David Huron
Cognitive Science Lunch Lecture
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia, 2007 March 21
Listeners can readily judge the actual or portrayed emotional state of a speaker or singer. Among other affective states, listeners can recognize when a voice is fearful, aggressive, sad, polite, cute, or sexy. Cues influencing these judgments include pitch, loudness, vocal-tract length, asperance, periodicity, and frequency modulation. These same relationships can be observed when using non-vocal musical stimuli. Some of the relationships are also evident in ethological studies of non-human animals. Cross-modal experiments suggest a close relationship between facial expression and vocal affect -- which implies a possible deep physiological connection.