Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/10/i-just-learned-about-the-delig.html
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I don’t think this “illusion” is an illusion. The speaker’s ‘notes’ and phrasing is tonal, with the last note (unresolved) feeding ‘logically’ back to the first note (rondo-like) and with the repetitioning merely forcing the listener to discover the ‘music’. I don’t think this is anything special; the speaker’s phrasing simply came out musically the instant it was said.
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I never get tired of this
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I had a similar feeling about it. I wonder if they did a test where someone else recorded the phrase (who had not heard the original recording of it) and then repeated the experiment.
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I wonder why it doesn’t work for rap and hiphop and whatnot. You’d think it would.
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I think it’s context. Must speech is quite musical, but you interpret it as nonmusical in a normal speaking context. Repeat it a few times, which is something songs often do, and you start to hear the notes.
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And how strange the change from major to minor.
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“In our final demonstration, speech is made to be heard as song, and this is achieved without transforming the sounds in any way, or by adding any musical context, but simply by repeating a phrase several times over.”
Yeah but simply repeating the phrase is exactly what creates musical context: meter, rhythm, pitch, articulation. I’m missing the illusion here.
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Other factors I wish Deutsch had included in her analysis:
- this phrase can easily be heard as a series of iambs (with one trailing short beat), and is being heard by test subjects whose English-language culture’s poetry and song is frequently based on iambs (though I don’t have the percentages on that)
- or, if interpreted as a series of trochees with a pickup at the beginning, how might that change the culturally-influenced analysis of the phrase as “lyrical”?
- the phrase consists of one short vowel then six long vowels. Long vowels do lend themselves more easily to elongation/singing. Try a phrase that’s all (or mostly) syllables with short vowels–are these perceived as less lyrical & more percussive?
- the middle five of the seven syllables are diphthongs, which have acoustical spectra that move, adding the the perception of melodic motion even if the fundamental pitch of the voice remains the same. Contrast with a phrase that has only monophthongs?
That’s all I’ve got off the top of my head…
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Illusions are usually visual, I thought, like the McGurk effect:
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This was a lot of effort put into investigating nothing.
It’s all in the delivery. If you loop a bland, computer-generated speech sample it’s never going to sound like singing.
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I recommend Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, the best version (to my mind) being an A-team ensemble which included world-renowned pianist Mitsuko Uchida, and German actress Barbara Sukowa at the Salzburg Music Festival. It’s a hoot!
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I believe I speak for many of us when I say ZOMG! WTF! [Listens to the audio samples accompanying the report write up] OMG!
And Olivier Messiaen used birdsongs!
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I have looked all over the place trying to find an audio example of this, but back in the 90s the Mac AV, the first to have speech synthesis, came with an example text file that you could make it read. It was “you just won a sweepstakes and you won’t have to pay income tax again”, and it sang it. Sadly, the soothing lullaby appears lost to time.
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I didn’t know until today that there are exceptions:
Lol. I actually sing this to myself sometimes. Talk about behaving strangely, especially to those around me who have no idea what the hell I’m singing.
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Steve Reich’s Different Trains takes beautiful advantage of this.
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Somewhere a copyright troll just hatched a scheme.
