Facial expressions of emotion in speech and singing

An experiment dealing with the recognition of emotions in speech and in singing for two subject populations (opera amateurs and non-amateurs) was conducted to assess the respective roles of a professional singer's voice and facial expressions in the perception of emotions, and to determine how the audience decodes those emotions. The results of visual, auditory, and audiovisual perception tests showed that emotions expressed during speech were identified better than those expressed during singing. While facial expressions appear to play an important role, the voice proved to be a relatively poor conveyor of emotional information. When voice and facial expression were combined, the recognition of emotions improved slightly for speech but not for singing, where the acoustic cues of emotions are partially destroyed and therefore do not provide any additional information