Posts Tagged ‘inspirational’

The Effects of Shoutiness

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

I’m not sure whether this experiment has been done before but I was watching some videos on YouTube and noticed that with some speakers/shouters my heart rate seemed to increase. I’m not sure whether this is because I agree or disagree strongly with what they are saying or whether it is some kind of natural human response to emotion or a particular pitch in voices (sort of like the urge to cry when seeing someone else cry or laugh when you hear laughter).

An interesting experiment would be to play a series of audio clips of various speakers to people whilst monitoring their heart rates. It would be handy to have them also rate the clips on how strongly they agree or disagree with the speaker.

Once the results were in I then wonder if you could use software to analyse the audio and make predictions as to how strongly a person is likely to respond on an emotional level to a particular style of speech.