1. EMOTIONS IN THE
SINGING VOICE
UG Final Year Project 2015
Supervisor: Mathieu Barthet
Centre of Digital Music, QMUL
Marzena Chmielewska

2. 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.

3. 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)

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. PARTICIPANT DEMOGRAPHIC
Sex Age
Female 20 None
Male 22 Piano, Guitar and Ukulele
Female 22 None
Female 21 None
Male 24 Clarinet Grade 3
Female 22 None
Female 32 None
Male 24 None
Female 22 None
Male 21 Guitar as a hobby
Female 22 None
Female 23 None
Male 19 None
Male 25 None
Female 22 Singing, Piano and Flute

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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

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

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

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. FUTURE WORK
Future 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.