Music & Language Studies

Jonathan G. Secora Pearl
Linguistics Colloquium, May 18, 2006
University of California—Santa Barbara

Abstract
Music and language are twin aspects of civilization, found in all known human cultures, across time and place, embracing us from our earliest days until the ends of our lives. Speaking and singing are found everywhere and everywhen. Wherein lies the distinction?

The greatest difficulty in answering this foundational question is that we are often deceived by written forms of music and language into believing our object dwells within them, rather than in the sounds that inspire them. On the page, these materials appear far more distinct than they do in sound. Text without context is a world without air; yet context alone remains the unanalyzable chaos of everyday experience. The trick is to find the balance between too much detail, and too little.

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The slide show and handout for Jonathan’s presentation at the 2007 annual meeting of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS) in Siegen has been added to the website.

Call For Papers

Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship
When: July 27-29, 2007
Where: Brevard, North Carolina

Panel: “Disciplining Entrepreneurship in Music Higher Education”

America’s music schools are adopting entrepreneurship education at a steady rate. However, the lack of an accepted definition or conception of “entrepreneurship” has spawned a diverse range of curricular structuring. Concurrently, a lack of scholarship concerning these efforts has buttressed perceptions of “entrepreneurship education in music” as “business education for music students.”

With new and progressive literature on entrepreneurship emerging from the economic, cognitive and social sciences, many Music Entrepreneurship programs (and students) have yet to reap the rewards of this scholarship. As this field emerges, developing a solid intellectual foundation is critical to the success and sustainability of these efforts.

The Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship invites papers that address Entrepreneurship education in American music training. We are particularly interested in papers that explore:

1) Theoretical or philosophical structuring
2) Curricular and program design
3) New approaches to pedagogy
4) Interdisciplinary connections
5) Conceptualizations of “Entrepreneurship” in the context of Music training
6) Continuities and discontinuities of entrepreneurship education in business and arts curricula

Please send a 250 word abstract by email to archlute@mail.utexas.edu.
Deadline for abstracts is May 1, 2007. Papers will be limited to 10 minutes (approximately) 8 pages, double spaced. Inquiries concerning submissions are encouraged.

I had an idea recently, in the vein of sound design, or score writing for movies, games, what have you. I’m wondering if anyone is working on this. The idea is simple: extract certain salient patterns of melody and rhythm from the speech of an individual, transforming those patterns directly into musical motives, to serve both as leitmotifs and as materials for variations and development.

I think for instance of my two-year old the other morning. He woke up cranky, awaking his older brother, who came to our bedroom, and announced the situation, while crawling into bed with us. I invited the two-year-old to join us, to which he replied:

which he repeated numerous times. I realize, of course, that this is a paradigm for dismissal or dislike. The pattern is clear, large rise (greater than an octave) at the beginning, a short pick up to a medium-length (or possibly long) accented noted, followed by rapid descent and fall in amplitude. The number of syllables/notes following the accent is mostly irrelevant, as long as it is at least three, it would seem. What a great motive for a character.

Is anyone doing this sort of thing today? Extracting real motives from snippets of speech, transforming them into musical motives, then using them as leitmotifs and fodder for musical development?

A link has been added (on my CV page) to the target article “In Time with the Music,” by Clayton, Sager, & Will, which includes an invited commentary by me entitled, “Cognitive vs. Physical Entrainment”. The article appeared in the first edition of ESEM CounterPoint, which seems to have since folded. The link above appears on the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts. Please note also, their upcoming workshop, May 11-13 on Music, Rhythm, and the Brain.

A question has recently come up regarding the reliability of pause as a cue to the segmentation of speech into intonational, or semantic meaning groups [1]. A few years ago, I had prepared a paper in conjunction with a colleague, Pentti Haddington, which addressed the question of the unreliability of pause in this context (click here for PowerPoint Slide Show). In our findings, pause was neither sufficient nor necessary by itself as a cue. Rather, pause sometimes co-appeared with other cues, and the conjunction of these cues together served to demark segmentation.

There is an important distinction that must be made between two types of pauses: the silent pause, which is perhaps what is most commonly referred to by the term; and the filled pause. The filled pause can be seen as a lengthening, or as a hesitation (each likely with its own causes and meaning). I believe that the filled pause, and hesitation are likely more reliable cues. The question then is how might one automatically extract the acoustic signatures of these cues, in order to use them for parsing in speech recognition?

Is anyone working on these issues?

[1] See for example, Seligman, M. “Nine Issues in Speech Translation,” Machine Translation, v. 15, no. 1/2, June 2000, pp. 149-186. This specific issue is discussed in section 5.

Sorry to those of you who may have encountered difficulties over the past few days accessing musiclanguage.net. The site was down for about two days. All systems have been restored, and no data seems to have been lost, other than potentially a few emails. Sorry for any inconvenience.