Perceiving Emotion in Melody: Interactive Effects of Pitch and Rhythm
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examined effects of pitch and rhythm on the perceived emotional content of short melodies. We initially developed exemplars of melodies that were judged consistently to convey a single emotional category: happy, sad, or scary. We subsequently manipulated the pitch and rhythm parameters to derive three altered versions of each exemplar: a pitch-only version (pitch differences intact but all tones of equal duration), a rhythmonly version (durational differences intact but all tones of equal pitch), and a baseline version (all tones of equal duration and pitch). Listeners rated how well each exemplar and altered version conveyed its corresponding emotion. Effects of pitch and rhythm varied across melodies. In all cases, ratings were influenced more by differences in pitch than by differences in rhythm. Whenever rhythm affected ratings, it interacted with pitch.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it