There is music in repetition: Looped segments of speech and nonspeech induce the perception of music in a time-dependent manner

Abstract

While many techniques are known to music creators, the technique of repetition is one of the most commonly deployed. The mechanism by which repetition is effective as a music-making tool, however, is unknown. Building on the speech-to-song illusion (Deutsch, Henthorn, & Lapidis in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129(4), 2245-2252, 2011), we explore a phenomenon in which perception of musical attributes are elicited from repeated, or Blooped,^auditory material usually perceived as nonmusical such as speech and environmental sounds. We assessed whether this effect holds true for speech stimuli of different lengths; nonspeech sounds (water dripping); and speech signals decomposed into their rhythmic and spectral components. Participants listened to looped stimuli (from 700 to 4,000 ms) and provided continuous as well as discrete perceptual ratings. We show that the regularizing effect of repetition generalizes to nonspeech auditory material and is strongest for shorter clip lengths in the speech and environmental cases. We also find that deconstructed pitch and rhythmic speech components independently elicit a regularizing effect, though the effect across segment duration is different than that for intact speech and environmental sounds. Taken together, these experiments suggest repetition may invoke active internal mechanisms that bias perception toward musical structure.

Phonological but not semantic influences on the speech-to-song illusion

“…The result of the present experiment provides evidence to further support the mechanisms found in NST—priming, activation, and satiation—as an explanation for the S2S illusion as proposed by Castro et al (2018). It is unclear how accounts of the S2S illusion that appeal only to repetition (Margulis, 2013; Margulis & Simchy-Gross, 2016; Rowland et al, 2019) would explain the results of the present experiment. Repetition theories of the S2S illusion would predict that the repeated word lists would elicit the S2S illusion, as was observed in the present study.…”

“…Continued research on the speech-to-song illusion may also help determine whether the mechanisms of priming, activation, and satiation found in NST can also account for another auditory illusion that—on the surface—resembles the speech-to-song illusion, namely the sound-to-music illusion (Margulis & Simchy-Gross, 2016; Rowland et al, 2019; Simchy-Gross & Margulis, 2018; Tierney et al, 2018). In the sound-to-music illusion, complex tones or environmental sounds ( e.g ., ice cracking) are repeated, and begin to take on a musical quality.…”

“…One account for how the S2S illusion occurs points to the important role that repetition of the stimulus plays in eliciting the illusion (Margulis, 2013; Margulis & Simchy-Gross, 2016; Rowland et al, 2019). However, accounts that appeal only to repetition as the mechanism that is responsible for the illusion fail to explain why the initial percept is that of speech, what exactly repetition does to change the percept, and why the subsequent percept is music-like instead of something else, such as nonsensical babble as occurs when speakers repeatedly produce a word and experience semantic satiation (Lambert & Jakobovits, 1960).…”

Tapping into linguistic rhythm

“…Capitalizing on the general perceptual phenomenon of repetition (Margulis & Simchy-Gross, 2016;Rowland, Kasdan, & Poeppel, 2019), looped speech has the potential to reveal underlying rhythmic structures of sentences (Falk et al, 2014;Rathcke, Falk, & Dalla Bella, 2018). After having listened to repetitions of a sentence, listeners are no longer engaged in cognitively demanding semantic and syntactic processing.…”

Does age affect perception of the Speech-to-Song Illusion?

“…An increasing number of studies have used a variety of stimuli to examine various aspects of the Speech-to-Song Illusion, making this illusion a well-established perceptual phenomenon [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. To provide a strong test of our age-related hypothesis about the Speech-to-Song Illusion, we attempted to maximize the likelihood that listeners would experience the Speech-to-Song Illusion by using the original stimulus recorded by [25], rather than the variety of stimuli that have been used previously [e.g., 1,8].…”