Week 1: Psychoacoustic cues to emotion in speech prosody and music

I found the theory behind this article fascinating as the subject is something that can be widely underappreciated. The idea that; 'Music, like speech, can communicate emotions to listeners through the organization of acoustic signals' is by no means a new thought and perhaps even understood by most people. It is easy to listen to a piece of music and experience an emotional response, and it is even easier to respond to speech.

I found it interesting that the refinement of this idea and the focus on speech porosity, something that, again, I believe, can be easily overlooked as just being a part of everyday speech.

The overlap between speech porosity and music is what interested me the most about this article. The two can be shaped universally through rate to create a simple increase or decrease in tension and energy.

After reflecting on this, I have begun to expand on this concept of overlapping influences and believe that these same influences can apply to text. Emphasizing speech porosity through text with the aid of musical cues and animations could create a similar effect in a medium, such as a game, where characters are not voiced, and there is a crucial absence of speech. I have found some examples of this with two games, both independently produced; Stardew Valley and Underrail.