Vos and Troost (1989) showed that the most common interval between successive tones in the melodies of the world is about a major second (2 semitones). Has an equivalent experiment been carried out using speech, i.e. what is the distribution of interval sizes (in % of fundamental frequency, e.g. in bins a semitone wide) between successive phonemes? To answer this question it would first be necessary to determine the perceived pitch of each phoneme. A good approximation might be the fundamental frequency at the p-centre. I have been snooping around in vain for literature to answer this question, perhaps I am using the wrong keywords? Please reply privately. Richard Parncutt, Uni Graz, Austria, parncutt@xxxxxxxxxxx |