1. Swissnex San Francisco
Feel the Music – Sound and emotion
Klaus R. Scherer
Swiss Center for
Affective Sciences
Klaus R. Scherer
Swiss Center for
Affective Sciences
Heavenly Voices
The expression of emotion in
operatic singing
Heavenly Voices
The expression of emotion in
operatic singing

2. The phylogenetic origin of affect bursts

3. Affect bursts and push effects
Examples for pure push effects:
 animal vocalizations
 infant grunts
 affect bursts
 sudden, uncontrolled emotions

4. Morton’s motivational-structural rules:
The evolutionary origin of vocal affect expression

5. Pull effects appearing – Gibbon dueting

6. Gibbons sing like soprans

7. Cheney & Seyfarth - Vervet monkey alarm calls
Leopard
Snake
Eagle

8. Steven Brown (2000)
- Musilanguage

9. Singing emotions
Rossini – La danza
Soon we’ll be dancing, round and round,
my ladies, come here,
A beautiful and playful lad
will have a turn with everyone.
Ramon Vargas Rolando Villazon

10. La Danza/Vargas

11. La Danza/Villazon

12. ANVIL Annotation

13. Diderot on singing emotions effectively
But they say that an actor is all the better for being
excited, for being angry. I deny it. He is best when
he imitates anger. Actors impress the public not
when they are furious, but when they play fury
well. In tribunals, in assemblies, everywhere where
a man wishes to make himself master of others’
minds, he feigns now anger, now fear, now pity,
now love, to bring others into these diverse states
of feeling. What passion itself fails to do, passion
well imitated accomplishes.

14. Thomas Moser, tenor
on controlled emotion
Of course, the emotion in the music has an influence
but it’s not ruling me. It’s not taking me over.
I try to feel it, it’s there, but I know that I have to
know what it is I’m trying to express. I had a student
once who came to me and said “I just assumed that
if the emotion is right the singing
will be OK.” But you can’t sing with emotion. You
have to express emotion but you can’t sing with
emotion.
For instance, I used to sing the Lied “Guten Abend,
gut Nacht” [Brahms] at the end of recitals. It took
me years before I could sing that without crying.

15. Lucy Schaufer, Mezzosoprano
on Stanislavski/Method techniques
Memory and imagination inform, then your voice
and body will follow suit creating specific colors
and shapes which result in a personal and
individual performance …
Develop your toolbox to include memories,
observations, and a playfulness in rehearsal and
performance which allows your brain to imagine
all the possibilities. Embrace the leaping off
point: it is exactly where the personal and the
imagined merge, where the voice and the body
combine to make a fully integrated performance,
one in which it is not just sound for sound-sake,
but a beautifully fully human story telling
soundscape.

16. Defining authenticity
Authenticity = credibility of the emotional expression
given the character, the plot, and the music – and
one’s own personality
Requirements for the singer:
(1) choosing appropriate expressive elements in voice,
face, and body
(2) combining these to achieve dynamic coordination
and synchronization of the different elements and
modalities
(3) regulating the dynamic flow of emotional expression
in terms of situational and technical constraints

17. Lucia: Ratings for 5 sopranos on four
different types of emotional interpretation
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
del Monte Scotto Gruberova Callas Sutherland
Sopranos
Ratings
tender passion fear of death madness sadness

18. Lucia: Location of the 5 sopranos in a
two-dimensional acoustic factor space
-0.5
-0.4
-0.3
-0.2
-0.1
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
-1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5
Singer's formant/High frequency
F0Band
Gruberova
Sutherland Callas
Scotto Monte
F0 Band factor: Low and stable F0, with strong energy in the F0 band, and little
total energy variation.
Singer’s formant/High frequency factor: High energy in the singer’s formant band
(~2.5kHz) and low energy in the higher frequency ranges (3.5-10 kHz)

19. Singing emotions study
Following the colloquium "Emotional
Power of Music", Geneva 2009, we
recorded world class singers to record
for us standard scales as well as a
nonsense sentence ("Nec kalibam soud
molen") in melodic phrases to express
9 emotions:
Admiration
Anger
Anxiety
Despair
Joy
Fear
Pride
Sadness
Tenderness

20. Five markers of voice quality
 Spectral balance = mean level difference between partials
above and below 1 kHz; strongly influenced by vocal
loudness
 Perturbation = composite measure of aperiodicity,
regulated by glottal adjustment, subglottal pressure, vocal
tract constriction.
 Low Partial dominance = mean level difference between the
lowest and the higher spectrum partials; depending on
glottal adduction, forceful adduction attenuating the lowest
partials.
 Loudness, vocal effort
 Tempo

24. Thank you for
your attention!