Speech to Song Illusion

Caught this on NPR's Radio Lab show today. Yikes!

Very interesting. The more closely one pays attention to what is actually going on in everyday speech, the more fascinating it becomes.

It was interesting to me that my husband thought this of little note. As a musician whose strongest suits are rhythm and pitch, he thought it obvious that any blurb of human speech would have intonation, & that making a repeat loop would introduce rhythm-- voila-- music.

I passed it by two musician / composer friends of mine, and they thought it interesting, although one said: " i've heard repeated speech before and haven't noticed it, so it must be this particular recording - yes? i wonder if it is because of the quality of her voice - which is a little singerly to begin with i think - although it's hard to be sure after you've experienced the illusion - and also because the tune is a very recognizable and hummable simple tonal tune, with a regular 4/4 beat."

I think what surprised me the most was that all 11 subjects (only a couple of whom had any musical training) mimicked her intonation so perfectly that you could play their recoding together and they were singing at precisely the same pitch like a well-trained choir.

There was another interesting bit on the radio interview. To demonstrate some of her research into pitch-based languages, she played a recording of one subject saying the same word over and over-- they were segments clipped out of various spontaneous conversations with various people over a period of weeks. Every time she hit the identical pitch.