The Emotional Characteristics of Western Classical Solo Singing Voices with Different Pitch, Dynamics, and Vowel

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "The Emotional Characteristics of Western Classical Solo Singing Voices 
with Different Pitch, Dynamics, and Vowel"

by

Mr. Bing Yen CHANG


Abstract:

Recent research has shown that different musical instrument sounds have strong 
emotional characteristics and how these they change with different pitch and 
dynamics, particularly for the western orchestral instruments. Further research 
has also investigated the timbre and other low-level acoustic features of the 
soprano voice and their correlation with perceived emotional expressiveness. 
This work investigates how pitch, dynamics, and vowel influence the emotional 
characteristics of the western classical solo singing voices. We conducted 
listening tests where listeners gave absolute judgments over ten emotional 
categories on the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass voices. For dynamics, loud 
notes dominated the high-arousal categories Happy, Heroic, Comic, Angry, and 
Scary, whereas soft notes dominated the low-arousal categories Romantic, Calm, 
Mysterious, Shy, and Sad. The dynamic differences are strongest for the Shy 
category, and weakest for the Romantic and Scary categories. For pitch, the 
Happy, Heroic, Romantic, Comic (tenor, bass), Mysterious (soprano, alto), and 
Shy categories had mostly upward trends across the pitch range. The Comic 
(soprano, alto), Mysterious (tenor, bass), and Angry (vowels E, I, O) 
categories had mostly downward trends. The Calm and Sad categories had an 
arch-shaped trend, while the Angry (vowels A, U) and Scary categories had a 
U-shaped trend. For vowel, the vowel A was dominant in the Happy and Romantic 
categories overall, but only in the Mysterious, Shy, and Sad categories for the 
bass voice. The vowel E was dominant in the Comic category for the bass voice, 
and in the Angry category for both the soprano and alto voices. The vowel E was 
dominant in the Scary category for both the soprano and alto voices. The vowel 
O was dominant in the Heroic category. The vowel U was dominant in the Calm, 
Shy, and Sad categories except for the bass voice (instead vowel A was 
dominant). Dynamics had the strongest effect on the emotional characteristics 
overall, and for most of the categories. Pitch only had the strongest effect in 
the Happy, Romantic, and Scary categories. Vowel was consistently the secondary 
or weakest effect, which implies that it had a nuanced rather than major 
effect. The overall vowel effect ranking was as follows: The vowels A tied 
closely with U first, O second, I third, and finally E last.


Date:			Thursday, 14 January 2021

Time:                  	4:30pm - 6:30pm

Zoom Meeing: 
https://hkust.zoom.us/j/92572482188?pwd=OXNoNW1Vd3ZwcEJycWJicDZ1NzQ0UT09

Committee Members:	Prof. Andrew Horner (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Raymond Wong (Chairperson)
 			Dr. David Rossiter
 			Dr. Desmond Tsoi


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