On Diana Deutsch's research 'speech-to-song'
"In all conditions, the first and last presentations of the phrase were identical, and we examined the effects of two manipulations of the intervening presentations on the subjects' judgments. In the first condition, the intervening presentations were exactly as the original. In the second, they were transposed slightly, so that the pitches differed but the pitch relationships were preserved. In the third, the intervening presentations were not transposed, but the syllables were presented in jumbled orderings.
ompares the effects of having the intervening repetitions exactly as the original, as compared with having them transposed slightly. We can see that when the repetitions were exact, perception moved solidly from speech to song. However, when the repetitions were transposed slightly, although ratings moved slightly towards song, they remained solidly in the speech region."
Summary:
"However, the present experiments show that for a phrase to be heard as spoken or as sung, it does not need to have a set of physical properties that are unique to speech, or a different set of physical properties that are unique to song. Rather, we must conclude that, assuming the neural circuitries underlying speech and song are at some point distinct and separate, they can accept the same input, but process the information in different ways so as to produce different outputs. As a further point, this illusion demonstrates a striking example of very rapid and highly specific perceptual reorganization, so showing an extreme form of short term neural plasticity in the auditory system."
source: http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=212
This research/idea of changing the spoken word slightly by transposing the words, so that the pitch differs slightly - speaks to my idea how each time a poem is performed it will sound slightly different.
Even if the same sentence is performed it will sound slightly different.
Octave Illusion
Many people hear a single tone that switches from ear to ear, while its pitch simultaneously shifts back and forth between high and low.
So it seems as though one ear is receiving the pattern 'high tone - silence - high tone - silence' while at the same time the other ear is receiving the pattern 'silence - low tone - silence - low tone'. Even more strangely, when the earphone positions are reversed many people hear the same thing: The tone that had appeared in the right ear still appears in the right ear, and the tone that had appeared in the left ear still appears in the left ear. This produces the bizarre impression that reversing headphone positions causes the high tone to migrate from one earphone to the other, and causes the low tone to migrate in the opposite direction!
Other listeners experience quite different illusions. Some hear a single tone that switches from ear to ear, whose pitch remains the same or changes only slightly as the tone appears to change location.
Some listeners report that the pitches appear to change gradually as the sequence continues, while for yet others, the pattern appears to speed up and slow down in unpredictable ways. Some people say that the high and low tones sound as though produced by different instruments - for example, the high tone may sound like a flute and the low tone like a gong. Some listeners experience different illusions at different times, so that the pattern appears to be constantly changing. Left-handers are more likely than right-handers to hear changing patterns.
Instinctively I am most interested in how 'unnatural pauses' /breaks that are not 'usual speak' / usual - conversational /intonation, shape so absolutely the impression of what is being said.
When are words that are actually a single word split in two with a pause?
Sometimes instead a sound will be pushed together with another word almost creating it's own word
'I don't want to lieany more' - anymore is taken apart and instead the sound/word 'lieany' is formed.
'I don't want to lie any more' - 00:30 ; 5:13 ; 8:58
'Drip ingthat scratch'
'drip ing that' - 5:21
'drip ing' - 5:28
'yes terdayIsaid' - 2:31
'yes terday' - 3:48 ; 8:17
're verse' - 2:38 ; 7:04
'body less' - 3:18 especially here the pause changes the meaning. First the listener understand 'was body' - then combines 'was bodiless' - our mind has to do a double take, play catch up. We believe we have understood something and then have to revise only a second later because the syllables 'less' change the meaning of what we are meant to understand.
'body less' - 7:49
A different instance of this is 'I said yes terdayIsaidthey' - 6:57 the words are simultaneously understood as 'I said yes' and the word 'yesterday', the listener scrambles to sort out the word play
Sometimes the splitting of words seems to serve the purpose of transplacing the moment to catch your breath. So as to not catch a breath in a usual moment but instead create a performative rhythm.
'trans formedI' - 3:12
Used for instance to connect two sentences in un-conversational way.
' just yesterday you said that I dreamt that you disappeared on my inner surface the edges ........ transformed ' - 7:35 Usually the sentence would end after surface and start again with the edges, instead the pause is added after the edges - again playing with perception/understanding
normally a word like 'and' connects but in spoken word here it might be a word like a long 'is' - 7:19
Actual breaks (i.e. a moment of silence) as well as words used as a performative type of breaks like 'are'
> exemplary sentence 4:00
> ' I feel your fingers in my brain' - 7:28
, highly unusually long pause between in & my
Pauses at unnatural moments in the sentence.
'This edge of the leakingworldyousaid this street'
Also tempo speeding up and slowing down - something highly unusual for conversation
Maybe the internal logic of how often something is said can give me the count of the metronome ?
Isn't poetry then as much about deciding how something will be pronounced, spoke, performed, intonated as it is about the words themselves?
Instead of pausing where a sentence would with a dot sentences are connected purposefully before a pause
'mysharpmindIsaid I feel your fingers in my brain.' - 2:57
with deep analysis it might be possible to figure out what kind of rhythms are used and how many times.
Using a word like 'they' to create a rhythm - 6:13 - 6:20
It seems like the voice is going down a stairs of octaves so unnatural it is difficult to understand what is being said 'my, sharp, mind, I, said,' - 7:25
I'd like to keep the integrity of the poem in it's entirety i.e. I don't want to play with just one word but it is the sentences that hold my interest.
Instinctively I am most interested in how 'unnatural pauses' /breaks that are not 'usual speak' / usual - conversational /intonation, shape so absolutely the impression of what is being said.
When are words that are actually a single word split in two with a pause?
Sometimes instead a sound will be pushed together with another word almost creating it's own word
'I don't want to lieany more' - anymore is taken apart and instead the sound/word 'lieany' is formed.
'I don't want to lie any more' - 5:13
'Drip ingthat scratch'
'drip ing that' - 5:21
'drip ing' - 5:28
'yes terdayIsaid' - 2:31
'yes terday' - 3:48
're verse' - 2:38 ; 7:04
'body less' - 3:18 especially here the pause changes the meaning. First the listener understand 'was body' - then combines 'was bodiless' - our mind has to do a double take, play catch up. We believe we have understood something and then have to revise only a second later because the syllables 'less' change the meaning of what we are meant to understand.
A different instance of this is 'I said yes terdayIsaidthey' - 6:57 the words are simultaneously understood as 'I said yes' and the word 'yesterday', the listener scrambles to sort out the word play
Sometimes the splitting of words seems to serve the purpose of transplacing the moment to catch your breath. So as to not catch a breath in a usual moment but instead create a performative rhythm.
'trans formedI' - 3:12
normally a word like 'and' connects but in spoken word here it might be a word like a long 'is' - 7:19
Actual breaks (i.e. a moment of silence) as well as words used as a performative type of breaks like 'are'
> exemplary sentence 4:00
Pauses at unnatural moments in the sentence.
'This edge of the leakingworldyousaid this street'
Also tempo speeding up and slowing down - something highly unusual for conversation
Maybe the internal logic of how often something is said can give me the count of the metronome ?
Isn't poetry then as much about deciding how something will be pronounced, spoke, performed, intonated as it is about the words themselves?
Instead of pausing where a sentence would with a dot sentences are connected purposefully before a pause
'mysharpmindIsaid I feel your fingers in my brain.' - 2:57
with deep analysis it might be possible to figure out what kind of rhythms are used and how many times.
Using a word like 'they' to create a rhythm - 6:13 - 6:20
I'd like to keep the integrity of the poem in it's entirety i.e. I don't want to play with just one word but it is the sentences that hold my interest.
Phantom Words
This image appears as an eye, though in reality it is a trillion-mile long tunnel of glowing gases, known as the Helix Nebula. As illustrated here, we ‘see’ visual objects’ that correspond to those that are familiar to us, even if our perceptions are quite incorrect. Similarly when listening to speech, the words and phrases that we ‘hear’ are strongly influenced, not only by the sounds that reach us, but also by our knowledge, beliefs, and expectations.
Some years ago I discovered a way to produce a large number of ‘phantom words’ and phrases within a short period of time. One of these is on my CD ‘Musical Illusions and Paradoxes1 and six more are on my CD ‘Phantom Words, and Other Curiosities’2.
To obtain the best effect, find a time when you will not be disturbed, and sit in front of two loudspeakers, with one to your left and the other to your right. (Headphones don’t work so well for this illusion.) Make sure that your sound system is set for stereo, and that the two loudspeakers are balanced for loudness. In a ‘phantom words’ demonstration, each track contains two words, or a single word composed of two syllables, and these are repeated over and over again. The same sequence is presented through both loudspeakers, but the tracks are offset in time so that when the first sound (word or syllable) is coming from the speaker on the left the second sound is coming from the speaker on the right; and vice versa. Because the sounds coming from the two loudspeakers are mixed in the air before they reach our ears, we are given a palette of sounds from which to chose, and so can create in our minds many different combinations of sounds.
It works well to have a pen and paper in front of you, so that you can write down the words and phrases that you hear. Often people initially hear a jumble of meaningless sounds, but after a while distinct words and phrases suddenly emerge. It often seems that the left and right loudspeakers are producing different words, which sometimes appear to be spoken by different voices. So write down separately the words that you hear as coming from the left, and those that you hear as coming from the right.
After a while, you will probably find that new words and phrases appear to be coming from one or both of the loudspeakers. When this happens, write down the new ones also. In addition, it’s not unusual to hear a third stream of words or phrases, apparently coming from some location between the loudspeakers. Nonsense words, and musical sounds such as percussive sounds or tones, sometimes appear to be mixed in with the meaningful words. People often report hearing words and phrases spoken in strange or ‘foreign’ accents – presumably they are interpreting the sounds from the loudspeakers as words and phrases that are meaningful to them, even if this causes the speech to appear distorted.
If English is your second language, you may find that you hear some words and phrases in your native language. In courses on illusions that I taught at UCSD, I generally played some ‘phantom words’ to my class. The students at our university are linguistically very diverse, and taken together I’ve received reports of ‘phantom words’ in Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, French, German, Italian, Hebrew, and Russian – to name just a few. It’s not unusual for students in my class to feel strongly that such ‘foreign’ words have been inserted into the tracks, and sometimes they adamantly stick to this belief, despite my assurances to the contrary.
People appear to hear words and phrases that reflect what is on their minds – rather as in a Rorschach test, though it’s my impression that the present effect is stronger. I can guess who is likely to be on a diet, as they report words like ‘I’m hungry’. ‘diet coke’ or ‘feel fat’. And students who are stressed tend to report words that are related to stress – if I play these sounds close to exam time, students may well hear phrases like ‘I’m tired’, ‘no brain’, or ‘no time’. Interestingly, female students often report the word ‘love’, while male students are more likely to report sexually explicit words and phrases.
Joe Banks has argued in detail3 that the brain mechanisms that cause some people to believe that they are hearing voices from the spirit world (called ‘Electronic Voice Phenomena’, or ‘EVP’) are the same as those that produce my ‘phantom words’.
Here are seven ‘phantom words’. One is from my compact disc ‘Musical Illusions and Paradoxes’, and the other six are from my compact disc ‘Phantom Words and Other Curiosities’.
source: http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=211