Re: “Music and speech share a code for communicating sadness in the minor third”
Interesting finding, but so many questions arise, the foremost being cause/effect:
We live in a world of film-music where “emotions” are punctuated by certain musical clichés (dissonance: tension; consonance: relief; major: cheery; minor: teary).
Of course the clichés may have been chosen because of their innate expressive meaning, but the reverse is also possible, perhaps just as possible: the Frenchman for whom an olympic gold win by a countryman immediately evokes the Marseillaise…
So, yes, the cultural universality of all this remains to be tested, as the author notes; otherwise we are just dealing with self-reinforcing habitual associations in Western pop “culture.”
(I would be more inclined to believe in the inborn affective connotations of simpler acoustic properties, such as volume (loud: alarm; quiet: calm), tempo (fast: agitated; slow: calm) and timbre (some vocalizations are shrill and grating, so sound urgent; others sound soothing). Also, there seems to be a lot of scope for looking at movement and dance, where some movements look intrinsically menacing, conciliatory, beckoning, agitated, etc., although there is plenty of room for effects of culture, convention and habit there too.)
I of course do believe that music expresses some deep universals in human affect, but it would take far stronger evidence than this author’s findings to show that that belief is right, especially for major/minor! (By the way, I think a minor 6th is even more of a tear-jerker than a minor 3rd…)
If the affective connotations of some vocal or other bodily gestures (and states: let’s not forget facial expressions, trembling and tears) are hard-wired into our brains, it is not that they are part of “language” too. Language is language even if it is written, unpunctuated by movement or intonation. The vocal and visual aspects of language are simply somatic: they come with the territory whenever we do anything with our bodies, especially inasmuch as it is being transmitted to or received by other bodies like our own.
With the globalization of Hollywood’s tear-jerkers, I doubt it is still possible to test whether or not certain acoustic clichés are cultural, let alone evolutionary universals, except maybe with isolated infants and hunter-gatherers! And the “Mozart effects” we seek are likely to turn out to be just as much MoTown effects. Rather like the Schenkerian reduction of all harmony to 5/1… ;>)