As much as I wish the opposite were true (in my former life I was a
musician), I think Alain is right: speaking is not like singing. I am
sure all of you must have come across tone deaf persons who could not
carry the simplest tune, but you could not tell this by listening to them
as they were speaking. I also have another experience to share:
A Hungarian pop idol, a very expansive young woman who learned to sing
"on the job" was in a car accident that left her brain damaged and
aphasic. Out of sheer determination, she decided to re-learn to speak
through singing, but not the pop stuff. She chose as her learning
instrument a series of unaccompanied songs by Gyorgy Kurtag, written on
poems by the 20th-century socialist-expressionist poet Attila Jozsef --
if you know the series you will admit that it must have been a grueling
task. And she performed the series well enough for Kurtag to write, for
her, a vocal piece on words by Beckett -- I heard it with her and it was
mesmerizing. Yet, when talking to her afterwards I realized that she was
still aphasic to a large extent.
Pierre
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Pierre Divenyi Experimental Audiology Research (151)
V.A. Medical Center, Martinez, CA
94553, USA
Phone: (925) 370-6745 Fax: (925) 228-5738
E-mail : PDivenyi@ucdavis.edu
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