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Pitch is well-known both to animate human discourse and to convey meaning in communication. The study of the statistical population distributions of pitch in discourse will undoubtedly benefit from methodological improvements. The current investigation examines a method that parameterizes pitch in discourse as musical pitch interval H measured in units of cents and that disaggregates the sequence of peak word-pitches using tools employed in time-series analysis and digital signal processing. The investigators test the proposed methodology by its application to distributions in pitch interval of the peak word-pitch (collectively called the discourse gamut) that occur in simulated and actual spontaneous emotive narratives obtained from 17 middle-aged African-American adults. The analysis, in rigorous tests, not only faithfully reproduced simulated distributions imbedded in realistic time series that drift and include pitch breaks, but the protocol also reveals that the empirical distributions exhibit a common hidden structure when normalized to a slowly varying mode (called the gamut root) of their respective probability density functions. Quantitative differences between narratives reveal the speakers' relative propensity for the use of pitch levels corresponding to elevated degrees of a discourse gamut (the "e-la") superimposed upon a continuum that conforms systematically to an asymmetric Laplace distribution.

In the United States, 6.8% of men, women, and children report voice problems currently, while during their lifetime ca. 29% will complain of some dysphonia, often due to pathologies of the vocal folds. The authors (a physicist and a speech pathologist) describe an interdisciplinary approach that exhibits promise for detecting physiological abnormalities of the vocal folds from a spectral analysis of the overtone series of spoken tokens. This preliminary investigation shows that the normal human vocal fold emits overtones that are very nearly precise integral values of the fundamental. Physiological problems of the vocal folds, however, introduce mechanical nonlinearities that manifest themselves as frequency deviations from the ideal harmonic (that is, integral) values. The authors quantify this inharmonicity, describing and illustrating how one can efficiently obtain and analyze such data. They outline, as well, a proposed investigation to assess the clinical sensitivity and significance of the analysis discussed in this work in conjunction with laryngoscopic diagnosis of pathology.

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