An Empirical Method for Comparing Pitch Patterns in Spoken and Musical Melodies: A Comment on J.G.S. Pearl’s “Eavesdropping with a Master: Leos Janá ek and the Music of Speech”

Music and speech both feature structured melodic patterns, yet these patterns are rarely compared using empirical methods. One reason for this has been a lack of tools which allow quantitative comparisons of spoken and musical pitch sequences. Recently, a new model of speech intonation perception has been proposed based on principles of pitch perception in speech. The “prosogram” model converts a sentence’s fundamental frequency contour into a sequence of discrete tones and glides. This sequence is meant to represent a listener’s perception of pitch in connected speech. This article briefly describes the prosogram and suggests a few ways in which it can be used to compare the structure of spoken and musical melodies. Submitted 2006 June 1; accepted 2006 June 6.