The sound of arousal in animal vocalizations has been evolutionarily conserved across many mammalian species, and is often characterized by particular nonlinear acoustic features. Here I will describe research examining the relationship between these acoustic features and culturally evolved characteristics of contemporary music that have predictable effects on people’ affective responses. I will present studies examining subjective responses of arousal and valence to music with and without nonlinear manipulations (i.e., added noise or abrupt pitch shifts), and show how listeners’ responses vary according to presentation context. Additionally, I will discuss recent psychophysiological data using the same music stimuli, and present some preliminary work examining the emotional effects of nonlinearities in human voices. Taken together, these studies show how a biologically evolved signaling system can play an integral role in the cultural evolution of musical phenomena.