While minor keys are used to convey sorrow or sadness in music – as opposed to major keys which tend to be more upbeat – a US scientist has found that similar minor keys also intone the same emotions in human speech:

A scientist in Massachusetts thinks she’s discovered a link between the interval of a minor third (C major to E flat, say) and expressions of sadness in human speech. Meagan Curtis found in her study that the speech-melodies of actors’ voices (the movement of pitch in their intonation) happened to encompass a minor third when they were asked to communicate sadness.

Curtis’ work only examined the structure of western music and speech, in particular American written English samples, but poses the question, are minor keys used to express morose emotions in the speech and music of other cultures as well?

Other languages and other musical cultures will surely have different expressions for emotional intensity – something Curtis’s study can’t tell us, as her sample was limited to American English. Besides which, the use of the minor key in any song or symphony is only one way to communicate sadness.

Saying hello first to someone you are speaking to on the phone may help them better understand what you ask for next, as it allows them time to comprehend your vocal range, something that is usually more instantaneous in face to face situations.

Vowel sounds are made by using the mouth as a resonating cavity, and distinguished from each other by such things as the position of the tongue, which changes the resonance. Since vocal cavities vary in size, we can understand a person’s vowels only in relation to their other vowels. The pitch of a large man and a small child are very different. In fact, a larger person’s high vowel in “see” could have the same pitch as a smaller person’s low vowel in “saw.”

The full transcript, which I hadn’t actually seen in it’s entirety before, of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, which he delivered on 28 August 1963.