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 Janáček 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.