Musical intervals in speech?

[Derek]

Does anyone know of a study that shows our speech to contain musical intervals, perhaps even cadences? Imagine a newscaster (or anyone speaking an entire sentence to a crowd). The "melody" of their voice goes up and down quite a bit! When the sentence finishes, even the pitch of the person's voice gives our ear a cue to the end of the sentence.

[pianonut]

i think our speech patterns would show quite a wide variety of very small intervals.  i think the closest we get on the piano would be moving from 1/2 step to 1/2 step.

it WOULD make an interesting song, to sort of follow an old tape of Chick Hern and set it to music.

[tenn]

Record yourself and play it backwards. Beautiful. Well mine is anyway!

[galonia]

In ear tests, one is usually required to identify intervals which are played ascending.  The first time I had to start identifying them descending, my teacher at the time said, minor 3rds are the easiest to hear, because you hear it all the time in playgrounds when children call out, "Muuuuum - my", in their sing-song voices.

A few years ago, I was sent on a writing course, and the instructor spoke about punctuation marks, and it was actually quite musical the way she talked about it.  Unlike in school, where we get taught the rules of when to use each punctuation mark, she spoke about reading aloud and how punctuation marks are instructions for the way a voice is used - e.g. comma is a pause, semicolon is a longer pause, full-stop even longer, question mark is a pause as well as voice rising in pitch, exclamation mark also indicates change in pitch in voice, etc etc

I don't see any difference between language and music - to me, I learn them both in the same way.

[tenn]

There's a CD you should check out called "Four thousand years of Korean folk music"
In particular track 9 "P'ansori Shimchiongga"
According to the blurb "P'ansori is the singing of long dramatic songs...... The singer uses gestures, speaks and sings in a dramatic style"
All I can say is if Koreans talk like this I could listen to them all day. It really is beautiful. They use a lot of vibrato and glissandi alternating with long smooth notes.

[Daevren]

I think both the Thai and Vietnamese language use different pitches in their languages. I think research has been done that shows more of those people have perfect pitch.

[Floristan]

Pitch/intonation is essential to Chinese.  Maybe someone who knows Chinese can explain this.  I believe there are 5 pitch levels in Chinese, and that altering the pitch often alters the meaning of the word.

All American English is much more sing-song-y than "Oxbridge" British English.  It's especially noticeable if one compares an American network newscaster to a BBC newscaster. 

In some languages, like German, a flat intonation is encouraged.

[possom46]

I saw a programme once where someone was teaching japanese english. To speak the sentence correctly, the instructor used a curved piece of cardboard which he ran his hand over up and down to show the pupils the pitch of the words in the sentence. Otherwise they would speak the whole thing at the same pitch. It does make you think how much is involved in speaking a language.

[Daevren]

I think I once heard someone say mandarin chinese has 5 pitches and cantonese  chinese has only 3, making mandrin english more melodic and maybe more beautiful.

[galonia]

I speak both Cantonese and Mandarin - Cantonese has far more tones - about 8 or 9, I think.  Mandarin has 4 tones, plus a "neutral" tone.  I also speak an obscure rural Chinese dialect (in order to communicate with one set of grandparents).

But it's not so much the tones - I mean, when you first learn to speak one of these dialects, you might learn them officially - but the more you speak and listen, you realise they change a little depending on context and the actual syllable you're producing... it's impossible to explain here unless I actually studied linguistics (one of my friends is a researcher in linguistics and he would know the official words to describe it, but probably hardly anyone here would understand him!)

I suggest you listen to different people speaking your own native language with different accents - e.g. English - the different accents are caused by different rendering of vowels, different lengths of time spent on vowels and consanants, AND slightly different pitches used for some syllables.  But you can still understand this different accent, right?  Well, most the time, I suppose.     In the same way, if you mispronounce a few tones in Chinese, although this can occasionally cause some funny meanings (or even offensive, or scary ones!) - in general, people will still understand what you're saying.

I don't think just because you speak a "tonal" language (i.e. the meaning of the word depends on the tone) it makes you more likely to have perfect pitch.  I've heard people speak Chinese dailects in a fairly flat way.  I also know Chinese people who are completely tone deaf - they speak perfectly fine, but they can't sing to save their lives, no matter how much they try and how much assistance they get - it's quite weird.

[lostinidlewonder]

Yeah, like when people, especially women,  say with a sigh. "Oh Well." Or when people nextdoor have a midnight screaming argument. The noise isnt constant loud. It comes in waves and pulses. Or when a little kid is really excited and tries to explain something, high pitched and dips lower in pitch when they emphasise the important parts, or.... everything is musical isnt it?

[cadenz]

there was this programme on tv about the holocaust and music from auschwitz not too long ago. and it had this one piece where it would play recordings of people who were from auschwitz camp (i think) saying some phrases over and over and the instruments would play a melody (rather atonal sounding) which was what the voice sounded like.

[tenn]

there was this programme on tv about the holocaust

That was a sad programme. Anything to do with the holocaust is sad. It finished with Bach's Chaconne for solo violin. Isn't that the most perfect and sublime piece of music.

I often wondered why chinese words don't change their meaning when they're sung. The pitch is quite high in Chinese opera. I'm sure it's much higher than the spoken word. Accent also has to be more than just pitch combinations, otherwise we'd all have perfect French accents singing Faure.
By the way Galonia, is it true that the symbol for an argument in Chinese is a picture of three women?
 

[galonia]

I often wondered why chinese words don't change their meaning when they're sung. The pitch is quite high in Chinese opera. I'm sure it's much higher than the spoken word.

By the way Galonia, is it true that the symbol for an argument in Chinese is a picture of three women?
 

The pitches aren't absolute, otherwise any sort of song wouldn't work (including things like Canto-pop  )  Besides, with Beijing opera, it's not so much the pitch is high, as the fact that the singing tone is more nasal.

The symbol with three women represents adultery.  It's not a good word.

[nanabush]

Imagine being so skilled, you could write the key someone is talking in lol... Like they talk usually around a certain pitch, unless their voice is cracking like mad.. I can't imagine what sheet music to someone speaking would look like, no meter and a whole bunch of accidentals... I have an idea..

[shasta]

I read a study somewhere on this:

When people in the stadium of a sports game yell in unison - - - specifically in football (american) when the fans yell "AAAAHHH" and raise their arm in the air prior to the place-kicker kicking off - - - the note they have collectively settled on is almost invariably F.  Weird!

[musanim]

This article

    Poem in the key of what
    https://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003651.html

is related and may be of interest.

[mikey6]

I was playing in a production of L'enfant et les sortilege and just got home.  Mum asked me something and I said 'ma!' - my pitch dropped a 4th at the end of the 'a', anyone familiar with the last bar of l'enfant will understand.  (freudian slip sortta)

[invictious]

For some reason..I speak in tritones and dim. 2nds....

I AM DA DEVIL.