Relations between affective music and speech: Evidence from dynamics of affective piano performance and speech production

• Main Authors: Xiaoluan eLiu, Yi eXu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2015-07-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: dynamics; emotion; speech production; Piano performance; fingerings; articulatory distance
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00886/full

This study compares affective piano performance with speech production from the perspective of dynamics: unlike previous research, this study uses finger force and articulatory effort as indexes reflecting the dynamics of affective piano performance and speech production respectively. Moreover, for the first time physical constraints such as piano fingerings and speech articulatory distance are included due to their potential contribution to different patterns of dynamics. A piano performance experiment and speech production experiment were conducted in four emotions: anger, fear, happiness and sadness. The results show that in both piano performance and speech production, anger and happiness generally have high dynamics while sadness has the lowest dynamics, with fear in the middle. Fingerings interact with fear in the piano experiment and articulatory distance interacts with anger in the speech experiment, i.e., large physical constraints produce significantly higher dynamics than small physical constraints in piano performance under the condition of fear and in speech production under the condition of anger. Using production experiments, this study firstly supports previous perception studies on relations between affective music and speech. Moreover, this is the first study to show quantitative evidence for the importance of considering motor aspects such as dynamics in comparing music performance and speech production in which motor mechanisms play a crucial role.