Speech-to-Song Illusion Project

Funded by

Title: The Role of Pitch in the Speech to Song Transformation

Recipient: Adam Tierney

Date: 2019

Speech and song are usually regarded as being acoustically distinct categories of human vocalization. However, certain spoken phrases, if removed from context and repeated, can be perceived as song, suggesting instead that speech and music are acoustically overlapping categories (Deutsch et al. 2011). Follow-up work from my laboratory (Tierney et al. 2013) developed a corpus of 24 spoken stimuli that reliably elicit a song percept when repeated (illusion stimuli), matched with 24 stimuli that continue to sound like speech when repeated (control stimuli). This project made use of this speech-to-song illusion corpus to investigate several questions about music perception.  Results suggest that individuals differ in the salience of pitch information in speech: in other words, the extent to which changes in pitch tend to capture their attention. Furthermore, individuals with high pitch salience report stronger illusory song percepts in the speech-to-song illusion, suggesting that individual differences in pitch salience are one source of variability in this striking but variable phenomenon.