The emotional characteristics of the soprano voice with different pitch, dynamics, and vowel

Abstract

Recent studies have found that different musical instruments have strong and different emotional characteristics. This thesis considers how the emotional characteristics of the soprano voice differ with Pitch, Dynamics, and Vowel, by conducting listening tests. Listeners compared the tones pairwise over ten Emotional Categories, and the results were derived using the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) statistical model. The results showed that Angry, Comic, Happy, Heroic, and Scary were stronger for loud notes, while Calm, Mysterious, Romantic, Sad, and Shy were stronger for soft notes. In terms of Pitch, Calm, Comic, Happy, Heroic, Mysterious, Romantic, Sad, and Shy had an arching shape that peaked at A5. In contrast, Angry had a U-shape with a valley at A5. Scary generally increased with Pitch. Shy slightly decreased with Pitch overall, though the prominent Vowel I was arching with a peak at A5. Vowels A and U were each individually prominent across seven Categories, indicating a wide range of strong expression, whereas Vowel E was only prominent across three Categories. These results quantify emotional nuance in the voice, which perhaps would be of interest to composers, vocalists, and audio engineers in manipulating emotional nuance in compositions, performances, and recordings.

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology