it's certainly a notion worth keeping in mind,
however keep in mind also that range and particularities vary dramatically between cultures. the information in the OP can be swiftly deposed, consider that some languages are categorically tonal, where pitch discretises meaning.
i would say, take such considerations slightly further. we human beings tend to see ourselves as the center of such activities, when it is entirely possible that what we are expressing is a subset of something that extends beyond ourselves.
as far as tuning, though there is a diaspora of eg. just intonations fitting it to an octave, the harmonic series is a natural constant.
i have observed musicality of prose many times.. a christian woman from a rural community in NSW australia exhibited a strong predeliction for speaking in a major key (i forget the tonic). using a pitch s&h process or gating can elicit pitch patterning, and i think you will find that it is tempered in many cultures. it is not the only factor in pitch so isolating it shouldn't be a basis for hard and fast determinations. the united states is, of course, something else.. peaks and valleys? in a culture where engagement is so prioritised, many other considerations may bear on pitching.
Harmonic function of speech
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- Banned
- 12368 posts since 30 Apr, 2002 from i might peeramid
you come and go, you come and go. amitabha neither a follower nor a leader be tagore "where roads are made i lose my way" where there is certainty, consideration is absent.
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- Banned
- 12368 posts since 30 Apr, 2002 from i might peeramid
here's a bit of fun uncovered while posting,
i'm sort of reminded of the frustration aimed at paolo soleri for not being "open" to "input" - here we have an italian inspired by well integrated hillside communities being petitioned by members of an industrial, disposable culture as if somehow their perceptions were equally as valid to the arcological solution.
"contemporary" people feel as if they are the most informed on the planet because they have seen and heard representations of diverse culture, without failing to realise how immersed they are in epherma. people whose speech is influenced by a sensationalist, commercial media culture have a tremendous time being able to relate to people whose erudition is founded more in natural phenomena, which does not have a rewind button, for one thing. i mean, no one is trying to be rude, but the story of my life on kvr is like, dudes, just shut up, you know tiddly winks by ronco.
how many westerners, convinced as they are by scientific authority of certainties, can truly grapple the epistemology of nescient/consideration weighted cultures? never ask a westerner, their thoughts are full of authority and sensationalism/attention harvesting mechanisms. if they can't be right, they'll enjoy sounding right as if it were a worthwhile substitute.
i'm not sure the tonal relativism here has to do with the form of language as it may be to other cultural factors... 1999 was 1999. and a semitone, isn't that impressive. i think we are more talking here, about the ability to apply attention, instead of being subject to it.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/05/us/st ... guage.html
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: November 5, 1999
Most native speakers of languages that use tones to convey meaning may have a form of perfect pitch, according to new research. The results may suggest that many or even most babies are born with perfect pitch but lose it if they do not learn a tonal language or undergo early musical training.
Most people find it easy to perceive and sing musical tones relative to each other, a skill called relative pitch, but perfect pitch -- the ability to identify any note by name or to sing a given note without hearing a reference note beforehand -- is much less common. Perfect pitch turns up in no more than one person out of 10,000 in Western countries, according to some estimates.
The languages studied in the new research were Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese, two major languages in which different rising and falling tones can impart different meanings to the same combination of vowels and consonants. For example, the Mandarin word ''ma'' can mean mother, hemp, reproach or horse depending on whether the spoken tone is flat, rising, falling, or falling and then rising.
While the differences in meaning are conveyed largely by relative rather than absolute tones, the researchers, led by Dr. Diana Deutsch, a psychologist at the University of California in San Diego, found that speakers retained an absolute tonal standard.
In the study, which Dr. Deutsch described yesterday at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, the researchers recorded Vietnamese and Mandarin speakers as they read lists of words that covered a wide range of tones, and then repeated the exercise days later. A computer analysis of the recordings showed that individual speakers uttered the same words at the same absolute pitches to within fractions of a semitone -- the musical step from one key on a piano to the next.
''It really sounds as though the person is sitting there immediately repeating the sound,'' Dr. Deutsch said. ''Which is really, to my mind, amazing.''
While the new findings have surprised many scientists, some said that more research needs to be done to show that the ability displayed by Vietnamese and Mandarin speakers is identical to perfect pitch as it is understood in music.
''It is still possible that the subjects may not actually see or realize a connection between tone as they use it in language, and pitch as a musical concept,'' said Dr. Donald Hall, a physicist at California State University in Sacramento who studies musical acoustics and is a church organist with perfect pitch.
Other research has shown that the prevalence of perfect pitch is higher in Japan, where the language is not tonal, but where many young children receive Suzuki music training. Perfect pitch is also more common among professional musicians, but studies so far have not established whether the talent arises from youthful practice or led the musicians to their vocation in the first place.
Still, some scientists said the new findings suggest that most babies are born with perfect pitch but retain it only by learning a tonal language or undergoing some sort of early musical training.
''There could be a much higher incidence of absolute-pitch musicians out there if all of us were exposed to music much earlier,'' said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, a neurologist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who has studied how structures in the brain are related to perfect, or absolute, pitch.
Others believe that most people, even in Western countries, do retain an almost exact ''pitch memory'' but simply lack a means of giving names to each pitch and putting the ability into practice, as speakers of tonal languages can do.
''What it means to me is that people have a very accurate memory for musical pitch,'' said Dr. Daniel Levitin, a cognitive psychologist at McGill University in Montreal who has studied perfect pitch. ''You and I don't have the ability to attach these labels to it.''
Another conceivable explanation for the results could lie in innate differences between Western and Asian populations, but Dr. Deutsch dismissed that possibility as ''extraordinarily unlikely.''
For the study, Dr. Deutsch, a psychologist, collaborated with Trevor Henthorn, an audio engineer at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts of the University of California in San Diego, and Dr. Mark Dolson, a specialist in audio signal processing at the Creative Advanced Technology Center of the company Creative Technology Limited in Scotts Valley, Calif.
In one series of measurements, the team asked seven native speakers of Vietnamese to read a printed list of words that spanned the range of tones in that language. Days later, the task was repeated, and recordings of each word were broken up into five-millisecond intervals on a computer and analyzed for their average tonal content. The differences of pitch between the two repetitions of a word by a particular speaker were all less than 1.1 semitone, and four of the seven speakers displayed pitch differences of less than half a semitone.
The results for 15 Mandarin speakers were perhaps even more striking, with nearly all of the speakers showing differences of fractions of a semitone from session to session.
How many of the speakers displayed what is usually called perfect pitch? ''You could argue that they all did,'' Dr. Deutsch said. ''If people show it, give or take a semitone, they'll claim perfect pitch,'' she said.
The unexpected results, Dr. Deutsch said, raises the question of why perfect pitch seems to be so rare in the West.
One possible explanation, she said, is that most babies are capable of acquiring perfect pitch, just as they can learn to speak any language without an accent. But as some window of time begins to close -- earlier for some children, later for others -- they can no longer acquire perfect pitch or speak a new language without an accent.
''Maybe up to a certain age you're going to be able to learn and memorize absolute representations of these pitches,'' said Dr. Schlaug, ''but after a certain age it's not possible.''
But that remains to be seen.
There remains the question, which Dr. Deutsch is attempting to answer with new research, of the precise connection between perfect pitch in music and tonal speech.
Dr. Perry Link, who teaches Chinese language and literature at Princeton University, says that he doubts the connection is direct. Native Chinese speakers, he says, are often unable to identify the tones they are correctly using, just as English speakers may use the language properly but be unable to parse their sentences grammatically. Absolute-pitch musicians, however, can explicitly name each tone they hear.
But Dr. Levitin of McGill University says the results are reminiscent of studies demonstrating that even speakers of languages like English that do not depend on tone can usually sing extremely familiar tunes in key without accompaniment. The tentative conclusion, he said, is that most people have excellent pitch memory, but the ability to express that memory diminishes in a person who does not speak a tonal language or study music at a young age.
Despite the fond hopes of parents, however, the new findings do not indicate that every baby carries the seeds of a Mozart inside, waiting to sprout. ''Mozart had absolute pitch, and he was a composing genius,'' Dr. Levitin said.
''Are we all composing geniuses? No,'' he said. ''But do more of us have absolute pitch than we thought? Yes, absolutely.''
i'm sort of reminded of the frustration aimed at paolo soleri for not being "open" to "input" - here we have an italian inspired by well integrated hillside communities being petitioned by members of an industrial, disposable culture as if somehow their perceptions were equally as valid to the arcological solution.
"contemporary" people feel as if they are the most informed on the planet because they have seen and heard representations of diverse culture, without failing to realise how immersed they are in epherma. people whose speech is influenced by a sensationalist, commercial media culture have a tremendous time being able to relate to people whose erudition is founded more in natural phenomena, which does not have a rewind button, for one thing. i mean, no one is trying to be rude, but the story of my life on kvr is like, dudes, just shut up, you know tiddly winks by ronco.
how many westerners, convinced as they are by scientific authority of certainties, can truly grapple the epistemology of nescient/consideration weighted cultures? never ask a westerner, their thoughts are full of authority and sensationalism/attention harvesting mechanisms. if they can't be right, they'll enjoy sounding right as if it were a worthwhile substitute.
i'm not sure the tonal relativism here has to do with the form of language as it may be to other cultural factors... 1999 was 1999. and a semitone, isn't that impressive. i think we are more talking here, about the ability to apply attention, instead of being subject to it.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/05/us/st ... guage.html
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: November 5, 1999
Most native speakers of languages that use tones to convey meaning may have a form of perfect pitch, according to new research. The results may suggest that many or even most babies are born with perfect pitch but lose it if they do not learn a tonal language or undergo early musical training.
Most people find it easy to perceive and sing musical tones relative to each other, a skill called relative pitch, but perfect pitch -- the ability to identify any note by name or to sing a given note without hearing a reference note beforehand -- is much less common. Perfect pitch turns up in no more than one person out of 10,000 in Western countries, according to some estimates.
The languages studied in the new research were Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese, two major languages in which different rising and falling tones can impart different meanings to the same combination of vowels and consonants. For example, the Mandarin word ''ma'' can mean mother, hemp, reproach or horse depending on whether the spoken tone is flat, rising, falling, or falling and then rising.
While the differences in meaning are conveyed largely by relative rather than absolute tones, the researchers, led by Dr. Diana Deutsch, a psychologist at the University of California in San Diego, found that speakers retained an absolute tonal standard.
In the study, which Dr. Deutsch described yesterday at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, the researchers recorded Vietnamese and Mandarin speakers as they read lists of words that covered a wide range of tones, and then repeated the exercise days later. A computer analysis of the recordings showed that individual speakers uttered the same words at the same absolute pitches to within fractions of a semitone -- the musical step from one key on a piano to the next.
''It really sounds as though the person is sitting there immediately repeating the sound,'' Dr. Deutsch said. ''Which is really, to my mind, amazing.''
While the new findings have surprised many scientists, some said that more research needs to be done to show that the ability displayed by Vietnamese and Mandarin speakers is identical to perfect pitch as it is understood in music.
''It is still possible that the subjects may not actually see or realize a connection between tone as they use it in language, and pitch as a musical concept,'' said Dr. Donald Hall, a physicist at California State University in Sacramento who studies musical acoustics and is a church organist with perfect pitch.
Other research has shown that the prevalence of perfect pitch is higher in Japan, where the language is not tonal, but where many young children receive Suzuki music training. Perfect pitch is also more common among professional musicians, but studies so far have not established whether the talent arises from youthful practice or led the musicians to their vocation in the first place.
Still, some scientists said the new findings suggest that most babies are born with perfect pitch but retain it only by learning a tonal language or undergoing some sort of early musical training.
''There could be a much higher incidence of absolute-pitch musicians out there if all of us were exposed to music much earlier,'' said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, a neurologist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who has studied how structures in the brain are related to perfect, or absolute, pitch.
Others believe that most people, even in Western countries, do retain an almost exact ''pitch memory'' but simply lack a means of giving names to each pitch and putting the ability into practice, as speakers of tonal languages can do.
''What it means to me is that people have a very accurate memory for musical pitch,'' said Dr. Daniel Levitin, a cognitive psychologist at McGill University in Montreal who has studied perfect pitch. ''You and I don't have the ability to attach these labels to it.''
Another conceivable explanation for the results could lie in innate differences between Western and Asian populations, but Dr. Deutsch dismissed that possibility as ''extraordinarily unlikely.''
For the study, Dr. Deutsch, a psychologist, collaborated with Trevor Henthorn, an audio engineer at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts of the University of California in San Diego, and Dr. Mark Dolson, a specialist in audio signal processing at the Creative Advanced Technology Center of the company Creative Technology Limited in Scotts Valley, Calif.
In one series of measurements, the team asked seven native speakers of Vietnamese to read a printed list of words that spanned the range of tones in that language. Days later, the task was repeated, and recordings of each word were broken up into five-millisecond intervals on a computer and analyzed for their average tonal content. The differences of pitch between the two repetitions of a word by a particular speaker were all less than 1.1 semitone, and four of the seven speakers displayed pitch differences of less than half a semitone.
The results for 15 Mandarin speakers were perhaps even more striking, with nearly all of the speakers showing differences of fractions of a semitone from session to session.
How many of the speakers displayed what is usually called perfect pitch? ''You could argue that they all did,'' Dr. Deutsch said. ''If people show it, give or take a semitone, they'll claim perfect pitch,'' she said.
The unexpected results, Dr. Deutsch said, raises the question of why perfect pitch seems to be so rare in the West.
One possible explanation, she said, is that most babies are capable of acquiring perfect pitch, just as they can learn to speak any language without an accent. But as some window of time begins to close -- earlier for some children, later for others -- they can no longer acquire perfect pitch or speak a new language without an accent.
''Maybe up to a certain age you're going to be able to learn and memorize absolute representations of these pitches,'' said Dr. Schlaug, ''but after a certain age it's not possible.''
But that remains to be seen.
There remains the question, which Dr. Deutsch is attempting to answer with new research, of the precise connection between perfect pitch in music and tonal speech.
Dr. Perry Link, who teaches Chinese language and literature at Princeton University, says that he doubts the connection is direct. Native Chinese speakers, he says, are often unable to identify the tones they are correctly using, just as English speakers may use the language properly but be unable to parse their sentences grammatically. Absolute-pitch musicians, however, can explicitly name each tone they hear.
But Dr. Levitin of McGill University says the results are reminiscent of studies demonstrating that even speakers of languages like English that do not depend on tone can usually sing extremely familiar tunes in key without accompaniment. The tentative conclusion, he said, is that most people have excellent pitch memory, but the ability to express that memory diminishes in a person who does not speak a tonal language or study music at a young age.
Despite the fond hopes of parents, however, the new findings do not indicate that every baby carries the seeds of a Mozart inside, waiting to sprout. ''Mozart had absolute pitch, and he was a composing genius,'' Dr. Levitin said.
''Are we all composing geniuses? No,'' he said. ''But do more of us have absolute pitch than we thought? Yes, absolutely.''
you come and go, you come and go. amitabha neither a follower nor a leader be tagore "where roads are made i lose my way" where there is certainty, consideration is absent.
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- KVRist
- Topic Starter
- 350 posts since 11 May, 2008
I know what I have written 2 years ago, but since the original post was made many things happened and people evolve.
Namely, I could just leave some references here, that I discovered in between the years that have passed:
"The pitch of speech as a function of linguistic community"
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40285626
"the pitch levels of female speech in two chinese villages"
http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/jo ... /1.3113892
"co-variation of tonality in the music and speech of different cultures"
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0020160
"Musical Intervals in speech"
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/23/9852
"Musical Melody and Speech Intonation: singing a different tune"
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001372
I'm sorry if this is too much, but at a certain point there are certain subjects that start becoming rather complex to be discussed in an internet forum because information starts pilling and pilling up... I'd say that these days when I'm curious about something I just go and immerse myself in academic literature now. Very often I don't find a straight answer, but, well...
Namely, I could just leave some references here, that I discovered in between the years that have passed:
"The pitch of speech as a function of linguistic community"
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40285626
"the pitch levels of female speech in two chinese villages"
http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/jo ... /1.3113892
"co-variation of tonality in the music and speech of different cultures"
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0020160
"Musical Intervals in speech"
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/23/9852
"Musical Melody and Speech Intonation: singing a different tune"
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001372
I'm sorry if this is too much, but at a certain point there are certain subjects that start becoming rather complex to be discussed in an internet forum because information starts pilling and pilling up... I'd say that these days when I'm curious about something I just go and immerse myself in academic literature now. Very often I don't find a straight answer, but, well...
Play fair and square!
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- KVRist
- 442 posts since 21 May, 2014
no....just no.Most people find it easy to perceive and sing musical tones relative to each other, a skill called relative pitch, but perfect pitch
being able to perceive relative pitches, is not easy....at all.....yes maybe it's easy if we are talking about diatonic tones.....rounded...to the nearest whole/half note.......
but it takes years......years...of listening and working with music to be able to perceive relative tones down to the couple cents....
intense training and focus.
people are not born with that....it's something that your brain needs time to learn how to perceive...hey i can only speak for myself
Sincerely,
Zethus, twin son of Zeus
Zethus, twin son of Zeus
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- KVRAF
- 25053 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
Many sizable cans of worms open and writhing now. I'm unsure of where this is headed, but we're both interested in some quality of knowing what to instruct the computer to do in order to replicate a more human result. For instance, the time element of portamento-type gestures: you notice probably not linear, but exponential or logarithmic acceleration (or slow-down). With the wind type there may be timbre factors with more force/harder blown: how does this unfold over time? et cetera.
but I should respond to this one:
This is a true statement: The frequencies of the harmonic series, being integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, are naturally related to each other by whole-numbered ratios and small whole-numbered ratios are likely the basis of the consonance of musical intervals (see just intonation). I don't buy that factoid as sufficient to make speech contours in pitch match the 12-note octave so nicely.
but I should respond to this one:
- a nice example of pseudo-science. Someone wants this thesis to be true pretty badly. But if this works, pretty much all sound in the physical realm, and quite a bit of electronically-generated sound naturally suit this 'chromatic scale' because the terms are made (skewed) to suit the premise. The first two formants are in a just intonation ratio, and all of this supposedly follows. (Because Harmonic series, yo.) It doesn't. Tail Wags Dog. Study the harmonic series; if you want a tritone per a given fundamental via nature like this, there's No. 11 (IE: 11:8), which is nearly half a dollar flat (~49¢) to 12tET.Musicologo wrote:some references here
"Musical Intervals in speech"
(link)
This is a true statement: The frequencies of the harmonic series, being integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, are naturally related to each other by whole-numbered ratios and small whole-numbered ratios are likely the basis of the consonance of musical intervals (see just intonation). I don't buy that factoid as sufficient to make speech contours in pitch match the 12-note octave so nicely.
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- KVRAF
- 7540 posts since 7 Aug, 2003 from San Francisco Bay Area
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- Banned
- 12368 posts since 30 Apr, 2002 from i might peeramid
you're too critical so as to not appreciate what is there and what isn't.. the harmonic series is certainly a fundament of scale and music. that doesn't mean a single series is the only fundamentjancivil wrote:I don't buy that factoid as sufficient to make speech contours in pitch match the 12-note octave so nicely.
human beings are able to abstract, be it from two intervals, or harmonic series springing from differing periodicities
if humans can implement two strings/variable resonators tuned to two values, then our solution is already more complex than a single series. and we know our hominid or other sonorous entity is not going to stop at that.
you come and go, you come and go. amitabha neither a follower nor a leader be tagore "where roads are made i lose my way" where there is certainty, consideration is absent.
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- KVRAF
- 25053 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
Who here really enjoys being told what they think, like that? I'm pretty confident that, should we accurately (and extensively) measure each one of us talking, we're not going to demonstrate any "chromatic scale". The proof was already tried and I don't accept it; and I don't know what actual use is in it (unless publishing it was remunerative).xoxos wrote:you're too critical so as to not appreciate what is there and what isn't.jancivil wrote:I don't buy that factoid as sufficient to make speech contours in pitch match the 12-note octave so nicely.
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- KVRAF
- 25053 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
In the paper I addressed, harmonic series is all they have, and this relies on ratios "embedded in" the formant structure as seen in vocal sound production and extrapolated into... More than what's there. I'm really not about a broad stroke such as 'speech is never musical' or 'music is no influence on speech', only that I had just encountered the very picture of pseudo-science at work. And for me kind of pointlessly.xoxos wrote: the harmonic series is certainly a fundament of scale and music. that doesn't mean a single series is the only fundament
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- KVRist
- Topic Starter
- 350 posts since 11 May, 2008
I went to search for more information and I quote here what I found that seems relevant theories. What i really value are not only the references but also the contradictory - they present several perspectives on the same subject.
Excerpts of
"Intervals and Scales" by
William Forde Thompson
in Deutsh, "the psychology of music", 3rd ed. Great, great book with tons of information regarding many, many aspects and lots of references.
«It is tempting to surmise that the pitch relations that occur between the partials of individual tones are unconsciously internalized and expressed artistically in the form of music and other creative arts. For example, Ross et al. (2007) proposed that human preference for the most common intervals found in music arises from experience with the way speech formants modulate laryngeal harmonics to create different phonemes. Their approach was to analyze the spectra of vowels in neutral speech uttered by speakers of American English and Mandarin, and to compare the harmonics with the greatest intensity within the first and second formants. This procedure resulted in a distribution of all second formant/first formant ratios derived from the spectra of 8 vowels uttered by American English speakers and 6 vowels uttered by Mandarin speakers. On average, 68% of the frequency ratios extracted matched intervals found in the chromatic scale. In contrast, only 36% of randomly selected pairs of harmonics in the same frequency range matched intervals found in the chromatic scale. This comparison illustrates that musical intervals are not merely correlated with pitch intervals found in any harmonic (periodic) waveform, but reflect a bias that is specific to speech. This speech-specific bias suggests that, “the human preference for the specific intervals of the chromatic scale, subsets of which are used worldwide to create music, arises from the routine experience of these intervals during social communication” (Ross et al., 2007, p. 9854, see also, Han, Sundararajan, Bowling, Lake, & Purves, 2011).
Most researchers, however, believe that the widespread use of certain intervals in music is encouraged by basic functions of the auditory system. First, Helmholtz (1877/1954) noted that the concept of roughness can be extended to combinations of complex tones, with the total amount of dissonance equal to some combination of the roughness generated by all interacting partials. When tones with harmonic spectra are combined, consonant intervals such as the octave and fifth have many partials in common, and those that are unique tend not to occur within a critical band and hence do not give rise to roughness. Complex tones that form dissonant intervals such as the diminished fifth (six semitones) have few partials in common, and some of their unique partials fall within the same critical band, giving rise to beating and roughness. Most significantly, the third and fourth partials of the lower pitch of a tritone interval are only one semitone removed from the second and third partials of the higher pitch of that interval.
Plomp and Levelt (1965) calculated predicted levels of consonance and dissonance for combinations of tones consisting of six harmonic partials and with the first tone fixed at 250 Hz (see also Hutchinson & Knopoff, 1978; Kameoka & Kuriyagawa, 1969a, 1969b; Terhardt, 1974). The results of these calculations illustrate consonance peaks at intervals commonly used in Western music: minor third (5:6), major third (4:5), perfect fourth (3:4), perfect fifth (2:3), major sixth (3:5) and octave (1:2). Kameoka and Kuriyagawa (1969a, 1969b) developed an algorithm for estimating the total amount of dissonance in dyads of pure and complex tones. Their model assumed that dissonance is additive and dependent on loudness, and they relied on the power law of psychological significance to combine dissonance levels from different dyads of harmonics, yielding a final measure referred to as absolute dissonance. These mathematical models of dissonance are broadly in agreement with judgments of dissonance, but predictions break down when more or fewer harmonics are included in the model (Mashinter, 2006; Vos, 1986).
Roughness may not be the sole determinant of consonance. Carl Stumpf (1890, 1898) suggested that consonance arises from tonal fusion—the tendency for combinations of tones to merge together. A related view is that consonance is enhanced by harmonicity—the extent to which the combined frequency components in an interval match a single harmonic series. Harmonicity is thought to play an important role in pitch perception. Terhardt (1974) proposed that the auditory system matches any incoming collection of partials, whether arising from a single tone or from combinations of tones, to the nearest harmonic template. If partials align with the harmonic series, the pitch is unambiguous. As the collection of partials deviates from harmonicity, the pitch becomes more ambiguous.
According to Terhardt, harmonic templates develop through repeated exposure to the harmonic spectra of speech sounds, which predominate in the acoustic environment throughout human development. A more general possibility is that repeated exposure to any acoustic stimulus leads to the development of a template for that stimulus. Chord templates, for example, could develop even for tone combinations that do not align with a harmonic series, as long as those chords are repeatedly encountered in a person’s musical environment. Such templates would allow trained musicians to identify highly familiar chords and may also underlie the perception of consonance and dissonance (McLachlan; 2011; see also, McLachlan & Wilson, 2010).»
«It is often suggested that the mechanisms underlying melody processing may be engaged for domains other than music, such as speech intonation (Ilie & Thompson, 2006, 2011; Miall & Dissanayake, 2003; Patel, 2003, 2008; Thompson et al., 2004; Thompson & Quinto, 2011). Ilie and Thompson (2006, 2011) found that manipulations of basic acoustic attributes such as intensity, pitch height, and pace (tempo) have similar emotional consequences whether imposed on musical or spoken stimuli. Thompson et al. (2004) showed that administering 1 year of piano lessons to a sample of children led to an increase in sensitivity to emotional connotations of speech prosody. Finally, there is convergence of statistical data on pitch changes that occur in speech and melodies. For example, Patel, Iversen, and Rosenberg (2006) compared the average pitch variability in French and English speech and folk songs. Spoken French had significantly lower pitch variability from one syllable to the next than spoken English, and a parallel difference was observed for French and English folk songs.»
«Recent investigations in our lab led by Paolo Ammirante provided evidence that pitch changes interact with timing mechanisms in the motor system (Ammirante & Thompson, 2010, 2012; Ammirante, Thompson, & Russo, 2011). These studies used a continuation-tapping paradigm, whereby participants tapped in synchrony with a pacing signal and then attempted to continue tapping at the same rate once the pacing signal was removed. To examine the role of pitch changes on the motor system, each tap in the continuation phase triggered a sounded tone. The pitches of these tones were then manipulated to form melodic patterns. Changes in pitch ystematically affected the timing of the taps that followed. Where a triggered tone implied faster melodic motion (larger melodic leaps within the same amount of time) the intertap interval (ITI) that the tone initiated was shorter (faster taps); where a triggered tone implied slower melodic motion, ITI was longer. That is, the implied melodic “motion” arising from intervals of different sizes was reflected in the timing of actions.
The role of movement in interval perception is also suggested by my research on the facial expressions of musicians (Thompson & Russo, 2007; Thompson, Russo, & Livingstone, 2010; Thompson, Russo, & Quinto, 2008). This work indicates that the perception of melodic intervals is significantly affected by the facial expressions of the musicians who are producing those intervals. Thompson et al. (2010) asked participants to watch a musician singing a melodic interval and to judge the size of that interval on a scale from 1 to 7. Only the face of the musician was visible. We first confirmed that the facial expressions alone, even with no sound available, could convey reliable information about the size of the melodic interval being sung (see also Thompson & Russo, 2007). Visual and auditory signals were then manipulated such that the visual signal taken from a large sung interval would be synchronized with the auditory signal taken from a small sung interval, and vice versa. Results confirmed that both auditory and visual channels influenced ratings of interval size. Facial measurements revealed that musicians made a number of subtle movements of the head and eyebrows, to which participants were highly sensitive. Additional manipulations confirmed that visual information arising from singers is automatically and unconsciously taken into consideration when evaluating interval size. Such findings underscore the complex and multimodal nature of music perception and suggest that analytic judgments of interval categories may provide a limited understanding of music experience (see also, Makeig, 1982).»
Related to Scales:
«The spectra of the instruments that predominate in a musical culture influence how those instruments are tuned and, hence, the scales that become associated with the music. Sethares (2005) noted a close correspondence between intervals, scales, and spectral properties of instruments. In traditions that rely primarily on instruments with inharmonic spectra, musical scales tend to be very different from Western diatonic major and minor scales, precisely because they permit the formation of the intervals that are found within the spectra of those inharmonic instruments.
The bonang is a musical instrument used in the Javanese gamelan and consists of a collection of small gongs. According to Sethares (2005), when the spectrum of a bonang is combined with a harmonic tone, it generates a dissonance curve with minima near the steps of an idealized slendro scale—one of the two essential scales in gamelan music. Another instrument used in gamelan music—the saron—consists of seven bronze bars placed on top of a resonating frame. When the spectrum of a saron is combined with a harmonic tone, it generates a dissonance curve with minima near the steps of a pelog scale—the other essential scale in gamelan music.
Based on such observations, Sethares (2005) argued that musical instruments co-evolved with tuning systems and scales. Musical instruments that are played in combination with one another must be tuned in a way that supports their combination, and this approach to tuning gives rise to the scales that shape musical structure. Once a tuning system is established, a musical tradition can also support new instruments that have spectral properties consistent with that tuning system. This process of co-evolution explains why gamelan scales and their instrument tim- bres, which are so unique, are rarely combined with the scales of Western music.
In traditions that mainly employ instruments with harmonic spectra, the tuning systems that support the formation of consonant intervals are also compatible with pentatonic (six note) and heptatonic (seven note, diatonic) scales. According to some researchers and theorists, this correspondence explains why major and minor pentatonic and heptatonic scales are the most widely used scales in Western, Indian, Chinese, and Arabic music over the past several centuries (Gill & Purves, 2009; Sethares, 2005).
Gill and Purves (2009) observed that the component intervals of the most widely used scales throughout history and across cultures are those with the greatest over- all spectral similarity to a harmonic series. The intervals derived from possible scales were evaluated for their degree of similarity to a harmonic series. Similarity was expressed as a percentage of harmonic frequencies that the dyad holds in com- mon with a harmonic series defined by the greatest common divisor of the har- monic frequencies in the dyad.
For example, if the upper tone of an interval has partials at 300, 600, and 900 Hz, and the lower tone has partials at 200, 400, and 600 Hz (a perfect fifth), then the lowest common divisor is 100 Hz. A harmonic series with a fundamental frequency at 100 Hz and the highest partial at 900 Hz (matched to the highest par- tial in the dyad) has nine partials. Of those nine partials, six are found in the dyad. Therefore, the percentage similarity between the dyad and a harmonic series is 100(649) 5 67%.
Only intervals that can be produced within a one-octave range were analyzed, and all intervals that can be formed within a given scale contributed equally to the similarity value for that scale. Because pitch is a continuum and there are an infi- nite number of possible scales, the scale notes were restricted to 60 possible pitches within a one-octave range, separated from each other by roughly 20 cents (one fifth of a semitone). Given these 60 possible pitches, all possible five-tone (pentatonic) and seven-tone (heptatonic) scales were analyzed. This constraint resulted in 455,126 possible pentatonic scales and more than 45 million heptatonic scales.
Among this vast number of possible scales, those with the greatest overall similar- ity to the harmonic series were the very scales that are used most widely across cul- tures and throughout history.
The authors proposed that there is a biologically based preference for the har- monic series, and this preference is reflected in the scales that are used in music. An explanation with fewer assumptions, however, is that the spectral properties of the instruments used in a musical tradition influence the scales that are used (Sethares, 2005). Because a high proportion of instruments produce periodic sounds, including the human voice, most scales permit intervals that have spectral properties that are similar to the harmonic series (and hence are low in dissonance). However, traditions such as Javanese gamelan music that use inharmonic instru- ments have very different scales. The slendro and pelog scales permit intervals that are not similar to the harmonic series but that are predictable from the spectral properties of the instruments used in that tradition.»
Excerpts of
"Intervals and Scales" by
William Forde Thompson
in Deutsh, "the psychology of music", 3rd ed. Great, great book with tons of information regarding many, many aspects and lots of references.
«It is tempting to surmise that the pitch relations that occur between the partials of individual tones are unconsciously internalized and expressed artistically in the form of music and other creative arts. For example, Ross et al. (2007) proposed that human preference for the most common intervals found in music arises from experience with the way speech formants modulate laryngeal harmonics to create different phonemes. Their approach was to analyze the spectra of vowels in neutral speech uttered by speakers of American English and Mandarin, and to compare the harmonics with the greatest intensity within the first and second formants. This procedure resulted in a distribution of all second formant/first formant ratios derived from the spectra of 8 vowels uttered by American English speakers and 6 vowels uttered by Mandarin speakers. On average, 68% of the frequency ratios extracted matched intervals found in the chromatic scale. In contrast, only 36% of randomly selected pairs of harmonics in the same frequency range matched intervals found in the chromatic scale. This comparison illustrates that musical intervals are not merely correlated with pitch intervals found in any harmonic (periodic) waveform, but reflect a bias that is specific to speech. This speech-specific bias suggests that, “the human preference for the specific intervals of the chromatic scale, subsets of which are used worldwide to create music, arises from the routine experience of these intervals during social communication” (Ross et al., 2007, p. 9854, see also, Han, Sundararajan, Bowling, Lake, & Purves, 2011).
Most researchers, however, believe that the widespread use of certain intervals in music is encouraged by basic functions of the auditory system. First, Helmholtz (1877/1954) noted that the concept of roughness can be extended to combinations of complex tones, with the total amount of dissonance equal to some combination of the roughness generated by all interacting partials. When tones with harmonic spectra are combined, consonant intervals such as the octave and fifth have many partials in common, and those that are unique tend not to occur within a critical band and hence do not give rise to roughness. Complex tones that form dissonant intervals such as the diminished fifth (six semitones) have few partials in common, and some of their unique partials fall within the same critical band, giving rise to beating and roughness. Most significantly, the third and fourth partials of the lower pitch of a tritone interval are only one semitone removed from the second and third partials of the higher pitch of that interval.
Plomp and Levelt (1965) calculated predicted levels of consonance and dissonance for combinations of tones consisting of six harmonic partials and with the first tone fixed at 250 Hz (see also Hutchinson & Knopoff, 1978; Kameoka & Kuriyagawa, 1969a, 1969b; Terhardt, 1974). The results of these calculations illustrate consonance peaks at intervals commonly used in Western music: minor third (5:6), major third (4:5), perfect fourth (3:4), perfect fifth (2:3), major sixth (3:5) and octave (1:2). Kameoka and Kuriyagawa (1969a, 1969b) developed an algorithm for estimating the total amount of dissonance in dyads of pure and complex tones. Their model assumed that dissonance is additive and dependent on loudness, and they relied on the power law of psychological significance to combine dissonance levels from different dyads of harmonics, yielding a final measure referred to as absolute dissonance. These mathematical models of dissonance are broadly in agreement with judgments of dissonance, but predictions break down when more or fewer harmonics are included in the model (Mashinter, 2006; Vos, 1986).
Roughness may not be the sole determinant of consonance. Carl Stumpf (1890, 1898) suggested that consonance arises from tonal fusion—the tendency for combinations of tones to merge together. A related view is that consonance is enhanced by harmonicity—the extent to which the combined frequency components in an interval match a single harmonic series. Harmonicity is thought to play an important role in pitch perception. Terhardt (1974) proposed that the auditory system matches any incoming collection of partials, whether arising from a single tone or from combinations of tones, to the nearest harmonic template. If partials align with the harmonic series, the pitch is unambiguous. As the collection of partials deviates from harmonicity, the pitch becomes more ambiguous.
According to Terhardt, harmonic templates develop through repeated exposure to the harmonic spectra of speech sounds, which predominate in the acoustic environment throughout human development. A more general possibility is that repeated exposure to any acoustic stimulus leads to the development of a template for that stimulus. Chord templates, for example, could develop even for tone combinations that do not align with a harmonic series, as long as those chords are repeatedly encountered in a person’s musical environment. Such templates would allow trained musicians to identify highly familiar chords and may also underlie the perception of consonance and dissonance (McLachlan; 2011; see also, McLachlan & Wilson, 2010).»
«It is often suggested that the mechanisms underlying melody processing may be engaged for domains other than music, such as speech intonation (Ilie & Thompson, 2006, 2011; Miall & Dissanayake, 2003; Patel, 2003, 2008; Thompson et al., 2004; Thompson & Quinto, 2011). Ilie and Thompson (2006, 2011) found that manipulations of basic acoustic attributes such as intensity, pitch height, and pace (tempo) have similar emotional consequences whether imposed on musical or spoken stimuli. Thompson et al. (2004) showed that administering 1 year of piano lessons to a sample of children led to an increase in sensitivity to emotional connotations of speech prosody. Finally, there is convergence of statistical data on pitch changes that occur in speech and melodies. For example, Patel, Iversen, and Rosenberg (2006) compared the average pitch variability in French and English speech and folk songs. Spoken French had significantly lower pitch variability from one syllable to the next than spoken English, and a parallel difference was observed for French and English folk songs.»
«Recent investigations in our lab led by Paolo Ammirante provided evidence that pitch changes interact with timing mechanisms in the motor system (Ammirante & Thompson, 2010, 2012; Ammirante, Thompson, & Russo, 2011). These studies used a continuation-tapping paradigm, whereby participants tapped in synchrony with a pacing signal and then attempted to continue tapping at the same rate once the pacing signal was removed. To examine the role of pitch changes on the motor system, each tap in the continuation phase triggered a sounded tone. The pitches of these tones were then manipulated to form melodic patterns. Changes in pitch ystematically affected the timing of the taps that followed. Where a triggered tone implied faster melodic motion (larger melodic leaps within the same amount of time) the intertap interval (ITI) that the tone initiated was shorter (faster taps); where a triggered tone implied slower melodic motion, ITI was longer. That is, the implied melodic “motion” arising from intervals of different sizes was reflected in the timing of actions.
The role of movement in interval perception is also suggested by my research on the facial expressions of musicians (Thompson & Russo, 2007; Thompson, Russo, & Livingstone, 2010; Thompson, Russo, & Quinto, 2008). This work indicates that the perception of melodic intervals is significantly affected by the facial expressions of the musicians who are producing those intervals. Thompson et al. (2010) asked participants to watch a musician singing a melodic interval and to judge the size of that interval on a scale from 1 to 7. Only the face of the musician was visible. We first confirmed that the facial expressions alone, even with no sound available, could convey reliable information about the size of the melodic interval being sung (see also Thompson & Russo, 2007). Visual and auditory signals were then manipulated such that the visual signal taken from a large sung interval would be synchronized with the auditory signal taken from a small sung interval, and vice versa. Results confirmed that both auditory and visual channels influenced ratings of interval size. Facial measurements revealed that musicians made a number of subtle movements of the head and eyebrows, to which participants were highly sensitive. Additional manipulations confirmed that visual information arising from singers is automatically and unconsciously taken into consideration when evaluating interval size. Such findings underscore the complex and multimodal nature of music perception and suggest that analytic judgments of interval categories may provide a limited understanding of music experience (see also, Makeig, 1982).»
Related to Scales:
«The spectra of the instruments that predominate in a musical culture influence how those instruments are tuned and, hence, the scales that become associated with the music. Sethares (2005) noted a close correspondence between intervals, scales, and spectral properties of instruments. In traditions that rely primarily on instruments with inharmonic spectra, musical scales tend to be very different from Western diatonic major and minor scales, precisely because they permit the formation of the intervals that are found within the spectra of those inharmonic instruments.
The bonang is a musical instrument used in the Javanese gamelan and consists of a collection of small gongs. According to Sethares (2005), when the spectrum of a bonang is combined with a harmonic tone, it generates a dissonance curve with minima near the steps of an idealized slendro scale—one of the two essential scales in gamelan music. Another instrument used in gamelan music—the saron—consists of seven bronze bars placed on top of a resonating frame. When the spectrum of a saron is combined with a harmonic tone, it generates a dissonance curve with minima near the steps of a pelog scale—the other essential scale in gamelan music.
Based on such observations, Sethares (2005) argued that musical instruments co-evolved with tuning systems and scales. Musical instruments that are played in combination with one another must be tuned in a way that supports their combination, and this approach to tuning gives rise to the scales that shape musical structure. Once a tuning system is established, a musical tradition can also support new instruments that have spectral properties consistent with that tuning system. This process of co-evolution explains why gamelan scales and their instrument tim- bres, which are so unique, are rarely combined with the scales of Western music.
In traditions that mainly employ instruments with harmonic spectra, the tuning systems that support the formation of consonant intervals are also compatible with pentatonic (six note) and heptatonic (seven note, diatonic) scales. According to some researchers and theorists, this correspondence explains why major and minor pentatonic and heptatonic scales are the most widely used scales in Western, Indian, Chinese, and Arabic music over the past several centuries (Gill & Purves, 2009; Sethares, 2005).
Gill and Purves (2009) observed that the component intervals of the most widely used scales throughout history and across cultures are those with the greatest over- all spectral similarity to a harmonic series. The intervals derived from possible scales were evaluated for their degree of similarity to a harmonic series. Similarity was expressed as a percentage of harmonic frequencies that the dyad holds in com- mon with a harmonic series defined by the greatest common divisor of the har- monic frequencies in the dyad.
For example, if the upper tone of an interval has partials at 300, 600, and 900 Hz, and the lower tone has partials at 200, 400, and 600 Hz (a perfect fifth), then the lowest common divisor is 100 Hz. A harmonic series with a fundamental frequency at 100 Hz and the highest partial at 900 Hz (matched to the highest par- tial in the dyad) has nine partials. Of those nine partials, six are found in the dyad. Therefore, the percentage similarity between the dyad and a harmonic series is 100(649) 5 67%.
Only intervals that can be produced within a one-octave range were analyzed, and all intervals that can be formed within a given scale contributed equally to the similarity value for that scale. Because pitch is a continuum and there are an infi- nite number of possible scales, the scale notes were restricted to 60 possible pitches within a one-octave range, separated from each other by roughly 20 cents (one fifth of a semitone). Given these 60 possible pitches, all possible five-tone (pentatonic) and seven-tone (heptatonic) scales were analyzed. This constraint resulted in 455,126 possible pentatonic scales and more than 45 million heptatonic scales.
Among this vast number of possible scales, those with the greatest overall similar- ity to the harmonic series were the very scales that are used most widely across cul- tures and throughout history.
The authors proposed that there is a biologically based preference for the har- monic series, and this preference is reflected in the scales that are used in music. An explanation with fewer assumptions, however, is that the spectral properties of the instruments used in a musical tradition influence the scales that are used (Sethares, 2005). Because a high proportion of instruments produce periodic sounds, including the human voice, most scales permit intervals that have spectral properties that are similar to the harmonic series (and hence are low in dissonance). However, traditions such as Javanese gamelan music that use inharmonic instru- ments have very different scales. The slendro and pelog scales permit intervals that are not similar to the harmonic series but that are predictable from the spectral properties of the instruments used in that tradition.»
Play fair and square!
-
- Banned
- 12368 posts since 30 Apr, 2002 from i might peeramid
jan -jancivil wrote:I don't know what actual use is in it
http://xoxos.net/temp/arcs.mp3
where there is certainty,
and that is the application
this is an important announcement: america is not the entire world.
https://xoxos.bandcamp.com/track/deemin-thugs
deemins are all over, you realise?
truth on being told.
you come and go, you come and go. amitabha neither a follower nor a leader be tagore "where roads are made i lose my way" where there is certainty, consideration is absent.
-
- Banned
- 12368 posts since 30 Apr, 2002 from i might peeramid
make sure to leave the thread before you accidentally listen to any of that.jancivil wrote:just people
deemins, i tell ya they're all over.
you come and go, you come and go. amitabha neither a follower nor a leader be tagore "where roads are made i lose my way" where there is certainty, consideration is absent.
-
- KVRAF
- 4822 posts since 25 Jan, 2014 from The End of The World as We Knowit
right now, they're on Different Trains...but sooner or later It's Gonna Rain and clear the air.jancivil wrote:this is just people talking at cross-purposes
H E L P
Y O U R
F L O W
Y O U R
F L O W
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- KVRAF
- 25053 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
Listen to any of what? I actually had a fairly detailed post where I addressed quite a lot of the quite long most recent post of Musicologo's and this nearly dead machine restarted suddenly (and Chrome won't recall my reply). I am completely sure I don't have this kind of Disrespect coming from you just out of my skepticism of some really not at all well supported but extraordinary assertions.xoxos wrote:make sure to leave the thread before you accidentally listen to any of that.jancivil wrote:just people
deemins, i tell ya they're all over.
I listened to some of your track a few wks back or somewhat, didn't do a lot for me if you must know. That's not a criticism, just a response. Note: I don't believe in demons, really, I believe in human agency rather.
