively new to the field of music emotion research. The advantage of this approach is that it aids analysis of emotional responses to music, while also offering a platform for the abstract representation of complex, real-time and continuous relationships. The first author (Coutinho) worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the second author (Dibben), supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (SFRH/BPD/62850/2009) and a Small Research Grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2009-2010). This publication was instrumental in a subsequent successful application by Dibben for a Swiss National Science Foundation International Short Visit to the Centre for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva (2013) to further analyse physiological data collected during the same research project. This paper lead to other invitations to collaborate (a book chapter co-authored with Coutinho and Scherer in an edited volume) and conference presentations (Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology, Sheffield, 2010; and two papers at the International Conference of Music and Emotion, Jyvaskyla, 2013).