The rise of fixed pitch systems and the slide of continuous pitch: A note for emotion in music research about portamento

Background in music psychology and history. Psychological and historical factors such as the desire to imitate, and the development of music notation systems and sound recordings, each appear to have contributed to the demise and suppression of portamento (pitch bending) in music, and the singing voice in particular. Portamento offers potential expressive resources in both music and speech, and so it seems important to examine what has happened to portamento in the study of emotion in music – we found limited empirical literature that examines the emotional effects of time-varying portamento in music. Background in music acoustics. The human voice is well suited to producing phonemes and speech, where control of timbre (including vowel sounds) is more important than control of pitch. This physiological and acoustic observation provides us with a clue as to what ‘music’ may have sounded like if and when it was part of a protolanguage. The physiology and acoustics of the human voice lend it to the production of portamento and timbre control better than it does stable pitch, even though fixed pitch tone production is found in much conventional Western music. Aims. We aim to investigate the nature of portamento, and why it has received such little attention in research on emotion in music. Main contribution. The paper presents evidence that the human voice is well suited to producing portamento, and that the near absence of portamento in emotion research study may be because of the difficulty in measuring and analyzing this transient aspect of expression, and an artifact of discrete notation systems, sound recordings and the desire to imitate musical instruments that easily produce fixed pitches, such as the flute and guitar. Implications. Portamento has known expressive utility in speech, and despite impediments it is important to investigate whether portamento has such an expressive capacity in music. Literature on emotion prosody and the psychophysics of portamento is drawn on generate hypotheses for future research.