Improve your tone, missy!

My quest for optimism and it's byproduct, happiness, landed me in an interesting place a few days ago. As I was looking up Gretchen Rubin's "Happiness Project," I found another Happiness Project--this one by Charles Spearin. Since Spearin's is a music project, and since I am a musician, this resonates with me.
Spearin is a Canadian instrumentalist, founder of post-rock instrumental group Do Make Say Think and an original member of indie rock group Broken Social Scene, according to his blog. His latest album, called "The Happiness Project," takes the lilting vocal tones of people in his neighborhood as they talk about happiness, and then uses them as the basis for composition.
If you go onto his website and click "sounds" you can listen to bits from the various people he interviews and the music that came from them. Particularly interesting is "Vanessa" who was deaf until she had a cochlear implant.
Spearin follows in the footsteps of Steve Reich, among others, in using speech as a jumping off point for composition. (Here's a little bit of Reich's "Different Trains," by way of example.)




But as I listened to his samples, I began to wonder about the whole relationship between sound, facial muscles, laughter and mood.
Here's a quick recap of some studies I've read about in the past six weeks:
Upbeat music can change your brain waves and lift your spirits.
Smiling, even fake smiling, can change your outlook for the better.
Laughter (as in laughing yoga) has stress-relieving properties and can improve mood.
Now comes Spearin with his interviews of people talking about happiness and I wonder, how does the voice change when we're happy? Is it something you can fake or is it more subtle? And do people react more positively to you when you have these vocal sounds?
I haven't found a lot on this, but if I were a researcher, I'd guess that happiness has a somewhat higher pitch and quicker tempo. Maybe a lifting contour in the phrases. If you can fake that, how effective would it be in changing your mood? In other words, is it more effective to listen to a happy song, or to sing one?
I'm tempted to become my own lab rat and try this for two reasons: 1.I never was any good at the big gushy greetings like you used to see on the Seinfeld show. (Come see the BAY-bee!!) and 2.It only makes sense. In college, we had a chorus professor who was forever telling us to put a smile into our faces to improve the tone. And it did! So what if I start with the tone? Maybe that will make it easier to improve my face (which is in desperate need, believe me.)
So I guess I've got this week's experiment. And--ooh--maybe along the way I'll write an upbeat tune about all this Great Recession stuff. No reason to let some good suffering go to waste.
Here's what another Canadian musician (Dave Carroll) did after an airline mishandled his luggage. (Hate bloggers, don't get excited. I have no intention of trashing any individual or company in song.)