Abstract

The composer Leos Janácek (1854-1928) has been noted for his interest in speech melodies. Little discussion has focused however on the field methods that he used in gathering them, nor on the products themselves. Janácek spent more than three decades, transcribing thousands of what he termed nápevky mluvy [tunelets of speech] in standard musical notation. The record that remains of these efforts is impressive both for its volume and its quality, as well as for its potential to reveal aspects of the perceptual overlap between music and language. Heretofore his pioneering efforts in the study of speech prosody and music perception have neither been recognized nor acknowledged. The present study provides a background for and an overview of the transcriptions, along with comparative musicological and linguistic analyses of the materials presented. With this analysis as a starting point, I indicate promising avenues for further collaborations between linguists and musicologists, seeking an integrated theory of music and language cognition.

Abstract

Music and speech both feature structured melodic patterns, yet these patterns  are rarely compared using empirical methods.  One reason for this has been a lack of tools which allow quantitative comparisons of spoken and musical pitch sequences.  Recently, a new model of speech intonation perception has been proposed based on  principles of pitch perception in speech.  The “prosogram” model converts a sentence's fundamental frequency contour into a sequence of discrete tones and glides.  This sequence is meant to represent a listener's perception of pitch in connected speech.  This article briefly describes the prosogram and suggests a few ways in which it can be used to compare the structure of spoken and musical melodies.

Abstract

Bolinger, Ohala, Morton and others have established that vocal pitch height is perceived to be associated with social signals of dominance and submissiveness: higher vocal pitch is associated with submissiveness, whereas lower vocal pitch is associated with social dominance.  An experiment was carried out to test this relationship in the perception of non-vocal melodies.  Results show a parallel situation in music: higher-pitched melodies sound more submissive (less threatening) than lower-pitched melodies.

Abstract

Increasingly, the Arts and Humanities and Science fields are finding common ground, as illustrated in Huron et al.'s fine paper.  My commentary discusses the origin of the idea that pitch and motivation have an evolved relationship.  Their finding that loudness and aggression are related has been little studied in animals and I suggest an explanation from the biological literature.