[lbo-talk] Music & phonetics

Tahir Wood twood at uwc.ac.za
Thu Jun 19 01:23:41 PDT 2008



>>> <lbo-talk-request at lbo-talk.org> 06/19/08 4:28 AM >>>
From: "Charles Brown" <charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Chuck's Cassirer posts

Phonetics discovers objective sound ranges similarly.

(Isn't music a derivative of human speech , voices ?)

Not quite the way you've put it though. Acoustic phonetics reveals the timbre of different speech sounds, not their pitches. So to put it simply, each separate vowel is like a note on a different instrument, NOT like a different note on the same instrument. So when you change from one vowel to another you can keep the same note but you change the timbre (harmonics) by changing the configuration of the mouth, mainly by repositioning the tongue. Its like staying on one note but changing from a trumpet to a saxophone, so to speak. Consonant sounds, of course are different, more like various percussion sounds (or else white noise).

But pitch can be phonetically significant in the so-called tone languages, which do not include English or any other European languages. Chinese is a tone language. The intonation system in English has more to do with phonological patterns across a whole utterance; these are not pegged to phonetic segments of speech. So in English a rising tone across a whole utterance signals a question, for example. But in the tone languages a change in the relative pitch changes the phoneme and therefore the meaning of the word in which it occurs, which is something radically different. So you could say perhaps that the tone languages have something of the musical quality in their phonetics that you were talking about.

Tahir

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