A Preliminary Investigation on Frequency Dependant Cues for Human Emotions

The recent advances in Human Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence has significantly increased the importance of identifying human emotions from different cues, and has hence become a subject of study for various scholars from diverse background including Acoustics, Psychology, Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Biochemistry. This study is a preliminary step towards investigating cues for human emotion on a very fundamental level by aiming to establish relationship between tonal frequencies and emotions. For that, an online perception test was conducted, in which participants were asked to rate the perceived emotions corresponding to each tone. The results shows that a crossover point for four primary emotions lies in the frequency range of 417 - 440 Hz, thus consolidating the hypothesis that frequency range 432 – 440 Hz is neutral from human emotion perspective. It was also observed that frequency dependant relationship between emotion pairs Happy - Sad and Anger - Calm are approximately mirror symmetric in nature.