The Music of Language [Audio Slideshow]

In the womb, we are bathed in song. Even if mom never sings or listens to the stereo, the music of her speech rings clearly to the unborn. We learn to recognize her spoken melodies even though her tissues distort her words.

Those melodies set the stage for mother-child bonding and the early development of speech.

From the beginning of life, music and speech are intertwined, an interplay psychologist Diana Deutsch of the University of California, San Diego, explores in the latest Scientific American Mind. Picking up on pitch helps us learn to talk, to read and to interpret others’ intentions when they speak.

The tuning of our ears early in life shapes the pitch of our speaking voice—and is so ingrained in language that our native tongue alters our perception of music.

Rap musicians effectively compose conversations. The melodious cries of street vendors also cross the fuzzy border between speech and song.

But the morphing of talk into tune is especially apparent in an illusion that Deutsch discovered by accident while making a CD. To detect glitches in the recording, she put the phrase “sometimes behave so strangely” on a loop, and noticed an odd occurrence as it played over and over again--her speech began to sound like singing.

This musical nature of speech conveys feeling and meaning.When we are happy and excited, we speak more rapidly and use higher pitches. W hen we are sad, we talk more slowly, using a deeper, more monotone voice.

Parents naturally exaggerate the music of their syllables when they speak to babies—and babies get the message, in every language, even though they don’t know what the words mean yet. You’ll get a smile if you say to a baby: “Goood Girl!”

Or in German:

[Audio sample of German woman praising child]

But you won’t if you scold: “Don’t do that!”

Or in German:

[Audio sample of German woman scolding child]

Taking music lessons can hone our ability to perceive the melody of words and the emotions that conveys. Studies show that just six months of lessons can enhance a child’s ability to detect fear or anger in a speaker’s voice.

The music of your native language or dialect can even affect the pitch of your speaking voice. Psychologist Jinghong Le, a colleague of Deutsch's from East China Normal University, visited the mountains in central China, to record the conversations of the women living in two remote, isolated villages separated by less than 40 miles as the crow flies. 

Within one village, the female voices sound identical. But across villages, the pitch varies dramatically. Listen to two women from the first village:

[Audio sample of speaker from first village]

and

[Audio sample of speaker from first village]

Now listen to two women from the second village:

[Audio sample of speaker from second village]

and

[Audio sample of speaker from second village]

Now listen to one woman from each village:

[Audio sample of speakers from each village]

This work suggests that anatomy plays only a supporting role in the pitch of our voices. The women in the two villages were anatomically and genetically very similar. Instead, our speech is largely tuned in the womb by the voices we hear around us.

In fact, Deutsch believes the language we hear growing up builds a musical template--a neural network for perceiving tones--in our brains. This template not only influences the pitch of our speaking voice but also our odds of developing perfect pitch, the ability to name an isolated note on the musical scale. Only about 1 in 10,000 Americans possess this skill. But Deutsch found that perfect pitch is far more common among people who speak a tone language, such as Mandarin or Vietnamese.

In these languages, pitch determines the meaning of words; that is, in Mandarin, the same word has different meanings depending on the pitch or pitches with which it is spoken. Listen to these four tonal variations of the same word, [ma], and note their completely unrelated meanings.

[Audio sample of Mandarin speaker pronouncing same word four times but with different intonation]

Among one group of music conservatory students who spoke fluent Mandarin and had begun musical training very early, Deutsch found that about 90 percent had perfect pitch. For English speakers with comparable musical training, the rate was just 8 percent.

Deutsch also found that tone language speakers make use of perfect pitch when they talk. When Vietnamese and Mandarin speakers recited a list of words on two different days, the pitches of the words were remarkably consistent. Here a Vietnamese speaker recites a word on day one followed by the same word on day two, and so on, for the whole list.

[Audio sample of Vietnamese speaker]

Music is so integral to language that our perception of pitch is critical to our ability to talk—and to get what others mean and feel when they speak to us. And conversely, in learning to talk, we are tuning our ear for music.

Image Credits:

Fetus image courtesy of lunar caustic vis Flickr.com
Diana Deutsch courtesy of Diana Deutsch
Mos Def in concert courtesy of Scootie via Flickr.com
Pretzel cart by Eric R. Olson
“Sometimes behave so strangely” notation courtesy of Diana Deutsch
Jing Hong Le courtesy of Diana Deutsch
China map vector courtesy of WO!Design
All other images purchased from istockphoto.com

Audio Credits:

Heartbeat sample by greyseraphim via freesound.org
“Mathematics” by Mos Def ©1999 Rawkus Records
NYC street sounds courtesy of gezortenplotz via freesound.org 
“The Calliope in Winter” courtesy of Jeremy Abbate
Guitar teacher & street vendor played by Jeremy Abbate
All language audio samples courtesy of Diana Deutsch

Written & narrated by Ingrid Wickelgren
Produced & edited by Eric R. Olson
Photo research by Ferris Jabr
Audio samples prepared by Trevor Henthorn & Jing Shen