Subject: R=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=E9p.?= : Re: sometimes behave so stra ngely From: Branka ZEI <Branka.Zei@xxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:15:03 +0100 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>Hi all, Bruno wrote: >The more a speech utterance resembles music on these >dimensions (stepwise pitch changes, fairly regular rhythm), the more >likely it will be perceived "as music" when it is repeated. Jeff wrote: >JasonMoran, a well known jazz pianist in the NYC area. He recorded a >Turkish woman speaking on the phone with her mother, and then put it >to song in a jazz trio (piano, bass, drums) context. Jeff's posting raises a long debated question whether song originally arouse from speech. It may well be that by applying stepwise pitch changes, and fairly regular rhythm, one goes from speech to a talking song and eventually a clearly perceived song. Now, when yue analyse the sentence "sometims behave so strangely" you get the the following: 1) None of her vowels was said on a mono-tone that could be represented by a single note (unlike the notation offered at http://philomel.com/phantom_words/description.html#sometimes). 2) Four out of 7 vowels are diphthongs - (easy to lengthen and "sing" without distorting the vowel's identity) 3) The tone sequences of vowels are: Word Tone "sometimes": rising monophthong + falling diphthong "behave": falling monphthong + rising diphthong "so": rising diphthong "strangely": a fall-rise on diphthong followed by a rise and + a falling monophthong No wonder that we perceive it as "song" especially when repeated sufficiently. The site below offers an interesting voice anaylsis software that turns any pitch contour into a "melody" played by a musical instrument http://www.winpitch.com/ Best to all Branka ________________________________________ Branka Zei Pollermann PhD Psychologue Psychiatrie de Liaison Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève 51 Bvd. De la Cluse, 1205 Genève tél. : 0041 22 382 48 81 Portable : 0041 79 203 92 17 ********************************************************************** This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager. **********************************************************************