Subject: Re: sometimes behave so strangely From: Eliot Handelman <eliot@xxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 16:30:59 -0800 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>Freed, Dan wrote: > If the rhythm of repetition is the key to switching the listener into a > musical perception mode, then perhaps the effect of Diana's > demonstration could be undermined by inserting irregular pauses between > the repetitions. > I played around a bit with the wav file, trying out repetitions of other speech segments, which after 20 or so times failed to become music. I also tried distorting the "strangely" sentence but couldn't lose the musical effect. I think part of the solution is to recognize that Diana actually IS singing, which could explain why the effect is robust. If we don't at first hear it as song, then perhaps it's that a trigger is needed to prompt that sort of schematization of pitch & rhythm that gives music part of its identity as a structural pattern abstraction. Perhaps a musical context, not just repetition, could act as this trigger. If the fragment is preceded with a 'b', say, on the piano or something, would anyone NOT immediately hear Diana's song? -- eliot --- Eliot Handelman PhD Computational music theory & AI