Finding the music of speech: Musical knowledge influences pitch processing in speech

Abstract

Few studies comparing music and language processing have adequately controlled for low-level acoustical differences, making it unclear whether differences in music and language processing arise from domain-specific knowledge, acoustic characteristics, or both. We controlled acoustic characteristics by using the speech-to-song illusion, which often results in a perceptual transformation to song after several repetitions of an utterance. Participants performed a same-different pitch discrimination task for the initial repetition (heard as speech) and the final repetition (heard as song). Better detection was observed for pitch changes that violated rather than conformed to Western musical scale structure, but only when utterances transformed to song, indicating that music-specific pitch representations were activated and influenced perception. This shows that music-specific processes can be activated when an utterance is heard as song, suggesting that the high-level status of a stimulus as either language or music can be behaviorally dissociated from low-level acoustic factors.

Acoustic foundations of the speech-to-song illusion.

“…These results are in line with the finding of Falk et al (2014) that the imposition of a perfect fifth interval had only a trending effect on the speech/song illusion. Given prior evidence that the speech/song illusion involves perceiving pitch sequences as conforming to scale structure (Deutsch et al, 2011, Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden et al, 2015b, these findings suggest that listeners are willing to perceptually classify pitch values within scale templates even if these pitch values do not strongly fit an existing musical key, as long as there is sufficient evidence that a sequence has other musical characteristics.…”

Editorial: The Evolution of Rhythm Cognition: Timing in Music and Speech

“…Another topic of broad interest centers on the relationship between speech, prosody, and music (Toro and Nespor, 2015; Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden et al, 2015; Chang et al, 2016; Filippi, 2016; Frühholz et al, 2016; Kotz and Schwartze, 2016; Schwartze and Kotz, 2016; Weidema et al, 2016; Carr et al, 2017; Ding et al, 2017; Spierings et al, 2017; Toro and Hoeschele, 2017). An intriguing hypothesis is that speech prosody may be the “missing link” between music and language (Filippi, 2016) or that music and language may be preceded by musical prosody (Fitch, 2013; Honing, 2017).…”

Vocal Features of Song and Speech: Insights from Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire

“…In order to focus on the perceptual impressions of listeners, particular attention must be paid to limit the top-down cognitive processes behind categorization of vocalization (Falk et al, 2014; Margulis et al, 2015; Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden et al, 2015; Jaisin et al, 2016). Schematically, human perception is influenced by the existence of preset categories and expectations based on these categories (i.e., top-down processes) as well as the physical features of the stimuli (i.e., bottom-up processes).…”