Body and Emotion in the Sonic Act
Zachary Wallmark · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022
This chapter develops an embodied cognitive framework connecting timbre perception to emotion, arousal, and meaning. Examining the dynamics of vocal exertion, it shows a basic correlation between the “sound of arousal” in the voice and high-arousal affect, even in relation to instrumental timbres. It claims that this relation plays a significant role in the way noisy timbres are perceived in musical and cultural contexts, and helps to explain how qualities of timbre can be somatically marked with positive or negative affective implications. These markings, which are largely conveyed through the acoustical properties of spectral centroid, inharmonicity, and auditory roughness, enable and constrain the affective response, thus determining how and what a given timbral quality can mean. The chapter moves through embodied theories of emotion to the expression of emotion in the voice (including an analysis of singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile’s “The Story”); from the role of vocality in musicking to the vocal aspects of instruments; from a physiological discussion of arousal and exertion to an acoustical reading of how arousal affects timbre; and, finally, to an account of the sensorimotor dimensions of hearing and the auditory dimensions of doing. It concludes with the suggestion that perceiving timbre involves some level of motor resonance with the acts that produce sound and with the human actors standing behind that sound.