A tristeza comunicada pelo intervalo de terça menor se faz presente tanto na fala quanto na música.

[Thiago Maciel Oliveira]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=music-and-speech-share-a-code-for-c-2010-06-17

Music and speech share a code for communicating sadness in the minor third

By Ferris Jabr Jun 17, 2010 05:45 PM 39

Here's a little experiment. You know "Greensleeves"—the famous English folk song? Go ahead and hum it to yourself. Now choose the emotion you think the song best conveys: (a) happiness, (b) sadness, (c) anger or (d) fear.

Almost everyone thinks "Greensleeves" is a sad song—but why? Apart from the melancholy lyrics, it's because the melody prominently features a musical construct called the minor third, which musicians have used to express sadness since at least the 17th century. The minor third's emotional sway is closely related to the popular idea that, at least for Western music, songs written in a major key (like "Happy Birthday") are generally upbeat, while those in a minor key (think of The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby") tend towards the doleful. 

The tangible relationship between music and emotion is no surprise to anyone, but astudy in the June issue of Emotion suggests the minor third isn't a facet of musical communication alone—it's how we convey sadness in speech, too. When it comes to sorrow, music and human speech might speak the same language. 

In the study, Meagan Curtis of Tufts University's Music Cognition Lab recorded undergraduate actors reading two-syllable lines—like "let's go" and "come here"—with different emotional intonations: anger, happiness, pleasantness and sadness (listen to the recordings here). She then used a computer program to analyze the recorded speech and determine how the pitch changed between syllables. Since the minor third is defined as a specific measurable distance between pitches (a ratio of frequencies), Curtis was able to identify when the actors' speech relied on the minor third. What she found is that the actors consistently used the minor third to express sadness. 

"Historically, people haven't thought of pitch patterns as conveying emotion in human speech like they do in music," Curtis said. "Yet for sad speech there is a consistent pitch pattern. The aspects of music that allow us to identify whether that music is sad are also present in speech."

Curtis also synthesized musical intervals from the recorded phrases spoken by actors, stripping away the words, but preserving the change in pitch. So a sad "let's go" would become a sequence of two tones. She then asked participants to rate the degree of perceived anger, happiness, pleasantness and sadness in the intervals. Again, the minor third consistently was judged to convey sadness. 

A possible explanation for why music and speech might share the same code for expressing emotion is the idea that both emerged from a common evolutionary predecessor, dubbed "musilanguage" by Steven Brown, a cognitive neuroscientist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby (Vancouver), British Columbia.  But Curtis points out that right now there is no effective means of empirically testing this hypothesis or determining whether music or language evolved first. 

What also remains unclear is whether the minor third's influence spans cultures and languages, which is one of the questions that Curtis would like to explore next. Previous studies have shown that people can accurately interpret the emotional content of music from cultures different than their own, based on tempo and rhythm alone. 

"I have only looked at speakers of American English, so it's an open question whether it's a phenomenon that exists specifically in American English or across cultures," Curtis explained. "Who knows if they are using the same intervals in, say, Hindi?"

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/biffspandex

--
Thiago Maciel Oliveira

http://ditirambozine.blogspot.com/

I said, 'I'm writing an unforgivably long book on Shakespeare,' and then added, 'You know how there's a tradition whereby formerly lively minds produce in old age unduly mellow books on Shakespeare.' This was his cue to say, 'Oh, yours won't be like that.' Instead, he looked gravely at me and said, 'When you find yourself writing about his essential Englishness, you must stop.'

[felipe cardoso]

Legal, os caras concordam com aquelas nossas observações no seguinte, a partir das falas: a segunda menor ascendente tem a ver com a ira, a terça menor ascendente e descentente com a tristeza, e alegria a terça maior descendente. Mas discordam no seguinte: a quinta ascendente para eles indica raiva, mas isso nao parece nas músicas: o acorde maior e menor nao passam raiva, apesar de terem a quinta; pra eles também a segunda menor descendente é triste, e a segunda maior ascendente é alegre. Mas em seguida, quando sao tomados apenas os intervalos sem a fala, há uma divergência: agora a quinta é "fortemente" associada a emoções positivas. Nessa parte eles concordam também com agente quando dizem que é difícil determinar um sentimento para a segunda maior, ascendente ou descendente.

 

Mas há alguns problemas: na fala não há notas, ou sao raras, mas nela a altura varia num contínuo, nao por saltos, de um repouso em uma nota a outro; logo, nao pode haver intervalo, no sentido musical da palavra, porque sequer existem notas na fala, menos ainda duas e nas proporcoes 3/2, 5/4, 6/5, etc. Porém a palavra "intervalo" nesse texto está em outro sentido, nao no musical: está no sentido de diferença entre o som mais agudo e o mais grave de uma expressao falada, que corresponde a uma ascendencia para o agudo ou descendencia para o grave, continuamente, nao em saltos; mas estes extremos nao formam um intervalo musical, nem poderiam formar, mas formam um intervalo, em outro sentido da palavra.

 

Além disso parece haver nas falas outros elementos que indicam os sentimentos: a intensidade forte da fala e a rapidez, na ira, a intensidade fraca da fala e mais lentidao na triste, e também a voz mais falha (como em Sad 1); na alegria parece que o som vem de lábios sorridentes (como em Happy 1), e isso percebemos apenas pelo timbre. Logo, deve haver certos instrumentos musicais que sao alegres, tristes, etc., apenas pelo timbre, desde que se pareçam com a alegria, tristeza, etc., ou com tudo que lhes remeta. O metal na introdução de "Eu faço samba e amor" do Chico, por exemplo, parece ter certa preguiça, nao? A flauta transversal por sua vez parece mais com a voz comum das Plesant 1 e 2 ou com as alegres que com as iradas e tristes, nao parece? O som do trompete é heróico ou corajoso, etc. É que os instrumentos de sopro produzem seu som da mesma maneira que a voz, ou de maneira parecida, e por isso os timbres sao parecidos e lembram uma risada, ou outra emissao vocal: as cordas vocais sao pois como a enbocadura desses instrumentos.