The authors suggest that humans prefer tone combinations that reflect the spectral relationships of human vocalizations. Gill and Purves (2009) showed that the most widely used scales across time and across cultures are those that are similar to harmonic series. (2011) examined music and speech from three tonal languages and three nontonal languages and found that changes in pitch direction occurred more frequently and had larger changes in pitch direction in tonal languages, and that the music typical of the cultures with tonal language also showed similar frequent and large changes in pitch direction, suggesting a coevolution of music and language. The authors sampled not only English speakers but speakers of Tamil, Farsi, and Mandarin and found similar relationships within each language. Peaks in the distribution were especially prominent at the octave, the fifth, the fourth, the major third, and the major sixth forming the intervals of the pentatonic scale and most of the intervals on a diatonic scale ( Schwartz et al., 2003). This appears to be a direct result of the resonances of the human vocal tract, and suggests that music and speech are closely linked.
C CHROMATIC SCALE SERIES
In a series of studies, Purves and collaborators have shown that the statistical structure of human speech shows a probability distribution with peaks at frequency ratios that match the chromatic scale.
Human vowel sounds are based on the chromatic scale.
Eckart Altenmüller, in Progress in Brain Research, 2015 5 Music and Emotion in Human Speech and Parallels in Other Species
0 kommentar(er)
