
Clarifying the differences between what animals and humans hear - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/70/variables/what-makes-music-special-to-us
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classichasclass
One point of contention in this otherwise interesting article: in some
languages, pitch is absolutely salient. It doesn't generally happen to be in
English, but in Bantu languages, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc., pitch or tone is
an important discriminator. How and what it encodes differ, and it is indeed
relative pitch or contour rather than absolute frequencies, but it is
definitely not secondary.

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PavlikPaja
Some languages also use rhythm to distinguish words, such as Finnish or
Japanese.

It could arguably be a factor in English as well, and the cause of such
effects as the "sesame street F-bomb" where the odd rhythm led many people to
hear something else that what was said.

