Environmental Sound and its Relation to Human Emotion

Abstract

Speech, music and environmental sound refer to three specialized areas of acoustic communication and its study, and these areas can be regarded as forming a continuum of human aural experience. Although these areas have traditionally been studied separately, there are many factors today pointing to their overlap and interaction. Most obviously, contemporary audio technology has blurred their distinctions by making reproduced speech and music into common environmental sounds, often structured by media and individuals as accompaniment environments. However, the relatively intense affective responses that we regard as the expressions of emotions through speech and music have been studied extensively, but separately, with any equivalent role of environmental sounds largely ignored.

Recent advances in brain functioning have begun to suggest that there are underlying mechanisms, related to specific parts of the brain, which can be linked to known psychological responses to both music and speech. One important clue to their relationship is that the emotional (and other) aspects of speech are conveyed by paralanguage (i.e. the nonverbal aspects of vocalization), the parameters for which are closely related to the musical parameters of melody. This paper wishes to extend this current line of research to the neglected area of environmental sound as it is perceived by individuals in context, namely as the soundscape. Soundscape competence, it is argued, co-evolved with the specialized areas of speech and music, and today with the widespread phenomenon of music-as-environment, as well as other media practices, it is useful to re-connect old arguments about music and emotion with contemporary soundscape experience. The paper will be illustrated with both environmental recordings and excerpts of the author’s soundscape compositions.