The Effects of Musical Training of Successful Communication of Emotion

Abstract

In music and speech, different combinations of tempo, intensity, and pitch can work together to express a wide variety of different emotions (Curtis & Bharucha, 2010; Juslin & Laukka, 2003). Due to the shared communicative code across these two domains, researchers have been interested in whether musical training enhances one’s ability to comprehend emotion in speech. Previous research has primarily examined musicians as decoders of vocally-expressed emotion, testing their performance on tasks measuring their ability to accurately identify emotional expressions in comparison to their nonmusician counterparts. The current project tested whether musicians are better encoders of emotion than nonmusicians, examining their ability to produce vocalizations that successfully communicate the intended emotion. It also tested whether musicianship confers a decoding advantage when attempting to identify emotions in the voices of others. To test this, emotional speech samples from five musicians and four nonmusicians were recorded under carefully-controlled conditions. These recordings were then played for 8 additional participants—half musicians and half nonmusicians—who served as raters and were asked, in a four-alternative-choice task, to identify the emotion they heard in each speech sample. Results indicated no significant differences in the overall encoding success between musicians and nonmusicians. However, there was a marginally significant decoding benefit for raters who had musical training. The decoding success of raters who had musical training was 80.8%, whereas the nonmusician raters achieved 67.4% decoding success. It is unknown whether the sample size was too small to observe a similar benefit of musicianship at encoding or if the musician advantage is truly restricted to the decoding stage of communication.