Always wondered why after a 10 second pause, two people will start talking at exactly the same time. This happened enough to consider it common phenomenon and as supernatural if I were to believe in that sort of thing. Then while I was listening to some music a short while ago, some that I have never heard before. I was whistling some improv, and paused for about 10 seconds as all but one instrument remained pumping out the beat, and simultaneously a second instrument was introduced and my whistling resumed. I am suggesting the rhythm of our sentences is similar to the rhythms of songs, and their predictability is in some ways isomorphic. I used to notice how conversations built into climaxes, and have many voices working together. Any input?
I've frequently observed this during conversations on the telephone. I don't know about "10 seconds" as the length of time that passes before both people start talking again, but after a noticeable pause both people may start talking at the same time. It doesn't happen as often when people are paying attention to body language, because some visual cues can hint at whether or not the person will continue talking... hand gestures or eye contact, for example. Maybe it's related to our recognition of patterns. Without considering expressions, there are ways to determine when someone is going to finish speaking and give you a chance to reply, perhaps as noticeable as an incomplete sentence. When you sit in a room full of people having conversations, I've noticed that you can hear an effect almost like a wave in the voices of the people in the room. As the volume increases and people have more energetic conversations, so too does the energy level decline and the noise subside after some time. The best way I can think of describing it is as a wave. At times it seems as though the overall intensity of conversation in the room reaches an apex. Rhythm in music is often the most noticeable way to tell when an instrument will play. Another similarity to a wave in that it may come and go, although it can be easier to predict since it was likely played in measured time. Though I know that there are some musicians who don't adhere to time signatures. Perhaps it's just a result of being conditioned to find patterns? I know that when I listen to "World Music" I sometimes have trouble keeping the beat. In some ways it's like a foreign language. Listen to it long enough and it will be easier to understand.
If music is geometrical, then language must be too. There's an idea somewhere that we sang first, or developed tonal abilities then the more nuanced changes in the larynx and so on. But I'd say we learned to sing, or chant, maybe. Could help explain why religion and music are such big influences, together and apart. Early music was choral, and religious, back in mediaeval days. The psalms in the Davidian part of the Bible too, were all sung, that goes back a ways. Probably the Egyptians had singing priests and so on. Some mathematical dude is into exploring polyphonics as hypersurface geometry and so on; reckons there's all this geometry in classical and early, and of course modern music.
nice, really helpful posts perhaps they do relate to our general pattern matching ability more than specific music & language correspondence, yet the analogy is elegant and nice to speculate about What happens in those 10 or 2 seconds of speech pause? Why would it take the same amount of time for a person to go through a train of thought like "so what's he gonna say... hmm maybe nothing... well.. ok I'll talk now" Maybe there is a common tempo set / what could account for an internal timer? I've got to think some more, do you have any other thoughts?
Maybe thinking about what to say is a lot more like whistling, or composing a kind of tune, and listening to it is the analysis of the rhythm and tone of the speech. Like how a speech can resonate - Will Shakespeare's words still do, but they're getting harder to grasp idiomatically, they still convey tragedy, comedy, etc. Really old music, say choral works from medieval Europe, still conveys something, or resonates. J S Bach the man, was buried centuries ago, and so on.
I suspect it has more to do with the "comfort zone" of the culture. If you ever see this situation with people from different cultures, they may not jump in at the same time because one is comfortable with a longer pause than the other. There's an old saying, "Two people are truly friends when a silence between them is not awkward." A friend from a northern European country once told me they had to add a second line to that: "And there's no time limit on the length of that silence. It could go on for years." There are other manifestations of the comfort zone phenomenon. Watch a Chinese and a Norwegian have a conversation while standing in a hallway. The Norwegian will slowly pull back to what he considers a comfortable distance, and the Chinese will slowly move forward to fill what he perceives as an uncomfortable gap. The one will back the other all the way to the other end of the hall. As a musician, I understand that. There's a pattern to the music even when there's no obvious melody. There are chord progressions to be resolved, and beyond that there's a structure that mimics the verses. Pop musical figures usually come in multiples of four or six measures. Listen to a drum solo in the middle of a twelve-bar blues and it's usually an exact multiple of twelve measures. Except that in your musical example the rhythm keeps playing so everyone is still keeping accurate time, ready to come in on the same beat. In a speech pause you have to keep time in your head and everybody has to keep time the same way. Much more difficult.
After watching tv and counting some pauses, it makes me think we adapted a highly specialized pause-timer to influence our language just as gestures or pitch changes would. Is a simple children’s tune like Three Blind Mice music? Maybe, but take away the pitch changes and it looks a lot more like speech. There is a gradation of separation between the two, yet they are two distinct categories in my mind. A simple experiment could compare syllable rate = X & pause time in X or something like that. It seems a pause-timer is mutually beneficial. Knowing when to speak, and when to let others speak in some ways is very fundamental. What other aspects of language might use such a precise form of timing?
I just read a study that the rate of pausing fluctuates between different sections of a narrative - a sort of cue for the listener. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=r...HMEig_2vVQvNJThpQ&sig2=U-i1paPtTbxGhyEPd4NI7Q They talk about a rhythm of speech too, but dismiss the overall structure as being important, concentrating on the more linear progress of planning and execution of meaning as the dictator of pauses. Perhaps therein lies a difference between speech and music.
You're only focusing on pitch as the essence of music. Indeed melody and harmony are two of the most important components, but rhythm is equally important and perhaps older. It's a reasonable assumption that people developed drums before other instruments and that drumming was used to coordinate the motions of work before they evolved into dancing, which, as today's rap music shows us, does not require melody and harmony. The symphonic music of the past few centuries has variable rhythm that's difficult to dance to, but all folk and popular music has a very strict rhythm. That's what makes people come in with amazing accuracy on the same beat after a pause. Speech just doesn't have that. The "rhythm" of speech is nowhere near as precise as the rhythm of music. I don't think it's unimportant. But as I said it's not as simple and as rigorous as the rhythm of music. You can count out the rhythm of a song fairly accurately for at least five seconds during a pause. You could easily lose the rhythm of speech in that time.
Thats an interesting observation. I have noticed that, the lapses in a conversation are more often when there are less people talking..you would probably tell me thats absolutely normal..but I have noticed that when we are in a group, we have an awful lot to say,no pauses, no lapses in the conversation, once you have one of two people leaving in the group, then it becomes less noisy...but there will ALWAYS be someone in that group who will be a little more quiet than the others even when the conversations reach a climax.....Hmm I dont know if I am making much sense here Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
When I look at something like rap I ask is it music with language or language with music? I’m taking away the imaginary boundary and calling it one thing – communication. We sing a little when we speak, and we dance a little when we gesture. And if one evolved before the other, than that is neat idea if shaking your finger is a modified tapping of a drum. With the instrument of our tongue and vocal chord we read the sheet music of alphabet and play different tunes.
Rap is kind of a minimalist expression - monotonic "singing'. The voice is used as a monotic instrument, a drum say, so the effect is not tonal but rhythmic. When you listen to normal speech in a foreign language, you can still get the tone of the conversation - expression or emotion is still conveyed, if not the actual content.
Rap is simply poetry. Poetry has rhyme and meter, like song, but not melody. Actually it's atonal in American style rap. In Caribbean rap the syllables are sung but in a very narrow tonal range. Coupled with the fact that the tone doesn't change quickly or often, the effect is not exactly melodic, but it is inarguably slightly more musical than American rap, which is purely poetry recitation set to a musical background. Don't try that in Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, or any other language in which tone is phonemic. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! One of the things I like about Chinese is that you cannot get away with a vague expression of your feeling in the pitch of your voice. You have to actually put it into words and say it. (You can do a little bit with volume, but not much since it's extremely rude in a Chinese community to talk too loud. If you start shouting they'll act like you've disappeared and look right through you.)
Actually, after listening to Thais converse in their native language for more than 10 years, I think I've got the hang of some of it. I know Thai has 5 different vocal tone "levels": low, medium, high, and 2 "in-between" vocal pitches (low-medium, and medium-high), which can appear together. I can judge the tone of a conversation, probably just because of familiarity - but I get it wrong too. Thai has a kind of "verbal shrug" sound, which varies according to (it seems) the level of frustration or resignation. It sounds a bit like: "Aaauuuwweee!", or similar, and with a rising tone - I think the final pitch also maybe defines the "shrug level". I still get "surprised", by the unfamiliar uses of tonality - for example they can be speaking in low (in English, usually considered serious) tones, and then start laughing. A kind of tonal "mismatch", to my native Anglophile grasp of language.
I have seen research claiming that the time length of a line of declaimed, formal poetry was pretty much the same in all languages studied, IIRC about one and a half seconds, and that tonal or slower languages compensated by having fewer words per line. The hypothesis offered was that the similarity of that length and the average time of cross-hemisphere processing communication in the human brain was not a coincidence, and that the pattern had arisen to take advantage of that timing as the musical and linguistic processing areas exchanged info - that the linguistic info coming into one ear would meet the musical info coming from the other hemisphere, while the musical info coming into that hemisphere would meet the linguistic info coming in that respective ear, each new line meeting the other aspects of the processed former line and matching up with them. Which might explain the common pairing of lines in declaimed, epic poetry - it would be like pushing a swing in rhythm, in the mind, as more and more of the neurons in each hemisphere were recruited and joined in the feedback. How that would square with the observation (Feynman et al) that each of us has our own underlying natural counting rhythm, which we can (with practice) use to track quite arbitrary lengths of time, I don't know.
That's a cool concept. I like how a higher level concept like music is a product of the way low-level neurons interact. However are you sure the theory requires both ears to receive sound? - I don't think covering one ear can stop the music. Do you have more info on the timed poetry?
In the proposed scenario outlined in the articles I read, the effects of epic poetry - the old style declaimed stuff, from before Gutenberg - would at least partly depend on the listener having two working ears, yes. One-eared listeners would still get some of the effect, as the rebound was processed. It's pretty simplistic, that model. IIRC the brain has more than a hundred defined, independently active areas of processing. But the notion that there are internal rhythms and natural feedback timings built into the structure of it intrigues - one would assume they have some effect visible in human behavior, and particularly in human communication, which typically brings feedback possibilities galore. As far as links - all this is from articles in periodicals and journals from back in the days of books and magazines. All mine are in storage at the moment. One major article I recall as being in a back issue of "Poetry" magazine - maybe from the 80s ? Another article I recall vaguely from somewhere was about a proposed measurement of "intelligence" that involved timing the reaction speed of the opposite brain hemisphere to a one-sided stimulus - a click noise in one ear. In the middle of it, they mentioned that the people with the fastest and slowest reactions were both more socially isolated than average - few friends, checkered work histories, various psychological problems or idiosyncratic features of their social lives. That was also true of the people in another study (as long as I'm memory delving) who were fastest at ascertaining the emotional milieu of a social scene presented as a film clip - there are people who can guess the dominant mood (anger, mutual affection, humor, etc) of a social situation from a film clip so short that they can't tell how many people are in the scene - faster than the eye can register an accurate image. These people are not often happy central members of a wide circle of wonderful friends and family. For what it's worth - - -
