Muskaan’s Article

Have you ever noticed you can tell when someone sounds happy before you even understand what they are saying? You can just ‘hear’ happiness or excitement in their voice. Our voices have a way of carrying emotions, going beyond just the words we speak. New research from the LAMA Lab is helping us understand how song and speech can differ and overlap to express the way we feel.

From Shakespearean poetry to lullabies, our voices communicate emotions, but it is puzzling to think about why we have both. Why do we sing when we can speak? Did singing evolve to express emotions better than speech? Understanding how we express ourselves is not only a question for psychologists, but it also has implications across a wide range of areas, such as music therapy and cross-cultural studies. “Speech and song are similar in the way they convey emotions in terms of structure,” states Saghar Tavakoli, lead researcher for the current study. Both use rhythm, pitch, and loudness to convey emotions, but the way emotions are expressed in the two can be different. For example, you can express emotions in speech using just your words, but the way you say it, like with a higher pitch or louder, can help to express anger. In songs, you can express anger in a range of ways, with a fast tempo or by using certain instruments to present anger either ambiguously or clearly.

A recent study by Tavakoli and colleagues, people were asked to improvise five emotions: happy, sad, fear, peaceful, and neutral, by either singing or speaking simple sentences. Then another group listened to these recordings and guessed what emotions they heard. “We wanted to test in a more representative sample, using the sentences participants made up on the spot, to see how this would work in people without music training”, states lead researcher Saghar Tavakoli, as previous studies have used professional singers to sing emotions.

Adults are good at knowing if someone is singing or speaking, where most people can tell the difference between song and speech. But people have a harder time figuring out what emotion was present in the song or speech. It’s possible that improvised emotions might not be as good as they could be if performed by a trained musician. Some emotions are easier to identify, while others are harder. Remember, the researchers wanted to look into whether people are able to identify certain emotions better in speech or in song. For most people, a peaceful emotion is easier to recognize in song, while neutral and fearful emotions are easier to recognize in speech. Happy and sad are tied, so most people can perceive these emotions equally well in speech and song.

Many people tend to have an idea that emotions would be perceived better in song than in speech, but the findings show the opposite; emotions were perceived better in speech than in song. “Speech still wins as the main form of emotional communication”, states Tavakoli. Unlike speech, singing is not our main form of daily communication. However, when we communicate, emotions are well-expressed by the words we use, but also in the way we say them, called prosody. The researchers wondered how much of this finding was just because of the words people improvised for the emotions, or if it was the prosody that conveyed the emotion. 

In the final part of the experiment, researchers removed the words from the recordings by filtering out high frequencies that are important to speech, leaving just the tone and rhythm. Amazingly, we can still pick up emotions even if we do not understand what is being said, just like how we can sense what a friend is feeling based on their tone, proof that sometimes it’s not what we say, but how we say things. Without words, people are better at recognizing emotions in song than in speech.

So, are emotions better understood in speech or song? When speech is compared to song, most people may be able to understand emotions better in speech because words and semantics are available, like how most humans usually communicate with each other verbally. When we remove those semantics, song and music do a better job at expressing those emotions. Musical elements of a song can bypass the need for verbal communication to express emotions to a listener (Vitevitch, 2023). So, at the end, how we understand emotions may be dependent on the context they are presented.

There are real-world impacts of this phenomenon. Music therapy helps people with communication disorders express emotions beyond words. Music can help those who have trouble putting their thoughts into words express themselves, build social connections, and develop skills such as joint attention (Mayer-Benarous, 2021). Understanding how music carries emotions can help refine these therapeutic approaches. This is a reminder to all how powerful both speech and song are for expressing our inner thoughts and feelings. Emotion is not just what we say; it is how we say or sing it.

Emotions can connect people, in speech and in song, with or without words. The next time a song hits you in your chest and gives you goosebumps, whether you know or don’t know the lyrics or the language, when a melody pulls you in before you even realize it, remember: your brain is tapping into one of the oldest emotional codes our species has ever shared. Strip away those words; what’s left is the pitches, the rhythms, and the tones of a language we’ve become fluent in long before we learned to speak.