Re: sometimes behave so strangely

["Marvit, Peter" <PMarvit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[At the risk of going even farther afield]

Upon hearing of the phenomenon and then listening to the clip, I flashed
back to "She was a visitor", composed in 1967 by Robert Ashley. Liner
notes describing that piece and two others on a CD can be found at
http://www.lovely.com/albumnotes/notes1002.html, while excerpts can be
easily found on Amazon or other CD sales sites. To my ears, the
repetition in that piece never crosses over to song, but the words *do*
lose meaning and seem to recombine into new "words" with a non-pitched
prosody. I was also reminded of "Different Trains" by Steve Reich
(1988), which explicitly assigned pitch values to certain regular speech
segments--either forcing or enhancing the "singing" effect. Finally, I'm
vaguely remembering a composer who took conversations in different
languages and synthesized music based on the spectral contents and
glides of the voices, but I cannot recall who, what, or when.

I was also struck by what Eliot Handleman subsequently and eloquently
described: "I think part of the solution is 
to recognize that Diana actually IS singing, which could explain why the
effect is robust." I have always been delighted by the careful
articulation and prosody of her inflections, and admit to sometimes
wondering how her talks on musical processing might be notated for other
instruments.

: Peter Marvit, PhD                          <pmarvit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
:
: Dept. Anatomy and Neurobiology    University of Maryland Medical
School:
: 20 Penn Street, HSF II, Room S251                  Baltimore, MD 21201
:
: phone 410-706-1272      http://www.theearlab.org      fax 410-706-2512
: