Media release

From: The Royal Society

Even violins can cry: specifically vocal emotional behaviours also drive the perception of emotions in non-vocal music

Artificially manipulating music can alter the emotions we perceive. This study used a computational model to simulate vocal emotional behaviours - ‘smiling’, ‘vocal tremor’ and ‘vocal roughness’ and applied them to non-vocal music to study the emotions perceived by the participants. The manipulations, when done on purely instrumental material, triggered emotional perceptions like those observed in speech and screaming. Even violins can cry, or at least sound positive when ‘smiling’ and negative when ‘trembling’ or ‘screaming’.