In order to study the relationship between emotion and intonation, a new technique is introduced for the extraction of the dominant pitches within speech utterances and the quasi-musical analysis of the multipitch structure. After the distribution of fundamental frequencies over the entire utterance has been obtained, the underlying pitch structure is determined using an unsupervised "cluster" (Gaussian mixtures) algorithm. The technique normally results in 3-6 pitch clusters per utterance that can then be evaluated in terms of their inherent dissonance, harmonic "tension", and "major or minor modality". Stronger dissonance and tension were found in utterances with negative affect, relative to utterances with positive affect. Most importantly, utterances that were evaluated as having positive or negative affect had significantly different modality values. Factor analysis showed that the measures involving multiple pitches were distinct from other acoustical measures, indicating that the pitch substructure is an independent factor contributing to the affective valence of speech prosody.

We have studied the prosody of emotional speech using a psychoacoustical model of musical harmony (designed to explain the basic facts of the perception of pitch combinations: interval consonance/dissonance and chordal harmony/tension). For any voiced utterance, the model provides 3 quasi-musical measures: dissonance, tension, and harmonic “modality” of the pitches used. Modality is the most interesting, as it relates to the major and minor modes of traditional harmony theory and their characteristic positive and negative affect. In a study of emotional speech using 216 utterances, factor analysis showed that these measures are distinct from those obtained from basic statistics on the fundamental frequency of the voice (mean F0, range, rate of change, etc.). Moreover, there was a significant correlation between the major/minor modality measure and the positive/ negative affect of the utterance. We argue that, in addition to the traditional acoustical measures, a measure of multiple-pitch combinations, i.e., harmony, is essential for determining the affective character of the tone of voice in speech.

We report the application of a psychophysical model of pitch perception to the analysis of speech intonation. The model was designed to reproduce the empirical findings on the perception of musical phenomena (the dissonance/consonance of intervals and the tension/sonority of chords), but does not depend on specific musical scales or tuning systems. Application to intonation allows us to calculate the total dissonance and tension among the pitches in the speech utterance. In an experiment using the 144 utterances of 18 male and female subjects, we found greater dissonance and harmonic tension in sentences with negative affect, in comparison with sentences with positive affect.

A dual control mechanism allowing foi the preservation and stability of a given system's information, and yet allowing flexibility and expression of that information is outlined herein. An isomorphic structure in the atom, the cell, the human organism, and the paradigmatic ‚control system’ of cybernetics is identified and related to potentially isomorphic social structures.