Melodic ambiguity in song and speech
I am in the midst of analyzing the phrase “the only thing I really want” from the song “I really love to dance” by Laurie Berkner. The phrase is repeated three times in the song, each time with a slightly varied inflection by the singer. This is a good example of perceptually ambiguous melody. Further, it serves as a jumping off point for discussing matters of transcription, and overarching questions regarding what level of detail is sufficient for interpretive analyses of perception. I am currently seeking examples of this phrase (or substantially similar ones) from corpora of spontaneous speech discourse, in order to compare aspects of the musical treatment to naturally occurring speech intonation.
