Archive for the ‘music’ Category
Language teaching via the medium of aerobics
Posted on
July 22nd, 2007 by
Simon Greenhill
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The sound of music is derived from the sound of language
Posted on
May 26th, 2007 by
Simon Greenhill
No Comments
The tone intervals in music sound good because they’re linked to the ones we use in our languages:
Throughout history and across cultures, humans have created music using pitch intervals that divide octaves into the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. Why these specific intervals in music are preferred, however, is not known. In the present study, we analyzed a database of individually spoken English vowel phones to examine the hypothesis that musical intervals arise from the relationships of the formants in speech spectra that determine the perceptions of distinct vowels. Expressed as ratios, the frequency relationships of the first two formants in vowel phones represent all 12 intervals of the chromatic scale. Were the formants to fall outside the ranges found in the human voice, their relationships would generate either a less complete or a more dilute representation of these specific intervals. These results imply that human preference for the intervals of the chromatic scale arises from experience with the way speech formants modulate laryngeal harmonics to create different phonemes.
Full article: Musical intervals in speech, EurekAlert! overview.
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