The tangible relationship between music and emotion is no surprise to anyone, but a study in the June issue of Emotion suggests the minor third isn’t a facet of musical communication alone—it’s how we convey sadness in speech too. When it comes to sorrow, music and human speech might speak the same language.

Meagan Curtis of Tufts University’s Music Cognition Lab recorded undergraduate actors reading two-syllable lines—like “let’s go” and “come here”—with different emotional intonations: anger, happiness, pleasantness and sadness. She then used a computer program to analyze the recorded speech and determine how the pitch changed between syllables. Since the minor third is defined as a specific measurable distance between pitches (a ratio of frequencies), Curtis was able to identify when the actors’ speech relied on the minor third. What she found is that the actors consistently used the minor third to express sadness.