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Psychoanalysis has been persistently criticized for its failure to provide 'objective evidence' for its concepts, and has been repeatedly admonished to be 'more scientific', by which is usually meant—imitate the physical sciences and use a statistical method best applicable to precise measurements of variables that can be expressed numerically. Dr. Ostwald's experiments may arouse a certain sceptical expectation that a study of the acoustic communication of emotion may give confirmation to some psychoanalytic tenets about affects and their expression by providing a nonanalytic method of investigation, and thus perhaps meet some of the clamor for objectivity, precision, and measurable variables.
The author introduces his monograph by stating that communication by sound is necessary for human comfort and survival, emphasizing the predominance of auditory over visual communication in psychopathology. He inveighs against dividing the content of human communication into the denotive and the emotive and stresses their inseparability.
The history of human soundmaking begins with the mystical assignment of omnipotence to various sounds by primitive civilizations which develop into the various forms of musical expression as we know them in the modern sense. The evolution of the science of sound starts with Hippocrates' discoveries of human sounds as diagnostic aids, the studies by the Pythagoreans of the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensation of sound, leading eventually to the studies of Helmholtz which put the physiology of sound perception on a firm scientific basis. Such sounds as animals make, baby sounds, the inarticulate speech of developing infants, and psychotic regressions are characterized as rudimentary. Learning to speak adds new sounds to one's repertory and suppresses infantile patterns. Deteriorated psychotics regress 'acoustically' as everyone knows.
There are seven qualitative attributes of sound, each with a gradient between extreme end