Cantopop and Speech-Melody Complex

It is generally accepted that speech and melody are distinctive perceptual categories, and that one is able to overcome perceptual ambiguity to categorize acoustic stimuli as either of the two. This article investigates native Cantonese speakers’ speech-melody experience of listening to Cantonese popular songs (henceforth Cantopop songs), a relatively uncharted territory in musicological studies. It proposes a speech-melody complex that embraces native Cantonese speakers’ experience of the potentialities of speech and melody before they come into being. Speech-melody complex, I argue, does not stably contain the categories of speech or melody in their full-blown, asserted form, but concerns the ongoingness of the process of categorial molding, which depends on how much contextual information the listeners value in shaping and parsing out the complex. It follows, then, that making a categorial assertion implies a breakthrough of the complex. I then complicate speech-melody complex with the concept of “anamorphosis,” borrowed from the visual arts, which calls into question the signification of the perceived object by perspectival distortion. When transferred to the sonic dimension, “anamorphic listening,” I suggest, is not about at which point a sonic object becomes “distorted” but is about one’s processual experience of negotiating the hermeneutic values in their different hearing-ases. The listener engages, then, in the process of molding and remolding, creating and negating, the two enigmatic categories. Through my analysis of two Cantopop songs and interviews with native Cantonese speakers, I suggest that Cantopop may invite an anamorphic listening, and that more broadly, it is an important, yet under-explored, genre with which to theorize about the relationships between music and language.

Eros, Beauty, and Phon-Aesthetic Judgements of Language Sound. We Like It Flat and Fast, but Not Melodious. Comparing Phonetic and Acoustic Features of 16 European Languages

This article concerns sound aesthetic preferences for European foreign languages. We investigated the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure to describe the “music” found in European languages. The Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish, take a lead when people talk about melodious language – the music-like effects in the language (a.k.a., phonetic chill). On the other end of the melodiousness spectrum are German and Arabic that are often considered sounding harsh and un-attractive. Despite the public interest, limited research has been conducted on the topic of phonaesthetics, i.e., the subfield of phonetics that is concerned with the aesthetic properties of speech sounds (Crystal, 2008). Our goal is to fill the existing research gap by identifying the acoustic features that drive the auditory perception of language sound beauty. What is so music-like in the language that makes people say “it is music in my ears”? We had 45 central European participants listening to 16 auditorily presented European languages and rating each language in terms of 22 binary characteristics (e.g., beautiful – ugly and funny – boring) plus indicating their language familiarities, L2 backgrounds, speaker voice liking, demographics, and musicality levels. Findings revealed that all factors in complex interplay explain a certain percentage of variance: familiarity and expertise in foreign languages, speaker voice characteristics, phonetic complexity, musical acoustic properties, and finally musical expertise of the listener. The most important discovery was the trade-off between speech tempo and so-called linguistic melody (pitch variance): the faster the language, the flatter/more atonal it is in terms of the pitch (speech melody), making it highly appealing acoustically (sounding beautiful and sexy), but not so melodious in a “musical” sense.

NONVERBAL MEANS OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: A PROBLEM OF CONFORMITY

The article substantiates the need to study the features of nonverbal behavior of representatives of different cultures due to the discrepancy of kinesic systems. English, Russian and Uzbek non-speech behavior, and the divergence of gestures are analyzed using the example of English, Russian and Uzbek kinesic cultures. Emotions can have a significant impact on the development, success or failure of the speech act and on the expression of the emotional state of each participant in communication. Gestures characterize national, territorial and social peculiarities of the communicant observed in temperament, emotional state and attitude to the interlocutor and, therefore, the author considers the problem of intercultural conformity, closely associated with interpretation of non-verbal text by different cultures. It is argued, for a complete and clear interpretation of the meaning of the statement transmitted by non-verbal means; it is necessary to avoid incorrect, incomplete, and excessive interpretation of non-verbal speech. The special nature of nonverbal communication explains the presence of universal, understandable signs, as well as specific signals used only within one culture. It is also analyzed the phonation phenomena of speech: melody, timbre, rhythm and strength of voice, articulation activity, which have the functions of supplementing and replacing a verbal utterance, which determine the physical and psycho-emotional state of the interlocutor.

Is It Speech or Song? Effect of Melody Priming on Pitch Perception of Modified Mandarin Speech

Tonal languages make use of pitch variation for distinguishing lexical semantics, and their melodic richness seems comparable to that of music. The present study investigated a novel priming effect of melody on the pitch processing of Mandarin speech. When a spoken Mandarin utterance is preceded by a musical melody, which mimics the melody of the utterance, the listener is likely to perceive this utterance as song. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the neural substrates of this speech-to-song transformation. Pitch contours of spoken utterances were modified so that these utterances can be perceived as either speech or song. When modified speech (target) was preceded by a musical melody (prime) that mimics the speech melody, a task of judging the melodic similarity between the target and prime was associated with increased activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and superior/middle temporal gyrus (STG/MTG) during target perception. We suggest that the pars triangularis of the right IFG may allocate attentional resources to the multi-modal processing of speech melody, and the STG/MTG may integrate the phonological and musical (melodic) information of this stimulus. These results are discussed in relation to subvocal rehearsal, a speech-to-song illusion, and song perception.

Intonation of Different Types of Statements in English and Chinese

The article has identified the intonation design of different statement types in the Chinese and English languages. Comparative analysis has revealed the presence of both similar and distinctive characteristics in the intonation design of different sentences types in the Chinese and English languages. Prosodic means of contacting languages are considered not only from the point of view of semanticdistinctive tones of a syllable, but also from the point of view of their communicative orientation. Key words: intonation, prosodic means, speech melody, register, stress, rhythm, pausing, tempo.