EMOTIONS IN THE SINGING VOICEUG Final Year Project 2015 Supervisor: Mathieu Barthet Centre of Digital Music, QMULMarzena Chmielewska

INTRODUCTION• The project was an investigation into discovering how people perceived

the singing voice, specifically emotions in the singing voice.• The majority of existing studies concentrated on the perception of music

or songs, i.e. singing with instrumentals.• To help with clear understanding of how the perception and feeling of

emotion correlates with the voice, the research was also conducted towards the biological aspects of the voice and its perception by human brain.

RESEARCH• Research was conducted into existing journals and articles around the

subject of emotions in music, singing and the biology of the process of listening.

• One of the important parts of it was a research about human perception of the voice and music and how it affects peoples brains.

• The main study in this part of my project was conducted about emotions and their meaning in the singing voice, music and daily life.

• The creation of the program needed was also backed up by review of existing patterns (Russell 1980) and applications (Moodswings, Kim et al. 2008)

OBJECTIVES• The primary objective was to investigate the relationship between the

singing voice and the emotions felt by listeners.• Collect data through an emotion wheel based program for later analysis

and conclusions.• Research into already existing studies and base the thesis on the

literature review as well as analysed data from the participants taking part in a experiment conducted for the purpose of this research.

RECORDING PROCESS• A singer was invited from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to produce a series of recordings for the purpose of testing and analysis.

• Multiple versions of a set of three songs was recorded, one ‘neutral’ version and one ‘emotional’ version. This would help provide further variation in the testing and results.

• Only one song was sung with instrumental feedback (“Caledonia”), rest was sung a cappella.

TESTING PROCESS• The testing would consist of comparing recordings which had expressive and neutral

versions, and collecting the emotional responses from participants.• A sample of 15 participants was recruited for the project.• They consisted of students from Queen Mary University and were invited to a testing

event through a Facebook group. Refreshments were provided to the testers.• The people had a varied range of musical backgrounds although the majority had none.• None of the people were made aware in advance of what to expect in terms of songs or

music. This was intended to help prevent the possibility of pre-determined expectations, i.e. if one of the testers had mentally prepared themselves in advance to ‘dislike’ the type of songs that they would listen to.

• The users were instructed to click on the application’s emotion wheel when they felt any emotional reaction. Clicks were separated by the time stamps according to the song playback, which illustrates the users clicking at different times.

PARTICIPANT DEMOGRAPHICSex AgeFemale 20 NoneMale 22 Piano, Guitar and UkuleleFemale 22 NoneFemale 21 NoneMale 24 Clarinet Grade 3Female 22 NoneFemale 32 NoneMale 24 NoneFemale 22 NoneMale 21 Guitar as a hobbyFemale 22 NoneFemale 23 NoneMale 19 NoneMale 25 NoneFemale 22 Singing, Piano and Flute

APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT• To assist with the perceptual

experiment, an application was developed in the Processing programming language.

• The goal of the application is to collect the judgements of the human listeners of perceived emotions over time when listening to a musical piece

• The interface of the application can be seen on the right.

The emotion wheel consists of 8 colors corresponding to emotions. The user chooses what he feels and clicks on one of the segments.

Mouse cursor- when the mouse is clicked, the timestamp and the coordinates are being saved.

DATA ANALYSIS• Once the data was collected it had to be analyzed to find correlations

between musical and emotional changes.• MATLAB was used to process the data into graphs. Graphs were chosen

as a way to develop a visual aid to analyze participants annotations.• Using MATLAB horizontal 3-D graphs were generated, with each color in

the graph representing a different tester.

DATA ANALYSIS• Barbara Streisand – Evergreen (1976) – Vocal Pop, Adult Contemporary.

Neutral Version Emotional Version

The Y axis states the amount of clicks made by the testers, while the X axis provides information about the coordinates of the click.

The emotional version in this case seems to vary far more accordingly to the X axis which shows which emotion was chosen on the emotion wheel

Each color corresponds to another user participating in the testing

DATA ANALYSIS• Jimmy McHugh – I Can’t Give You Anything but Love (1928) – Jazz.

Neutral Version Emotional Version

DATA ANALYSIS• Dougie MacLean – Caledonia (1978) - Scottish traditional folk music.

Neutral Version Emotional Version

USER FEEDBACK• The majority of the users who were asked which of the songs their

preferred choose the first song.• Some participants mentioned that due to some of the genres of music

that weren’t ones they usually listened to meant the became bored quite easily which can be partially seen in the last two graphs, when the amount of clicks is dispersed across longer time periods.

• Four of the participants remarked that the songs would be more interesting or listenable if they was backing instrumentation included.

FINDINGS• From the data analysis it was discovered that:• Users clicked on the emotion wheel at different times than others.• The average amounts of click per song was around four. The users were told to click

whenever they felt any emotion while listening to the track.• The graphs depict that the parameters corresponding to particular fields are in some

places either in the same or similar.• The participants with less musical background (11 people) seemed to respond with more

emotions than those who played an instrument or sung (4 people). A greater tester size would be needed to determined if this was replicable or simply a coincidence.

• The emotional version of the last song received the most clicks out of all of them (up to 17 clicks depending on the participant).

• They were many users who made far fewer clicks than others or their click were not as varied.

CONCLUSIONS• The graphs show that the ‘emotional’ version of a song can seem to

trigger greater emotional imbalance between different sections in the song than when it’s sung as a ‘neutral’ version. Listeners appear more eager when the singer puts a perceivable emotional connection with the situation portrayed in the musical piece

• It’s believed the graphs show that emotions are perceivable in the singing voice from a listeners perspective. Participants seemed to react more to the emotional versions of the songs than to neutral ones. The average amount of clicks was higher for the emotional version as well.

FUTURE WORKFuture studies with this topic could be expanded upon in several ways.

• Other studies could investigate singing with different languages, i.e. how would someone respond to singing from a different culture that was not in their native language.

• Future studies could also take into account more genres than was included in this project.

• Future studies may also have the resources to conduct research with a far larger numbers of participants to help establish findings.

• There originally was a sub-objective of specifying the differences between felt and perceived emotions.