Emotion in Music Mirrors Speech
A good one from Scientific American:
When you hear Western music, you generally get the emotional tone. A major key is happy. (Music plays.) A minor one? That’s sad. (Music plays.)
And spoken voices reflect this tonality. Here’s someone sounding positive: “I don’t know who made this cake but it is fantastic!” And down on his luck: “The papers finalizing the divorce came today.”
The researchers wanted to know: are these sounds international? So they turned to classical music from southern India. Here’s one that represents joy. (Raga plays.) Another displays grief and sadness. (Raga plays.) As for the spoken word, I bet you can tell the positive speaker (woman speaks) from the negative one (woman speaks).
The rest of the article and its accompanying podcast is very good. Give it a read/listen.