Re: musical tones in speech

[Martin Braun <nombraun@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks, Bruno, for your clarifying comments.

As to your question.
"Is it possible that the Dutch intonation researchers, in the process of
extracting F0 targets from the intonation contours, applied
subjective criteria that somehow were affected by the common musical
tones they had been exposed to outside the laboratory? Since F0
target extraction is not automatitized, I presume it involves
repeated listening to utterances and subsequent decision making. Is
it possible that the distributional biases arose at that stage?"

Answer:
No, it isn't. This issue is treated in the method section of the paper:

http://ojps.aip.org/journal_cgi/dbt?KEY=ARLOFJ&Volume=LASTVOL&Issue=LASTISS

In short, the marking of speech targets was not based on listening. It was
done on the visual pitch contour line. Further, musical tones were not
discernable in the scales of the pitch-contour plots. The whole question of
a possibility of "musical tones in speech" was never an issue, during all of
the IPO work, where the data extraction was done.

Martin


----- Original Message -----
From: Bruno Repp <repp@ALVIN.HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
To: <AUDITORY@LISTS.MCGILL.CA>
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2001 7:50 PM
Subject: Re: musical tones in speech