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Episode 10: Sometimes Behave So Strangely Redux
87 Plays7 years ago
As we finish up season one, we look back to one of the most famous and strange musical illusions: speech turning into song through repetition. We explore some new research on the relationship between singing and speaking and what happens in the brain when the illusion works. And we look forward to season two, in which we'll focus in on what music can tell us about medicine.
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Transcript
Introduction to the podcast and speech-to-song illusion
00:00:00
Speaker
The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible. Did that sound familiar? Welcome back to Cadence, the podcast where we explore what music can tell us about the mind. I'm your host, Indre Viscontis.
00:00:19
Speaker
You might have heard, sometimes behave so strangely, the speech to song illusion by Diana Deutsch on this podcast or on Radiolab or in a talk that someone gave or in a myriad other places. There are even bands that have sampled it.
00:00:43
Speaker
I wanted to revisit it to show you that if you did experience a change from speech to song and it lasted, that's pretty amazing.
00:00:53
Speaker
This is an example of extremely rapid and extremely long-lasting closticity, right? I mean, you hear things one way, and then, because of this manipulation, you hear that very same thing, maybe forever, who knows, certainly for years in the experience of several people I've spoken to.
00:01:14
Speaker
a different way. So this tweaking of the pitches is amazingly long-lasting and I don't know of any other example of plasticity that is so rapid and so long-lasting in either the visual or the auditory system.
Research insights on infants' perception of speech and song
00:01:44
Speaker
That was Diana Deutsch, the discoverer of the illusion and a music cognition pioneer. I wanted to explore the implications of this kind of plasticity and the many different ways in which this illusion has been studied by music cognition researchers. A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with one such researcher in Canada who pointed me to a study of the speech to sound illusion that I hadn't read yet.
00:02:05
Speaker
My name is Christina van den Bosch der Nederlunden and I study how we learn about music and language in development. So the questions that I like to ask are really basic questions like, how do we know the difference between speech and song? How do we tell the difference between music and language?
00:02:22
Speaker
I don't know how we do, but it becomes really interesting in development when you ask that question. So when we talk to infants, we don't talk to infants either speaking or singing. We talk to infants in a really sing-songy way, right? So infant-directed speech or motheries or whatever you want to call it has a lot of musical characteristics. So again, instead of just saying, hi, how are you?
00:02:45
Speaker
Hi, how are you? We do a lot with our intonation to bring affect into it and to make it more engaging. And so when you think about kind of the statistical distributions of the acoustic characteristics that maybe would differentiate speech and song,
00:03:02
Speaker
They're pretty blurred. The lines are pretty blurred in infancy. And so that's a lot of the questions that I was asking in my graduate work at University of Nevada, Las Vegas with Aaron Hannon and Joel Snyder. And so I did a little bit of infancy stuff, but I had to start with adults just asking these sorts of questions. So a nice boundary condition is, I don't know if you know the speech to song allusion. Yep, we do.
00:03:31
Speaker
Oh, sweet. Awesome.
Repetition's role in perception and individual variations
00:03:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great, it's a really great illusion. And basically, the first time you hear it, it sounds like speech. And then after multiple repetitions, it starts to sound like song. So I used 24 of these in a study and I wanted to know whether or not when people are listening to these utterances, whether or not they actually are listening to them as song. Wait, what? 24 of them? I had to hear them and see if they were just as powerful.
00:03:59
Speaker
How did she find these? Adam Tierney is the one who found them and he apparently had a bit of an army of undergrad research assistants go through like books on tape to try and find these illusions too. Let's hear what this army of graduate students came up with.
00:04:15
Speaker
Here is no less gave the houses snags and sandbars and his two sisters somehow I can get when she comes she may find some little distance down there was a cold drizzle fumes history of England shortly after eight o'clock people in the neighborhood it has its compensations and one cannot help
00:04:30
Speaker
There are more and more studies about kind of these speech to song transformations with repetition and stuff like that. But it's kind of interesting because it seems like it's not just any utterance that can transform from speech to song. It has to have specific acoustic characteristics like this rhythmic regularity, fundamental frequency stability, or maybe kind of the spread of the pitch relationships to be able to make kind of a melody instead of just being really monotone or something like that. So it doesn't seem like it's just any utterance that can do that.
00:05:00
Speaker
So I guess the story isn't quite as simple as repetition. But the next question is whether it works for everyone. So I had 24 different illusions. And I remember when I first started the study, I thought, okay, everybody's going to be hearing all of these is transforming to song just like I do. But that wasn't the case. So you have people, it seems pretty individual. So
00:05:19
Speaker
Again there are 24 of these and for some of the utterances people heard them as song by the end and some of them they sounded like speech but it was again very individual so it wasn't that it was always excerpt number two that everybody heard is transforming it was you know there was a lot of variability in that which is actually pretty neat.
00:05:37
Speaker
That's a whole other question that people can ask. So what are the acoustic characteristics that make something transform into song? There are some ideas about rhythmic regularity, like we were talking about earlier. And then I think a big one seems to be fundamental frequency stability. So even if you go back to when I was doing infant-directed speech, my fundamental frequency, the pitch of my voice,
00:06:02
Speaker
wasn't very stable. So I'm not, when I say hi, the pitch is going all over the place. But when you sing, it gets pretty stable. So if I'm singing, hi, how are you? It's, hi, how are you? And I'm kind of moving discreetly from each note or something like that.
00:06:19
Speaker
And so that might be a big difference between speech and song too. When we are talking, even though my voice gets a little monotone when I'm talking a lot, usually the pitch of your voice is moving all over the place. It's not discrete movements either. It's sliding and gliding from one syllable to the next. And so I think that's another big difference between kind of speech and song as well.
00:06:42
Speaker
This reminded me of a retreat I went to a few months ago in which I was talking about music in the brain to a room full of scientists and film and television directors from Hollywood. It was a really interesting weekend. And during my talk, I played the speech to song illusion via Diana Deutsch and watched the room transform as it inevitably does every time I play that illusion. But they sometimes behave so strangely. They sometimes
Exploring non-experience of speech-to-song illusion and mind wandering
00:07:08
Speaker
behave so strangely.
00:07:15
Speaker
But then a couple of people came up to me afterwards and asked me to explain it to them because they hadn't heard it. It didn't work for them. And that kind of amazed me because it just seems to work for me so automatically. And even many, many years later, if I haven't heard the illusion, it just seems to do the same thing. And the two people who
00:07:37
Speaker
express the fact that they hadn't heard it turn into song were scientists. And I know they were really paying a lot of attention. I could see it in their faces. And so I wondered if, in fact, one of the ways in which the illusion happens requires you to kind of let your mind wander.
00:07:55
Speaker
and listen to it in a new way, as opposed to sitting there and focusing on the auditory aspects of the sound. In my department, the chair of the department would always say, every time, every time I gave this talk, because you give the talk a lot when you're, you know, when it's, when it's some of your first projects, every time he'd say, I don't hear it.
00:08:14
Speaker
every time. Maybe there are individual differences in terms of what acoustic characteristics you weigh more heavily in your distribution or your thresholding of what acoustic characteristics make something sound like speech or song.
00:08:29
Speaker
So yeah, maybe in this particular illusion if the particular pattern of pitch, pitch pattern, so the Deutsch illusion has kind of a nice cadential almost ending there, something like that. And so maybe that's more important for somebody who for whatever reason weighs pitch information more heavily than rhythm or something like that.
00:08:50
Speaker
And so maybe the chair of the department at UNLV wanted something more with the rhythm and didn't pay as much attention to the pitch characteristics. So what did she find? This was just an objective way for this project that I did in my graduate work was to look at whether or not when you perceive it a song, are you perceiving it in a different way that makes it so that you'd be better or worse at detecting certain types of pitch changes?
00:09:17
Speaker
if you were actually perceiving it as song compared to spoken. And so I had two different types of pitch changes, one that kind of conformed to the musical motive or the musical melody that you would have heard if you heard that spoken sentence transform from speech to song. And I had another one that went away from that. And the idea was that if you perceived, after all those repetitions, if you perceived that utterance to actually sound like music,
00:09:44
Speaker
then those musically expected pitch changes or the ones that conform with the musical melody of that sentence should be really hard to detect. But if you perceived it as speech still, you should be able to detect both types of pitch changes. So the musically expected and the musically unexpected equally well. And what I found was that after repetition, people were, because you've heard this utterance many times, you get better at detecting pitch changes from the first time you
00:10:14
Speaker
heard the utterance to the second time, but also that you find a difference between detecting these conforming and non-conforming pitch changes. So basically, you're better at detecting these non-conforming pitch changes because they go away from the melody that you expected and you're worse at detecting the pitch changes that conform with the melody because now they kind of fit with the melodic representation that you have because you're perceiving it as song.
Neuroimaging and brain activity in speech-to-song perception
00:10:41
Speaker
And that only happens when you perceive it as transforming and not when it's stable. So this is kind of a nice way to kind of objectively measure whether or not you perceive these utterances actually sounding like music. So basically, are you recruiting all this musical knowledge that you have when you're hearing this utterance, this song, compared to when you're hearing it in speech?
00:11:02
Speaker
But what about the brain? There have been a few neuroimaging studies of the speech to song illusion, and generally they show that there is overlap with speech production and perception areas plus other regions. So for example, if you hear the sentence as being sung, then you engage parts of your speech and language processing plus some other regions. If you hear it as being spoken, you really stick to those speech regions.
00:11:28
Speaker
So that means that when we hear the stimulus as music, we actually recruit additional parts of our brain that aren't activated when we're just listening to the speech part or we're just interpreting the stimulus as speech. But possibly one of the most interesting neuroimaging studies of this effect comes from the lab of Adam Tierney. Remember him? He's the one whose army of graduate students discovered those next 24 illusions by listening to many, many audiobooks. Here are a few more examples.
00:11:55
Speaker
Shortly after eight o'clock, people in the neighborhood, it has its compensations, and one cannot help wishing linen of the salt in public. Cannot guard yourself. I have had nothing since breakfast. Would induce her to change her plans. You would know that you had heard it. Sudden commotion on the deck. For this was the only service...
00:12:11
Speaker
So Adam Tierney's team found that when we hear the sounds as singing rather than speaking, we also engage the parts of our brain that are responsible for speech production, the motor areas, the ones that control the muscles involved in speech. It's almost like we're singing along in our heads, literally using the muscles that we would use were we actually singing.
00:12:33
Speaker
while we're listening. But we don't do that when we think the person is just talking. Now, we've already heard about the close connection between music and movement in past episodes, as we've talked about how our brain processes rhythm. But is this connection to movement also why we remember music better than, say, other things?
Music's memorability and the earworm phenomenon
00:12:52
Speaker
It's somehow in our bodies, what some people call muscle memory, which of course is actually in the brain, not in the muscles.
00:13:00
Speaker
So I asked Diana Deutsch, why is music so memorable?
00:13:04
Speaker
Memory for music is unique in that, well, let's compare it with memory for speech. When you listen to a conversation and remember it, you don't remember the exact words that are being said, but rather you remember the gist or the general meaning of what's being said. But it doesn't make any sense to do that in music. I mean, you can't paraphrase a phrase of music, for example.
00:13:33
Speaker
the sounds and the sound patterns stand for themselves. So there has to be a different type of memory because you don't have memory for gist in music. It's memory for something very concrete.
00:13:48
Speaker
And it is very odd because you have this phenomenon of stuck tunes or earworms where you hear music going round and round in your head and you can't get rid of it. So you hear a particular phrase over and over again and this could last for hours or even days. And most people do suffer from stuck tunes to some extent.
00:14:12
Speaker
Some people don't mind them, a lot of people find them just so upsetting that they end up in doctors' offices in an attempt to see if they could get rid of them. One of the things that I find quite remarkable is that we hear music constantly in our daily lives.
00:14:32
Speaker
And we expose ourselves to music constantly. And even if we don't want to, we hear music constantly, you know, in shopping malls and in restaurants, even in doctor's offices and in hospitals. And so we really can't get away from it. And it could be in part that we really haven't evolved to listen to music all the time, like most of our waking lives, but rather that it occurs during, you know, rituals and ceremonies and so on.
00:15:02
Speaker
So it might be that this phenomenon of stock tunes, which people have only just started to look into, is on the whole a relatively recent event, that it's come to occur much more frequently, only recently due to the fact that we are exposed to music so much in our daily lives. And we hadn't been involved to do that.
00:15:31
Speaker
Well, that gives us a lot to think about and explore, but we're running out of time. This is the last episode for this first season of Cadence. Music exposes aspects of our brains and behavior that surprise us and also teach us about ourselves. Over the course of this season, we ask questions like, what is music? What is it for? Is all music great or is there some music that's better than others?
00:15:56
Speaker
And overall, we found that there are a couple of principles that we can take with us as we break and prepare for season two. First, repetition is a universal aspect of all music. But music itself depends on the context, because the same sounds can sound like noise in one context and music in another. And composers don't write in a vacuum. They write in a particular time and place. So if we don't have any sense of when and where they wrote the music, it's hard for us to appreciate it.
00:16:24
Speaker
But there are certain characteristics of great music. Great music taps into the need of our brains to find patterns and to predict the future. But it keeps us interested because it surprises us on many different levels. The way we interpret and listen to music changes depending on how much experience we have with music.
00:16:44
Speaker
whether we're trained musicians, passionate aficionados, or casual listeners. And musical training can even change the way that we perceive other sounds, like language. Musicians develop all kinds of skills, including a precise sense of time that might be different from how the rest of us perceive time. But maybe not. That's still an empirical question.
00:17:04
Speaker
But certainly, musical training changes the way you listen. And that's one thing that musicians really work on all the time, of course. Whether you're trained at a conservatory or in front of YouTube, it still changes how you process sound. Ultimately, here at Cadence, we're interested in how music affects our lives. And so we'll leave the last word to music historian Bob Greenberg. Modernity has been problematic for Homo sapien.
00:17:33
Speaker
And our music is a reflection of that. It's not something that happens on its own. The globalization of the second half of the 20th century is bringing about other things that give me great hope. Western composers are no longer limited to just Western ideas about music or time. We're all being influenced by Asian and Central Asian ideas. We're all being influenced by jazz. We're all being influenced by everything because everything's available.
00:18:07
Speaker
We're already hard at work on season two, and we can't wait to start sharing our new episodes with you starting in late summer. But in order to make the season the best it can possibly be, we need your help. First, you can help us by writing a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you'd like to support us financially, we could really use that too. So we've started a Patreon campaign.
Support and community engagement for Cadence podcast
00:18:30
Speaker
You can find us at patreon.com slash cadencepodcast.
00:18:34
Speaker
That's patreon.com slash cadence podcast. In season one, we explored many of the topics that fascinated me well before I started this podcast. And that brought up so many more things to explore. That's why our next season is going to be a deep dive more into one particular topic. But I'm sure that will just raise even more questions. We hope that you like this podcast, that you're learning something and that you want to see it continue. We really appreciate your help.
00:19:07
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this season and this episode of Cadence. You can find us online at the ensembleproject.com slash Cadence at Facebook slash Cadence podcast and on Twitter at Cadence podcast. You can also get in touch with us at cadencemind at gmail.com.
00:19:23
Speaker
Cadence is produced by Adam Isaac and me, Indre Viscontis. I also created and write the show. The music in this episode was provided for us by acclaimed New Zealand composer, Rian Sheehan. Check him out at riansheehan.com. You can find me on Twitter at indrevis. This season of Cadence was generously sponsored by the Germanicos Foundation. Join us in a few months for season two, in which we continue our exploration of what music tells us about the mind.
00:19:55
Speaker
In the next season, we want to take a deeper dive into a slightly less broad topic, and that is how music cognition research is being applied to the field of medicine.
Preview of upcoming season on music cognition in medicine
00:20:05
Speaker
There's so much to explore. There's all the evidence from people who have had
00:20:11
Speaker
say strokes or brain damage for some other reason that for example may entirely lose their power of speech and yet have no difficulty with music. There's a famous example of the composer Shebelin who after he had a stroke
00:20:30
Speaker
that really clobbered his left hemisphere and left him virtually entirely aphasic, continued to compose music that gave him tremendous acclaim. Williams syndrome, one of the unique things about it is it's a very small genetic deletion and it creates all these seemingly disconnected symptoms, so the friendly personality is the big one, but it also creates intellectual disability
00:20:57
Speaker
And despite the overall intellectual disability, there are certain areas that are really strengths. So verbal ability is one. People with Williams tend to have a really good vocabulary and they can talk really easily. They're great storytellers. And then they also tend to have musical ability that is beyond what you would expect for their intellectual disability.
00:21:20
Speaker
and an intense affinity for music and a really just profound emotional response that's a lot stronger than what we see in the general population.