The effects of vowel, pitch, and dynamics on the emotional characteristics of the Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass Voices

Previous research on the soprano and tenor voices have shown that their emotional characteristics change with different vowel, pitch, and dynamics. This work continues the investigation with the alto and bass voices. Listening tests were conducted whereby listeners gave absolute judgements on the SATB voice tones over ten emotional categories with the data analyzed using logistic regression. High-arousal categories were stronger for loud tones, whereas low-arousal categories were stronger for soft tones. The categories Happy, Heroic, Romantic, and Shy had mostly upward trends across the pitch range, whereas Angry had an overall downward trend. Calm and Sad had an arch-shaped trend, while Scary had a U-shaped trend. Comic and Mysterious had different trends among the voices. The voices each exhibited different vowel trends, though vowel A was dominant for all the voice types in the categories Happy and Romantic. Dynamics had the strongest effect overall, followed closely by pitch, with both effects approximately twice as strong as the effect of vowel. Vowel U had the largest strength-of-expressiveness overall, with A second, O third, I fourth, and finally E last. These results give a quantified preliminary perspective on how vowel, pitch, and dynamics shape emotional expression in the SATB voices.