Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, 621 Young Drive South, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1606, USA.
Biol Lett. 2012 Oct 23;8(5):744-7. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0374. Epub 2012 Jun 13.
Humans, and many non-human animals, produce and respond to harsh, unpredictable, nonlinear sounds when alarmed, possibly because these are produced when acoustic production systems (vocal cords and syrinxes) are overblown in stressful, dangerous situations. Humans can simulate nonlinearities in music and soundtracks through the use of technological manipulations. Recent work found that film soundtracks from different genres differentially contain such sounds. We designed two experiments to determine specifically how simulated nonlinearities in soundtracks influence perceptions of arousal and valence. Subjects were presented with emotionally neutral musical exemplars that had neither noise nor abrupt frequency transitions, or versions of these musical exemplars that had noise or abrupt frequency upshifts or downshifts experimentally added. In a second experiment, these acoustic exemplars were paired with benign videos. Judgements of both arousal and valence were altered by the addition of these simulated nonlinearities in the first, music-only, experiment. In the second, multi-modal, experiment, valence (but not arousal) decreased with the addition of noise or frequency downshifts. Thus, the presence of a video image suppressed the ability of simulated nonlinearities to modify arousal. This is the first study examining how nonlinear simulations in music affect emotional judgements. These results demonstrate that the perception of potentially fearful or arousing sounds is influenced by the perceptual context and that the addition of a visual modality can antagonistically suppress the response to an acoustic stimulus.
人类和许多非人类动物在受到惊吓时会发出刺耳、不可预测、非线性的声音，并对其做出反应，这可能是因为这些声音是在声学生产系统（声带和鸣管）在紧张、危险的情况下过度发声时产生的。人类可以通过技术手段模拟音乐和配乐中的非线性。最近的研究发现，不同类型的电影配乐中包含了这种声音。我们设计了两项实验，以确定配乐中的模拟非线性如何影响唤醒和愉悦度的感知。实验中，参与者被展示了既没有噪音也没有突然频率转换的中性音乐范例，或者是这些音乐范例的版本，其中通过实验添加了噪音或突然的频率上升或下降。在第二个实验中，这些声学范例与良性视频配对。仅在音乐的第一个实验中，通过添加这些模拟非线性，对唤醒和愉悦度的判断发生了变化。在第二个多模态实验中，随着噪音或频率下降的增加，愉悦度（而不是唤醒度）降低。因此，视频图像的存在抑制了模拟非线性改变唤醒的能力。这是第一项研究音乐中的非线性模拟如何影响情绪判断的研究。这些结果表明，对潜在恐惧或唤醒声音的感知受到感知上下文的影响，并且添加视觉模态可以拮抗地抑制对声音刺激的反应。
