Some Psycho-Physical Analogies between Speech and Music

Abstract

Exploration of possible relationships between speech and music appears as an attractive approach to gain more insight in the nature of both speech and music. The present paper attempts to throw some light on the psychophysical aspects of that approach, i. e., on analogies and disparities between speech and music on a rather low level of communicative hierarchy. Although speech and music evidently must be regarded as basically different media of audio-communication, in the physical domain they have in common that they just are sound signals stimulating the auditory system of a listener.One can thus explore the problem by asking: What are the basic and typical characteristics of the respective sound signals? Those characteristics in turn can be inspected from two main aspects, namely, that of sound production, and of sound perception. The first aspect is essentially physical, the second psycho-physical.