Prior research has amply documented that happy music tends to be faster, louder, higher in average pitch, more variable in pitch, and more staccato in articulation, whereas sad music tends to be slower, lower, less variable, and more legato in articulation. However, the bulk of existing studies are either correlational or allow these expressive cues to covary freely, thereby making it difficult to confirm the causal influence of a given cue. To help address this gap, we experimentally assessed whether the average height (F0) of a pitch gamut independently impacts the perceived emotional expression of melodies derived from the gamut. Study participants rated the perceived happiness/sadness of a set of isochronous and semi-random tone sequences derived from the Bohlen-Pierce scale, an unconventional scale based on pitch intervals that do not appear in common practice music. Results were consistent with the notion that higher average pitch height communicates happiness and/or that lower pitch height communicates sadness. Moreover, they suggested that the effect is: (1) sufficiently robust to be detected using rudimentary melodies based on an unconventional musical scale; and, (2) independent of interval size.

We examined how children (5- and 8-year-olds) associate changes in musical parameters with bodily motion, using movement and verbal tasks. In Task 1, participants moved to short musical stimuli involving bidirectional changes in pitch, loudness, or tempo. In Task 2, participants selected motion features appropriate to the same stimuli (forced-choice verbal task). In Task 1 the distribution of movement features significantly varied for different musical parameters: pitch change associated most strongly with vertical motion, loudness change with muscular energy and vertical motion, and tempo change with speed and muscular energy. In both tasks and for both ages, directions of change in motion and musical parameters correlated, e.g., increase in loudness was associated with increasing speed, increasing muscular energy, and spatial rise. The effect of pitch direction was mediated by temporal order, suggesting that overall pitch contour, rather than local direction only, affects bodily motion. Age affected responses to pitch direction, rather than loudness or tempo change. Results suggest that children consistently correlate musical and movement features through both verbal and motion responses, presenting an intricate web of auditory-motor-cognitive mappings.

An algorithm is given with the purpose of building complex tones for which waveform circularity is shown and for which pitch circularity may be heard. The tones consist of sawtooth and square acoustical waves. It is proposed that a perceptual illusion, analogous to those described by Shepard (1964), can be then created. The signal may comprise an infinite number of harmonics, as in the case of natural sounds. Using the equitempered scale, an appropriate mathematical formula is given.