Music & Language Studies

Lee, Christopher S. and Neil P. McMangus Todd. “Towards an auditory account of speech rhythm: application of a model of the auditory ‘primal sketch’ to two multi-language corpora, Cognition 93 (2004): 225-254.

Kulka, Jiří. “Leoš Janáček’s Aesthetic Thinking,” Rozpravy Československé Akademie Věd 100:1 (1990), pp. 3-75.

Sampson, Geoffrey. Empirical Linguistics. London/New York: Continuum. 2001.

A societies page has been added, with links to the home pages for each group.

Anacrusis is one of those few terms that is shared between musicology and linguistics. The word derives from the Greek meaning an “up-stroke” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989, s.v. anacrusis). Musically, an anacrusis has been described as “[o]ne or more notes preceding the first metrically strong beat of a phrase; upbeat, pickup.” (Randel, 1986, s.v. Anacrusis) Linguistically, the term has similarly been used to refer to a series of unaccented syllables at the beginning of a stretch of speech, normally uttered with a quickened tempo (Chafe, 1994, p. 59; Cruttenden, 1996, p. 21; Du Bois, Cumming, Schuetze-Coburn, & Paolino, 1992, p. 100). It is an open but empirically testable question whether or not anacrusis in music is normally characterized by this same quickening of tempo.

References

Chafe, W. (1994). Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

Cruttenden, A. (1996). Intonation, 2nd Ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Du Bois, J., Cumming, S., Schuetze-Coburn, S. & Paolino, D., Eds. (1992). Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics, v. 4: Discourse Transcription. Santa Barbara: University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Linguistics.

Randel, D. (1986). New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Need to add some analyses of Laurie Berkner (“the only thing…”) from “I really love to dance”, and Louis Armstrong’s rendition of “Hello Dolly” as illustrations of melodic and rhythmic ambiguity in music. Possibly add others to this roster. Use screenshots and sound clips to illustrate these concepts.

For Berkner analysis, also compare to a few speech examples of the word “only”. Review and describe the literature on pitch change as a result of physiology, as in closing to the nasal “n”. Discuss the issues for a transcriber (or perceiver) in determining the relevance and salience of such transient pitch change. Should we notate every detail?

Discuss issues of level of detail, broad versus narrow transcription. Use metaphor of vision: examination with the naked eye, magnifying glass, microscope.

The bibliography Song, Speech, and Brain now contains all annotated entries from my 2000 annotated chronology of the literature. The current version is organized by author, whereas the original version was chronologically-based. A link to the original is contained on the page linked above. I will continue adding entries to this bibliography.

RIECKER, Axel, et al. “Opposite Hemispheric Lateralization Effects During Speaking and Singing at Motor Cortex, Insula and Cerebellum.” NeuroReport 11/9 (2000):1997-2000.

The authors discuss previous findings which indicate the production of language (words) and the production of melodies may be handled by “different cerebral networks.” (1997-1998) However, they point out that speaking and singing may in fact encompass both components, words and melodies combined. They contend that

in order to test the hypothesis that different networks support the generation of speech and melodies, sound structure and tonal aspects of acoustic communication must be teased apart. (1998)

That is, it is necessary to distinguish between aspects of intonation which convey purely linguistic information (i.e. type of utterance: statement, question, command; or, lexical stress: distinguishing PRESENT or CORRELATE [noun] from PRESENT or CORRELATE [verb]) from those communicating emotional cues. For the present study, eighteen healthy right-handed subjects were asked to speak the months of the year, and to sing a well-known instrumental tune without lyrics (derived from W. A. Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and familiar to all subjects), while undergoing fMRI. Additionally, in order to control for possible differences between overt and covert modalities, each of the tasks were performed aloud and silently. Extensive analysis of variation was conducted across experimental conditions. Findings reported specific localization of activity during tasks, which differed for each condition, including overt vs. covert performance. The effects were strongest for covert singing and silent speech, producing clear opposite lateralization effects in the right motor cortex/posterior inferior frontal gyrus and left cerebellum for song, and the opposite for speech. Bilateral activation in these regions was noted for overt tasks, with moderate lateralizations corresponding to those for covert performance. They conclude:

Two opposite cerebral networks comprising motor cortex, anterior insula, and cerebellum subserve speaking and singing, respectively. Since activation of the insula revealed to be bound to overt performance, this structure seems to mediate actual implementation of speech (words) and melody (tunes) patterns in terms of temporal spatial coordination of vocal tract musculature. (2000)

LIBERMAN, Alvin M., and Ignatius G. Mattingly. “The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Revised.” Cognition 21 (1985): 1-36.

A highly involved and influential paper. This is a revision of the motor theory which had been developed during the early 1950s by Liberman and colleagues. Essentially the motor theory provides that the object of speech perceptions is not the acoustic elements of an utterance per se, but rather the productive gestures by which the auditory elements arise. The reason for such a theory is the simple fact that listeners consistently produce phonological categorization with a seeming disregard for the great variety in the actual stimuli that prompt them. It is the contention of the theory that phonological elements are naturally distorted, relative to the surrounding phonemes, on the basis of the physics of the vocal production. It is an implicit analysis of these distortions that leads a listener to classify sounds, in terms of the vocal procedures involved.

BUCHANAN, Tony W. Kai Lutz, Shahram Mirzazade, Karsten Specth, N. Jon Shah, Karl Zilles, and Lutz Jäncke. “Recognition of Emotional Prosody and Verbal Components of Spoken Language: An fMRI study.” Cognitive Brain Research 9 (2000): 227-38.

The current study utilized a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technique to identify the neural areas involved in the recognition of emotional prosody and phonemic characteristics of spoken language by normal listeners. Ten right-handed male subjects, lacking any known neurological disorders, were presented with the recorded words: BOWER, POWER, DOWER, TOWER, spoken by a native-English speaker in one of four emotional tones of voice: happy, sad, angry, neutral. The stimuli remained the same (though in random order) for all conditions. What differed were the task requirements. In each case, the subjects were to depress a button upon detection of the target stimulus. There were four conditions: (1) identify POWER in any of its emotional forms; (2) identify BOWER in any of its emotional forms; (3) identify any of the words in a happy tone; and (4) identify any of the words in a sad tone. This is similar in intent to the study by Bartholomeus (1974), but more elegant in experimental design, and avoiding the limitations of the dichotic listening paradigm. In both the present experiment and Bartholomeus’ the same stimuli were used with different tasks in order to test whether requirements on attention impact neural processing, in particular whether they alter laterality effects. The findings in the current case were affirmative, and defined the regions of the brain far more precisely than is possible with dichotic listening. The results demonstrate two major findings: first, bilateral activation during both phonetic and emotional detection tasks, in comparison with baseline (resting state) activity; and second,

significant lateralization of cortical activity during the perception of both emotional prosody and the perception of verbal characteristics of words (236).

In particular, it was found that detection of emotion tasks produced significantly greater activity in right frontal regions than corresponding verbal tasks; and verbal tasks involved significantly greater left frontal activity than emotion detection tasks with the same input. The authors point out that localization of activity in the frontal lobes is counter to the findings of some clinical studies, which would predict lateralized activity in temporoparietal regions. However, they explain:

This discrepancy most likely arises from the inherent differences between experiments involving patients with specific lesions and functional imaging experiments. While studies involving patients with lesions are able to demonstrate those areas critical for a specific function, functional neuroimaging studies are only able to demonstrate those areas that are involved in a specific function (234).

DOHERTY, Colin P., M Fitzsimons, B. Asenbauer, and H. Staunton. “Discrimination of Prosody and Music by Normal Children.” European Journal of Neurology 6 (1999): 221-6.

In a very ambitious study, Doherty and colleagues set out on the first systematic attempt to study receptive processing by normal children of both affective and linguistic prosody, as well as receptive processing of affective cues in instrumental music. The study consisted of five separate tasks, combining various cross-modal methodologies. The first two experiments contained the presentation of recorded pairs of compound nouns, either repeated or followed by their corresponding noun phrases (i.e. blackboard/black board; racquet ball/racquetball). In the first experiment, the children were asked to say if the two presented stimuli were same or different. In the second, they were asked to point at the appropriate picture from a choice of two, corresponding to the meaning each presented separate example. The third task was to test children’s ability to distinguish types of utterance (statement, question, command) on the basis of the relevant intonation contours. Sentences were devised which could fit any of the contours and whose intent could be inferred only by such cues. The final two experiments consisted in the recorded presentation of four sentences spoken in one of three emotional ways (happy, sad, angry), and 24 examples of emotional music to be judged according to the same three emotions. In both cases, the same face pictures paradigm as in experiment two was used. Their findings indicated early and reliable success with emotional cues in instrumental music, but much weaker and slower trends for comprehending affective cues in speech. They conclude that

adult-like ability in affective cue discrimination may develop later than the corresponding linguistic ability

suggesting that

affective prosody may not be as important to the child as previous thought

and further that comprehension for

emotional cues in music develops earlier than prosodic affective perception

suggesting

that music and prosody are not, in fact, comodular

in the brain. (225)

PATEL, Aniruddh D. and Isabelle Peretz. “Is Music Autonomous from Language? A Neuropsychological Appraisal.” In Perception and Cognition of Music, Irène Deliège and John Sloboda, eds., 191-215. Hove (UK): Psychology Press, 1997.

Presents a thoroughgoing overview of the question in its title. Explains many of the experiments and evidence, along with possible confounds to the resulting data. Suggests areas where continuing research is needed, in particular attempts to isolate neural specificity for speech versus non-speech domains. Covers the literature regarding memory for words and melody in song, and argues that a greater diversity of experimental data is required before firm conclusions can be drawn on the relation between musical and linguistic mental codes in song. In general, suggests that essential research is only now in the offing, and that many areas of inquiry remain to be examined.

The evidence reviewed in this chapter suggests that “music” and “language” are not independent mental faculties, but labels for complex sets of processes, some of which are shared and some different. Neuropsychology allows the empirical delineation of the boundaries between these domains, as well an exploration of their overlap.

…[N]europsychological evidence suggests that the processing of pitch contour employs some of the same neural resources in music and language, while the processing of tonality appears to draw on resources used uniquely by music.

Numerous other areas of convergence and divergence between music and language await more thorough investigation. (p. 208)

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