Empirical Musicology Review v4 n3 Commentaries

Abstract

Huron, Dahl, and Johnson, in their paper “Facial Expression and Vocal Pitch Height: Evidence of an Intermodal Association”, demonstrated a positive correlation between the pitch of a sung note and the vertical position of the singer’s eyebrows. Moreover, other subjects viewing photographs of the faces of the singers, with the lower part of the face and neck of the singers blocked out, could accurately judge whether a high note or low note had been sung. The authors offer a number of hypothetical explanations for their findings. I propose a speculative, ethologically-based, explanation for these correlations: namely, how both pitch of voice and eyebrow position would be correlated in this way to convey to the viewer the degree of potential threat – or lack of threat – posed by the signaler.

Abstract

It is argued that the symbolic objects in music and musical scores can permit affordances much as physical objects can. This construction of "affordance" places greater emphasis on cultural forms and human memory than the original idea proposed by James J. Gibson, and it aligns itself more closely with the refinements to "affordance" suggested by Donald Norman. For symbolic objects to permit strongly perceived affordances, it may be necessary for perceivers to have developed schematized perception in the course of over-learning culturally significant forms.