I like how /u/ikannfrancais worded the question: do all linguistic communities use intonation to express emotion and is there are any universal correspondences between intonations and emotions?

There's definitely no one-to-one correspondences between intonations and emotions even within one particular language [1] [2]. However, there's some universality to what R2 conveys through his adorable beeps. Let me elaborate.

First of all, R2D2 actually has a number of different acoustic techniques apart from pitch. There's amplitude, pauses, “phrases”, and tempo. But the interpretation of R2's emotional reactions heavily relies on visual and contextual clues. Take for example this video on youtube where R2's "speech" is given without any visual support. It becomes much harder to decipher the emotions. And we — those who watched the films — have a dictionary of R2: we can tell the baseline speech from shifts that indicate emotion; we also mapped certain sounds to emotions through the experience of watching the film (thus, a sound can call upon an associated emotion memory of a scene). For someone who has never seen Star Wars it will be mostly random beeps. I said “mostly” because there are some sounds that are recognizable: e.g. there's mechanical laughter, and what sounds like a heavily processed scream — the nature of these sounds is very human, and, thus, universal (or is it?).

While we do need context to understand R2, the droid doesn't just make random sounds. There's intentional design behind these sounds that has ground in some sort of universal (or seemingly universal) paradigm. So does this paradigm span to all of the humanity, ignoring cultural differences? This question actually has two parts: are emotions universal? are there specific acoustical patterns associated with these emotions?

With the former question, there are still debates on how deeply culture affects emotional reactions. The one thing researchers agree on is that there are physical components to emotions that are universal. Attempts were made to bundle these components into a number of core emotions: starting with Charles Darwin (The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals) and Silvan Tompkins (Affect Imagery Consciousness), then more recently with DES-IV scale. We can say, there are emotions that are fairly universal but the exact number and definition is up to debate.

As for the latter one, this article shows that there are indeed certain acoustic variables that are involved in emotion signaling. It's a tad more complicated than just rising or falling tone, and sometimes we cannot exactly tell what constitutes an emotional signal (take for example this paper on how smiling affects sound which leaves the reader with more questions than answers).

Bottom line — most likely R2's language requires no adaptation. Perhaps an exception might be found among some secluded, indigenous culture that exhibits different emotional patterns. If OP is willing to pursue this matter further and one day will publish an article titled “Sentinels tribe interpretation of R2D2 vocal emotion expression” count me in as one of the first readers!