Can Sound Carry Emotion Within Its Information Codes? A Hypothesis on Subconscious Emotional Responses Beyond Nature and Nurture

This hypothesis proposes that sound carries emotion within its information codes—defined as acoustic patterns like pitch, rhythm, intonation, timbre, and harmonics—processed by biological and artificial systems. Infants’ innate sensitivity to emotional sounds, such as a caregiver’s voice, supports this, as they respond with comfort or distress without prior experience (Masataka, 2006). Coma patients further demonstrate this encoding, showing brain activity via EEG and fMRI when exposed to familiar voices and music, suggesting subconscious emotional processing (Di et al., 2007; Eickhoff et al., 2008; O’Kelly et al., 2013). Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis and Friston’s Free Energy Principle suggest emotions in sound are bodily and predictive, while Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory links responses to integrated processing. Theories like Prosodic Theory, Affect Induction, and Neuroaesthetics highlight how acoustic features evoke emotions. This hypothesis extends to AI systems like Grok, with applications in therapy and communication.