![]() ![]() Another advantage of his approach is that his use of the musical score allowed for both the rhythm and melody of speech to be analyzed, both independently of one another and interactively. The key innovation of Steele’s approach from our standpoint is that he attempted to represent the pitches of all of the syllables in the sentences that he analyzed. He represented syllabic pitch as a relative-pitch system using a musical staff and a series of “peculiar symbols” that would represent the relative pitch and relative duration of each spoken syllable of an utterance. Steele laid out a detailed musical model of both the melody and rhythm of speech (we will only concern ourselves with the melodic concepts here). In fact, it was the approach that was adopted in the first theoretical treatise about English intonation, namely Joshua Steele’s An Essay Toward Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols, published in 1775. This is the approach that we aim to implement and test in the present study. However, is this simply a metaphorical allusion to musical melodies, or does speech actually have a similar system of pitch relations as music? If it does not, what is the nature of speech’s melodic system compared to that of music? A first step toward addressing such questions is to look at speech and music using the same analytical tools and to examine speech as a true melodic system comprised of pitches (tones) and intervals. It is common to refer to the pitch properties of speech as “speech melody” in the study of prosody ( Bolinger, 1989 Nooteboom, 1997 Ladd, 2008). The use of a musical score ultimately has the potential to combine speech rhythm and melody into a unified representation of speech prosody, an important analytical feature that is not found in any current linguistic approach to prosody. Our basic observation is that speech is atonal. Doing so allowed us to quantify local and global pitch-changes associated with declarative, imperative, and interrogative sentences, and to explore the melodic dynamics of these sentence types. The fundamental-frequency trajectories of the recorded items were converted from hertz into semitones, averaged across speakers, and transcribed into musical scores of relative pitch. We tested the validity of this approach by recording native speakers of Canadian English reading unfamiliar test items aloud, spanning from single words to full sentences containing multiple intonational phrases. We present here an alternative model using musical notation, which has the advantage of representing the pitch of all syllables in a sentence as well as permitting a specification of the intervallic excursions among syllables and the potential for group averaging of pitch use across speakers. Current phonetic and phonological approaches to speech melody either assign localized pitch targets that impoverish the acoustic details of the pitch contours and/or merely highlight a few salient points of pitch change, ignoring all the rest of the syllables. ![]() ![]() We present here a musical approach to speech melody, one that takes advantage of the intervallic precision made possible with musical notation. Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada. ![]()
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