This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
For thousands of years humans have made music using specific tone collections called scales or modes that have a special aesthetic and emotional appeal (the familiar 'do,re, mi...' scale, for example). Since the time of Pythagoras, understanding the basis of these of this appeal has fascinated musicians, scientists, philosophers, linguists and many others. Although tonal relationships have been fully documented over the centuries, the basis of this phenomenology is not understood. Recent results from this group of investigators have indicated that musical tones are also embedded in the characteristics of speech, providing a way to explore issues at the intersection of music, language and aesthetics. Using and extending databases of music and speech, the investigators will examine 1) why humans favor a few particular tone collections out of the many billions that are possible; 2) why some tone combinations are more consonant than others; and 3) why major and minor scales or modes have distinct emotional effects. The hypothesis is that the answer in each case lies in the similarity of musical tones and the characteristics of human vocalization, leading to unconscious associations that determine the way musical tones are perceived.
Answering these questions would provide a major intellectual advance in the long history of work on the basis of musical tonality and its effects on listeners. The hypothesis that the answers lie in the similarity of the spectra generated by musical intervals and the spectra generated by the human voice is a promising way to examine these issues. Whereas numerous investigators in recent centuries have argued that music derives from speech, no one has explored this possibility in terms of spectral imitation. If it can be demonstrated that the tonal phenomena evident in music arise from similarity to speech, theoretical, experimental and practical work in audition, linguistics, psychoacoustics, phonetics, speech pathology, speech recognition, anthropology and philosophy may have a new way of understanding some very old problems.
