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.

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.

Need to add a critical commentary on dichotic listening experiments. Why are these studies still so often cited? From my review of the literature most of them are fatally flawed by too many confounds, especially in their assumptions regarding what consititutes linguistic (or “verbal”) vs. non-verbal stimuli. But see Kimura’s (1967) comments, p. 167, acknowledging the difficulty of determining “what verbal activity consists in”.

I am planning to add syndication links to the sidebar so viewers can subscribe to the rss feed, or subscribe to the front page via bloglines or the equivalent. I just haven’t figured out the php code yet.
The front page serves as a blog, so it can be subscribed to in the fashion of other blogs.

A terminology page has been added under the heading Resources.

Need to check with others regarding their permission to be included here, as well as the inclusion of contact info and additional items.