Voice Modulation: A Window into the Origins of Human Vocal Control?

Pisanski, Katarzyna; Cartei, Valentina; McGettigan, Carolyn; Raine, Jordan; Reby, David

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2016.01.002

Cited by 156 publications

(200 citation statements)

References 104 publications

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“…The literature suggests that females show greater F 0 variability than males (Puts et al, 2011; Pisanski et al, 2016) and that they have a higher incidence of creaky voice (Yuasa, 2010). Creaky voice was, in fact, a problem in our analysis, and this might have been well due to the high proportion of females in our sample.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Musical Approach to Speech Melody

Chow

Brown

2018

Front. Psychol.

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We present here a musical approach to speech melody, one that takes advantage of the intervallic precision made possible with musical notation. Current phonetic and phonological approaches to speech melody either assign localized pitch targets that impoverish the acoustic details of the pitch contours and/or merely highlight a few salient points of pitch change, ignoring all the rest of the syllables. We present here an alternative model using musical notation, which has the advantage of representing the pitch of all syllables in a sentence as well as permitting a specification of the intervallic excursions among syllables and the potential for group averaging of pitch use across speakers. We tested the validity of this approach by recording native speakers of Canadian English reading unfamiliar test items aloud, spanning from single words to full sentences containing multiple intonational phrases. The fundamental-frequency trajectories of the recorded items were converted from hertz into semitones, averaged across speakers, and transcribed into musical scores of relative pitch. Doing so allowed us to quantify local and global pitch-changes associated with declarative, imperative, and interrogative sentences, and to explore the melodic dynamics of these sentence types. Our basic observation is that speech is atonal. The use of a musical score ultimately has the potential to combine speech rhythm and melody into a unified representation of speech prosody, an important analytical feature that is not found in any current linguistic approach to prosody.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Musical Approach to Speech Melody

Chow

Brown

2018

Front. Psychol.

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“…Whereas most scholars believe this occurred in the service of Type II symbolic speech in Homo sapiens, there is an intriguing, alternative hypothesis recently proposed by Pisanski et al (2016). This alternative hypothesis, which will be explained using the new Type I and II terminology, is that the ability to modulate pitch and resonant frequency evolved first as a spontaneous, sexually selected ability to affectively influence extra-pyramidal-tract-mediated Type I sounds.…”

Section: Evolutionary History Of Type II Sound Prosodymentioning

confidence: 97%

"Y/Our" Vocal Sounds - Towards an Ethological Classification of Human Vocalizing Behavior and Sounds

Feierman¹

2017

HEB

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Human ethology has been accused of being the behavioral science that treats humans as though they don't make vocal sounds. Although heritable, coordinated patterns of movement or fixed action patterns (Erbkoordinationen), which are the fundamental building blocks of classical ethology, can generate "our" vocal sounds (e.g., laughing, crying, and screaming), they cannot generate "your" vocal sounds (e.g., spoken words in English, German, French, Spanish, etc.). These latter "your" vocal sounds are made by single muscle movements, which when volitionally repeated, combined or coordinated, can generate culture-specific, behaviorally-generated vocal sound symbols, such as the general names in each culture for persons who give birth to babies (e.g., mother, Mutter, mère, madre). This article is a first attempt at an ethological classification of human vocalizing behaviors and the sounds they make. Lastly, how human ethologists could study these two different types of human vocalizing behaviors, using the sounds they make as proxies, will be discussed.

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“…Finally, researchers may also examine whether, in addition to grunts, other types of human vocalisations such as aggressive roars, fear screams, and sexual vocalisations convey evolutionarily important information. Such vocalisations constitute an intermediary link between nonhuman mammal vocalisations and human speech, and investigating their production and perception may provide additional insight into the evolution of human vocal communication and vocal control, a necessary prerequisite for speech (Pisanski, Cartei, et al, 2016).…”

Section: Acoustic Cues To Tennis Match Progress and Outcomementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Human nonverbal vocalisations likely predate language, and appear homologous in structure and function with nonhuman vocalisations (e.g. laughter Davila-Ross, Owren, & Zimmermann, 2010;Pisanski, Cartei, McGettigan, Raine, & Reby, 2016; infant distress vocalisations Lingle et al, 2012). As such, they may constitute a relatively direct link between animal and human vocal systems.…”

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confidence: 99%