Harmonic function of speech

[Musicologo]

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/142 ... Speech.mp4

Any thoughts or evidences about this? I've been reading a lot of Patel, Diana Deutsch, even searched for the Jordania articles and couldn't find evidence about this, still the argument seems interesting and, at least in western societies he seems to have a point.

Resume: we set can find our natural tonic (that changes everyday and even fluctuates during the day), by listening to the articles and propositions and pronouns. We then create meaning in minor thirds (whine or tease), major thirds (happyness), fifhts (questioning), etc...

Then, we also have functions regarding transposition. If we have a certain tonic that is arpeggiated in our "normal tone", we then have a preacher/auctioneer speech a fourth above our "normal tone"; we are aggressive a fifth above, or threatening a fourth below the tonic, and we are in danger/panic a seventh above the tonic, etc..

[MadBrain]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation ... in_English

[Musicologo]

Yes, that article is part of the "problem". Prosody and intonation are a great deal with it. The issue, although is to verify if the "low", "high", "very high", etc pitches actually can be described between themselves by a diatonic/tonal relation as described by Pattison.

[jancivil]

it seems like a bit of a stretch to fit the two things together so neatly. I think that musical intervals followed speech intonation, more than the other way 'round; although I could accept some cross-generation over time.

I guess strong 'intervals' = forceful expression in general but I'm not hearing perfect 4ths/5ths in speech and I would be horrified if I did really. Let alone hearing major scales, good god.

I have a kind of aversion to this sort of thing I have to admit.

[MadBrain]

IRL, pitch levels when speaking have much too much sliding up or down to have a well defined pitch, especially the ones that aren't "default medium level". Plus you tend to have the global level falling or rising gradually throughout the sentence.

[Musicologo]

The way I'm re-seeing this now is: Our auditory system and brain perceives cues in the way another person is talking so we can infer if they are "normal", "mad", "preaching", "desperate", etc...

How are we perceiving those cues? What differs from one "tone to each other"? And mainly what differs from these attitudes from one another it seems to be a "relative pitch"... like we all have a "normal pitch" and then when we are mad we talk "higher" when we are desperate we talk even "higher" when we are threatening we talk "lower".

And we are giving names to these "functions" - "mad", "threatening", "preaching" and trying to co-relate theses functions with melodic intervals.

It seems to be a fair ground base here, intuitively I was able to "hear" these functions around me when people are talking to me.

I'd say there's a background for a systematic study if these correlactions are accidental, cultural and if they are more stable than we think they are.

[tapper mike]

Not pitch, more likely attack, decay, resonance and mostly velocity.

[Shabdahbriah]

Interesting read/listen...

I happen to have a mellifluous/melodious "announcer" (radio/voice-over/ or character, et al) voice, and can pretty-much use it how-so-ever I wish within (higher) 'pitch' limits, imposed (mainly) from 50+ years of smoking.

That said, there is some truth to what I heard here, at least with regard to how we "perceive" a tone to "infer" a certain "emotional" quality. My personal 'favorite' is someone trying to sound "sincere"... you know the type.

I noted that in the audio linked above (which I have not finished listening to), the reference to "whining" and "teasing", which are both (in my experience) frequently more "nasal", than "normal" speech tones.

... correlactions are accidental, cultural and if they are more stable than we think they are.

This would be a very interesting study, although concrete "conclusions" would be dependent upon the "groups" (participants) tested, I would think... for example, how does one take into account/distinguish/correlate, ethnically regional/cultural "speech" patterns, in contrast to (say) those which deviate from that 'influence' (norm), and are consciously or unconsciously practiced until 'habitual'?

A lot of "speech patterns" are mimicked, many to the point of being (or appearing) 'contrived', or 'affectatious', e.g. "gansta/thug" (speak), "valley-girls" (eeeew), stoner "surfer-dudes", or even "flamingly" gay men, for example.

Interesting possibilities, nevertheless.

MadBrain, tapper mike, and jancivil made valid points (IMO).

[2c]

[memyselfandus]

interesting

[jancivil]

IRL, pitch levels when speaking have much too much sliding up or down to have a well defined pitch, especially the ones that aren't "default medium level". Plus you tend to have the global level falling or rising gradually throughout the sentence.

I wish there was a youtube up of the original version of Zappa's The Dangerous Kitchen, where the vocal ('meltdown' is what they called the style) was transcribed and then performed on the guitar by Steve Vai, but it completely refutes that notion.

Pitch can be defined in terms other than 12tET. Sure, a portamento is not usefully boiled down to a series of individual points but we land on things we totally can describe as pitches.

[Musicologo]

Do you have a better idea to define pitch beyond 12Tet OR frequency?... Either you map the parameter onto a discrete or a continuum scale with a certain range..
either that or you find a "descriptive/qualitative parameter"... other than that I'm not sure how to define it...

Of course, Cantometrics (Lomax) anyone? We can throw a series of another parameters. I don't exactly know if they blur the issue or clarify it.

Whenever I think of voice and the flow of discourse or even sung melody, I find it extremely hard to map it convincingly. Yet, it seems extremely easy to mimic it with some woods or reeds, so we know what we are doing, we are just lacking an effective way to verbalize/systematize it. Working also on that though. If you want to give ideas they are welcome.

[jancivil]

Well, such a statement as 'ok, 12tET is the one way that pitch can be or ever has been notated' will not turn out to be a true statement. The word 'defined' as though to mean 'it must be within 12 equal to an octave' is also just not a good definition of 'defining pitch'. So, should we nail an in-between note on an instrument we have obviously defined it.
I prefer statements that are true to this kind of assertion.

People have been defining pitch with other systems for a while.

For food for thought, I have gone into Arabic systems (some links on this board) where ratios and distances building string instruments were the way of defining pitch that is not 12tET. If you go back to the very foundation for intonation, there are quite smaller intervals they seemed to think had a point. The Arabic system, few of the pitches in it would in fact conform. They have a notation system for it.
- and I don't know what the goal is here in terms of notation. I would tend to use words after a point. My days of notating for someone are more or less over. I use non-12tEt a lot, I write lines in an 'harmonic' environment that I understand and are defined without having to convey it to another person fortunately. There is little point in defining a portamento; for trombone it's pretty continuous, vs what happens in the clarinet gliss at the start of Rhapsody in Blue. Does that need to be spelled out? I don't reckon it helps anybody.

Now it should be noted there are certain ways of thinking about 12 tones that amount to more than twelve. If you take Db and C# as functioning differently, such as Db descending to C and C# pulling up to D, here is a convention that is actually taught in school, although I would expect disagreement and a lack of consensus, such as I have seen people say that Mozart was taught the opposite of that. And there are four rather than three within the scope of a tone. On the sarod for an example there are known ways to do a raga that are described in language and shown as a place on the fingerboard, and they seem to know what to do, quite outside this limitation. It isn't any one row of tones, this raga has these inflections, the other raga has those. There are people that sought to define all of this in ratios and a system, Danielou and his 53 has found a lot of acceptance.

[woggle]

there's no need to define some sort of anchored pitch relations - you could just as easily make a claim to an hierarchical partition of the pitch space in language and look for universals in the same way people did with colour space. eg - every language partitions pitch into at least 3 divisions, then some into 5, 8 , 12 etc etc
and meaning maps as a set of primary meanings that all language groups use, rolling out subsequent additions systematically blah blah blah

But I couldn't listen to the talk - it was just so unsubstantiated and the idea that people have a tonic that can be mapped - and is mapped - to some sort of western pitch scale is silly. Obviously people have anatomical constraints that determine the sorts of pitches they produce. It is fairly reasonable and unsurprising to think that people will adjust their pitch/voice quality according to psychological states. We all know that. Attempts at control (eg not reveal they are nevous through the voice) in most people willl also be apparent in things like reduced modulation. But the idea that say a Warlpiri speaker will use minor thirds as some sort of signifier is really silly - or at least requires some very solid evidence

[woggle]

Visage was the big introduction into classical music for me in the late 70s

[jancivil]

I couldn't listen to the talk - it was just so unsubstantiated and the idea that people have a tonic that can be mapped - and is mapped - to some sort of western pitch scale is silly.

I saw something like this here on this board once, it is absurd to try and limit speech to an anchored pitch regimen. It smacks of the kind of thing early in the last system where people wanted the western music to be a natural, ideal thing. Furtwangler stated a lot of total rubbish towards this end.

However what I just said about the sarod is true and this is instrumental music that emulates vocal music.