Re: Tone Deafness (Lonce LaMar Wyse )

Subject: Re: Tone Deafness
From:    Lonce LaMar Wyse  <lwyse(at)ISS.NUS.SG>
Date:    Wed, 6 Dec 1995 09:28:55 +0800

Malcolm asked:

 > How do you whisper a tone language?  Or for that matter, how do you
 > whisper a question?

This is an interesting question (well, not so much to native tonal
language speakers who just do it all the time, but to the rest of us)!

In Chinese, at least, you convey the information spectrally. Try it at
home! : Sing "ah" in a whisper and add "frequency modulation". I
suspect that this spectral info is present and used for voiced speech
perception as well.

                                                - lonce