[artfulhippo]

You're right, but you may want to consider that highly monotone communicators may not actually notice most of the non-literal signals that get passed in typical social situations.

Models be built from something, something related to the modeler's interpretation of their own interface into reality.

That said, it's nice that such a model was made; it's a nice reference / jumping off point. Someone more sensitive to their percepts and the nuances of life would be hard pressed to formalize any model at all; they'd be hard pressed to unfocus from the complexities and responsibilities of social life to do the abstract work of modeling.

[mnhn1]

Sure. There's also the converse situation where people who speak in tonal languages might not develop associations with melodic patterns in speech and any strong meta-meaning, since in those languages, pitch is actually carrying top-level meaning.

People who have congenital amusia, iirc, also tend to struggle with understanding tone languages. It seems true that if you aren't able to distinguish pitch well, you aren't good at encoding/decoding messages that are present through the medium of pitch differences.

I didn't mean to suggest above that this is a general thing for all humans. Like every other recreational stimulate-the-senses activity, some people don't actually care for it/aren't affected by it anyway.

[artfulhippo]

I see. Could you say more about meta-meaning?

[mnhn1]

I'm using that to group all the things that are communicated through the musicality of the voice in addition to the words themselves. Like if a person is happy, upset, or surprised, in a way you can pick up from the tone of their voice.

Here's a small example, about how the minor third interval between two notes which is perceived as "sad" in Western music, is also present in English speech that sounds "sad" to the listener: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44642274_The_Minor_...