A sound is worth a thousand words

: exploring the taxonomic and causal link between emotions and sound objects

Abstract

This investigation's object is the relation between emotion and sound and how the latter can be understood through an emotion-oriented study. Psychological investigations strive to understand how the world affects people and how people, in turn, understand the world on the grounds of their own reflections and interpretations. Thus, an emotional understanding of sound is inevitably linked to the concept of perceived emotion. This dissertation's purpose is to understand whether there is a taxonomic relation between sounds and perceived emotions. To this aim, emotional semantics and proposals for emotional categorization are approached, as well as studies on sound categorization and its relation with experiments between emotion and sound or music. Two studies investigated the aforementioned themes. In Experiment 1, participants rated sound-image pairs in a causaloriented environment, followed by a similar recall task, with the aim of understanding the connection between the listener and a sound's semantic content. In Experiment 2, participants rated a group of sounds, half of which were masked to hide their semantic content, with the goal of understanding the importance of semantic content in auditory stimuli. Taken together, the data suggest that some emotions cannot be transmitted by sound alone and that it takes a combination of the listener, the context, and the sound's physical features in order to get a complete understanding of perceived emotions.

Date of Award	5 Jul 2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Pedro Duarte Pestana (Supervisor) & Vitor Joaquim (Supervisor)