music and speech

interesting article found at Futurity, via my favorite Dr.X's Free Associations blog:

"To study the emotional content of music, the team collected a database of major and minor melodies from about 1,000 classical music compositions and more that 6,000 folk songs and then analyzed their tonal qualities.

They then had 10 people speak a series of single words with 10 different vowel sounds in either excited or subdued voices, as well as short monologues. The team compared the tones that distinguished the major and minor melodies with the tones of speech uttered in the different emotional states.

They found the sound spectra of the speech tones could be sorted the same way as the music, with excited speech exhibiting more major musical intervals and subdued speech more minor ones.

The tones in speech are a series of harmonic frequencies, whose relative power distinguishes the different vowels. Vowels are produced by the physics of air moving through the vocal cords; consonants are produced by other parts of the vocal tract." --Futurity
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music is a tool i use with my daughter, when she goes non-verbal with speech, music never fails to connect her with me and other people. once in a complete non-verbal stage, i began the song from Annie, ..."the sun will come out tomorrow..." and she finished it. many, many times she has come back to being verbal after a psychotic break by singing. sometimes, i can have an entire conversation with her based on music/songs.

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"It would be hard to say whether singing or speech came first, but Bowling supposes “emotional communication in both speech and music is rooted in earlier non-lingual vocalizations that expressed emotion."

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