Vocalizing Torment: On the expression of emotion through voice quality in emo

Abstract

The singing voice offers pre-eminently a source for the expression of emotion, as it forms the intersection of music and language, both known for their emotive power. Research on this topic has been scarce as compared to the expression of emotion in instrumental music, yet it has been on the rise in the last decades. So far, most research on the expression of emotion in the singing voice has focused on classical or opera singing. This has demonstrated that key to the differentiation of emotion is the perceptual phenomenon of vocal sound quality or ‘voice quality’, but how this exactly works remains unclear. While largely neglected, it is also relevant to study vocal emotion expression in contemporary, popular styles of music, as these involve many distinctive vocal expressions. Therefore, I have researched the vocal expression of emotion in emo, which is an understudied, popular music genre, known for its emotional nature. To this end, I have scrutinized three seminal emo songs in terms of voice quality. This was done by employing partly a new, close listening method proposed by Ngo and Spreadborough (2022), which was complemented by spectrograms. My analyses have pointed out that in early emo, primarily the voice quality parameter roughness played a pivotal role in the vocal expression of emotion, while in later emo, especially nasality was important. It is however important to realize that these findings are subjective and heavily dependent on contextual factors.