Subject: Re: sometimes behave so strangely From: "Marvit, Peter" <PMarvit@xxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 19:30:46 -0500 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>[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@xxxxxxxx> : : 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 :