A haunting melody can change your mood in just a few notes. New evidence suggests it is the distance between notes that determines how they make us feel—and that characteristic may have evolved from the way we use our voice.

Daniel Bowling, a cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University, analyzed the intervals, or distances between notes, in melodies from Western classical music and Indian ragas in a study published in March in PLoS ONE. He found that in both types of music, the size of the average interval is smaller in melodies associated with sadness and larger in melodies linked with happiness. Consider Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. The melody in the first movement sways mournfully in a small grove of notes. In the second, happier movement, the melody takes off, lightly skipping through a much broader swath of the scale.

Bowling suggests that music mimics the natural patterns of our most primitive instrument—the voice. To test his theory, he collected speech samples from 20 English speakers and 20 Tamil Indian speakers and looked at whether the changes in frequency predicted the emotional content of their words. He found the same pattern as he did in written melodies: the sadder the speech, the more monotone the delivery. “Through the voice, we've come to associate different emotions with different tonal characteristics,” Bowling says.

6 Comments

1. 1. Shan Hargest 10:53 AM 7/27/12

   Bowling, if accurately reported, is making the assumption that 'voice' is primitive and music is not, and also that voice and music can be distinguished from each other. It is unclear how 'voice', 'primitive' or 'music' are being defined in this study, which makes the results difficult to assess.
   
   The voice can be used, among other ways, non-verbally and musically, and some have proposed that this form of communication is a common ancestor of music and language, though there are theories placing music before language or language before music.

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2. 2. jgrosay 04:32 PM 7/27/12

   I've always had the hunch that, equally as handwriting reflects the personality traits of its author, some kind of a projective test that is in the basis of graphology, an approach almost universally used in France in the selection process for jobs, music can reflect somehow the personality and inner world of the composer, as the pitch of voice reflects the mood of the person speaking, and that this may even be a bi-directional process, music making some kind of an injection of the composers personality or mind into the listener, as the images in movies affect the instinctive life of watchers. If this were proven true, listening to productions of composers having had an unacceptable behavior history, for example the killer Gesualdo di Venosa, may have negative consequences for those hearing their music, not entering the hard issue of things such as the so called "Suicidal piece", a composition that supposedly induced tenths of suicides among its listeners and was banned from playing early in the past century. Any comment pro or con on these proposals?

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3. 3. rcello in reply to Shan Hargest 06:13 AM 7/28/12

   I assume he says voice he refers to human speech?

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4. 4. Daisybookworm 11:23 AM 7/30/12

   Highly recommended: "Why Do People Sing? Music in Human Evolution", Joseph Jordania, http://www.amazon.com/People-Sing-Music-Human-Evolution/dp/9941401861
   

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5. 5. Daisybookworm 11:25 AM 7/30/12

   Speaking is singing.
   

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6. 6. Daisybookworm in reply to Daisybookworm 11:33 AM 7/30/12

   i.e., in many respects human song is just a form of sustained speech.

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