Philip,
Are you suggesting that birds and animals cannot talk, or make music?
I doubt speech (auditory communication) is restricted to humans (it is
clearly NOT uniquely human, IMO).
Nor is speech just rhythm. If you remove the sounds above or below
1500 Hz, we know that the identification (P_c) of maximum entropy
sounds (the so called nonsense speech sounds) goes to 50% (this result
comes from the c1930 articulation index measurements at Western
Electric, and Bell Labs, once it was created).
How does your rhythm theory figure into this result?
I am not saying that some sort of rhythm plays no roll, just trying to
put your comments into some perspective. What exactly would the role
of rhythm be, in your view? What is the difference between "rhythm"
and critical band "modulations" (within and across critical bands),
commonly found in the auditory literature, for example?
Jont Allen
AUDITORY automatic digest system wrote:
There are 4 messages totalling 430 lines in this issue.
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Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 21:44:21 +1300
From: Philip Dorrell <aud@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Rhythm perception (is really speech rhythm perception)
According to my "super-stimulus" theory of music=20
(http://whatismusic.info/), the primary purpose of the cortical maps=20
that respond to regular musical rhythms is to perceive the irregular=20
rhythms of speech in a time-scaling invariant manner (i.e. the same=20
rhythm at different tempos). My theory imposes an additional
constraint=20
on any theory of rhythm perception, in that it requires that the=20
perception of musical rhythms must result in geometrical patterns of=20
neural activity which are more constant than is the case when
perceiving=20
speech rhythms, and which have clearly defined perimeters between
active=20
and inactive regions.
This theory is consistent with the incremental perception of beat,=20
because the purpose of rhythm perception must be to label the
components=20
of speech rhythm as they occur, as being more or less part of a
regular=20
rhythm. There is no purpose to "find" the regular beat, because in=20
general there are no regular beats in speech. It's like Fourier=20
analysis, which happens to produce a well-defined result for regular=20
repeating signals, but can be quite useful in the characterisation of=20
non-regular non-repeating signals.
The theory is also consistent with the observation that the ability
to=20
perceive musical rhythms is uniquely human (since speech is uniquely
huma=
n).
Philip Dorrell.