
Speech to Song Illusion (2013) - bookofjoe
http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=212
======
kazinator
I'm not convinced that this is an illusion.

Here is the confounding thing: our ears perceive the spectral distribution as
pitch. So that is to say "aaah" sounds higher than "oooo", even with the same
underlying pitch; just different equalization.

If we boost a narrow frequency with a parametric equalizer and then sweep the
frequency up and down, we can use it as a musical instrument, pretty much
regardless of what is the input sound.

You can do this with your mouth: make a chhhhh voiceless sound and just change
the shape of your mouth and move your tongue; you can make a melody. Yet,
there is no underlying tone; just noise.

Your ear doesn't care; pitch is just which part of the basiliar membrane is
stimulated more. Doesn't matter whether that came by equalizing noise so more
of it is concentrated in that spot, or whether it came from a periodic signal.

The human voice is a combination of the periodic signal with harmonics from
the vocal cords, and the filtration of the vocal tract creating the
"formants". Both of these contribute to the perceived pitch; we know that we
can make a melody just with the formants alone with the "chhhhhhhh"
experiment. It's not just the vibration of the vocal cords that produces
pitch.

I think we can even hear these separately. If I make a monotonous sound with
my vocal chords and at the same time a constricted hissing sound "ghhhhhh",
and then vary the shape of my mouth, then "inside the hiss", I hear the melody
created by the filtration. At the same time, I also hear the unchanging pitch
of the sound from my vocal cords as a separate voice. We can't say that the
melody of the modulated hiss is an illusion because the vocal cords are pinned
to one note.

~~~
gugagore
I just tried to make a monotonous sound with my vocal chords while changing my
mouth cavity to a melody, like in the "chhh" experiment, or as if I were
whistling, and for me it's kind of impossible. If my vocal chords are
vibrating, then the pitch they make follows my mouth shape.

I'm wondering did you need to practice that?

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diydsp
I hear this all the time when listening to almost any voice that has more than
the minimum expression in the form of varied pitch.

I wrote a program to detect the most apparent rhythms from arbitrary sound
input. It was based on the Echo Nest API. I was able to extract a few lines
out of spoken word texts that had clear 4 on the floor rhythms.

But my project left pitch alone. We unconsciously vary aspects of our prosody
to reflect our meaning, intention, mood, etc. You can even hear the children
(at the bottom of the page) embellish the woman's loop with more consonant
tones, e.g. on the syllable "strange".

If you listen very, very closely you can hear them alternate between strict
reproductions of the tenser tones and their own re-editing to make it sound
more consonant or friendly. I posit this is their mind playing along with a
game of how they want to make it sound vs. complying with their leader.

NPR and most advertising makes me very uncomfortable as they're parroting each
other's attention-grabbing prosodies, imitating tones of danger, confusion and
great curiosity.

And of course, one of the great modern masters of hearing inherent pitches is
Mono Neon:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA2-eKbfaWI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA2-eKbfaWI)

~~~
jonnydubowsky
Thanks for posting about MonoMan! I'd never seen that before. I needed a good
dose of artful joy. This technique can also be applied to our rhythmic
cadences of speech as demonstrated by my friend Dan Weiss, playing the drum
interpretation of the FedEx guy commercial:
[https://youtu.be/mIIP4zIi4DM](https://youtu.be/mIIP4zIi4DM)

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VikingCoder
I'm reminded of POGO - Alice

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAwR6w2TgxY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAwR6w2TgxY)

~~~
rjbwork
My favorite version,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnuGjcp8h2c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnuGjcp8h2c)

Unfortunately the site that produced these kinds of images, yooouuuutuuube is
no longer up, even though the domain is seemingly active on root url.

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jccc
Steve Reich did this in 1988, deriving melodies from speech in recorded
interviews:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Different_Trains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Different_Trains)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E4Bjt_zVJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E4Bjt_zVJc)

~~~
agarv
Scott Johnson's John Somebody from 1982 is another good one

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Johnson_(composer)#John_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Johnson_\(composer\)#John_Somebody)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPlY4X5hrYk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPlY4X5hrYk)

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tantalor
> suddenly appears to burst into song

No, it doesn't. What am I supposed to hear? What does "burst into song" mean?

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lostmyoldone
Weird. I could hear a _possible_ increase in how 'musical' the repeated phrase
sounded, but I was flabbergasted when I heard the subject recordings, because
I didn't hear anything remotely as song like??

Maybe it is my phone speaker not being good enough ? That, or I'm just weird
as usual.

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empath75
One of the first episodes of radiolab was about this
[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91513-behaves-so-
strangely](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91513-behaves-so-strangely)

------
kazinator
> _And here is the notated phrase as it is generally heard after it has been
> played repeatedly:_

Can this point possibly be made without using the key of B, requiring a key
signature with five sharps?

~~~
afandian
I don't know if it's part of the illusion, but I definitely hear this as being
in B, ending on the dominant.

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PavlikPaja
I can't hear anything like that?

~~~
ubertakter
I could hear it. So well that in the full sentence it now sounds like the
phrase is being sung. It will take a while for that effect to "wear off".

That being said, it may be related to something about western music scales. If
you are used to music that doesn't use a 12 interval scale, maybe you wouldn't
interpret it as music.

~~~
PavlikPaja
Maybe the opposite? The repeats make speakers of non-tonal languages notice
the tones that they normally filter out from speech, and to them it sounds
odd.

