Ha. There is a vowel in Russian I STILL have problems distinguishing from its closest "relatives," and I sure as hell can't pronounce it properly.
What I think is most mysterious about this music thing is not the universality or lack thereof of this or that scale, but that mathematical relationships between sound waves should have emotional effects, sometimes extremely powerful ones, at all. That is pretty damn weird, and I am skeptical that deriving it from speech is going to work. (Don't animals respond emotionally to music, or is that just a bullshit fake memory of something I think I read once?)
--- On Thu, 6/19/08, Andy F <andy274 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I know languages often name colors differently, sometimes
> with a
> seemingly restricted "palette". Is that a result
> of the culture's
> natural environment? Maybe there's a similar effect in
> sound.
>
> > Phonetics discovers objective sound ranges similarly.
>
> True, but that doesn't mean that any one person can
> recognize those
> objective differences. Consider the difficulty in hearing
> differences
> in tonal languages like Chinese, or how East Asians have
> problems with
> r/l.
>
>
> --
> Andy
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