The Impact of Pitch on Emotion

The magic of how subtle shifts can lead to big changes in perception

I find it fascinating how pitch alone can change our perception of the music we hear.

Recently, a student of mine brought in a piece by Hozier to work on. It was too low in the original key, so we ended up transposing it up to make it comfy for her. Hozier tends to sing fairly high in his register, so we only needed to go three half steps to make the magic happen.

As we were sorting out the best transposition for her, she mentioned hearing another song of his that someone had pitched up (as in, just took the original track and bumped it up wholesale into a higher key) and that it sounded really cool. She said she’d send the link for me to have a listen.

The piece in question, NFWMB, was not one that I was familiar with. It was fascinating to listen to the pitched up track. The song was soft, sultry, hypnotic. Hozier tends to sing in a high range to begin with, and has a lot of light and bright qualities that he uses in his voice. The result of these natural qualities, combined with pitching it up, was that the track now gave an utterly convincing perception of female vocals.

Then, things got even more interesting. In the chorus, there’s a layered effect - where he is singing in octaves with himself. The impact of transposition here gave the upper octave a feeling of being the primary melody*, in female-coded vocals - but the lower octave sounded distinctly like a male voice. The acoustic impact of transposing the song was that it rendered this moment in the middle as if it was being sung both by male and female voices simultaneously. It’s literally the same singer singing with himself. My vocal acoustics nerd brain was happily exploding by now.

Now at this point, I was definitely curious to hear the original, so I pulled it up. I was shocked to discover that the dropped key suddenly brought a sinister quality to the song that had not been present when it was pitched up.I want to highlight my lack of context going into this listening adventure. I’d never heard the song before, and I was not listening too carefully to the lyrics - more just going with the vibe. It turns out that the song is fairly dark, as originally intended. Would I have felt the same way if I’d listened to the original first, rather than approaching it via this back door means?If you’ve heard the original, I’d be so curious to hear your perceptive experience listening to the pitched up version!

I think it’s so fascinating how absolute pitch can have emotional impact like this. Let me know your thoughts!

*turns out the lower octave is the primary melody - this is clear in the original