How are Emotions Expressed through the Voice in Music Therapy

This book explores how emotions are expressed through prosody from the perspective of music therapy. In psychoanalytic music therapy, it is important to consider clients¿ unconscious emotion. Music is a suitable way to express their emotions nonverbally. Vocal expression also can express emotions nonverbally, because it contains similar components to musical expression. The function of prosody, auditory aspect of speech, provides information of speaker¿s emotion to the listener. Interestingly, it is processed in our brain at the unconscious level. A study into prosody found through acoustic analysis that the sound of the clients¿ expressed their emotion clearly through their speech. This result indicates that it is useful to consider not only music but also prosody for analyzing the clients¿ unconscious in music therapy.