Hierarchical temporal structure in music, speech and animal vocalizations: jazz is like a conversation, humpbacks sing like hermit thrushes.

ABSTRACT: Humans talk, sing and play music. Some species of birds and whales sing long and complex songs. All these behaviours and sounds exhibit hierarchical structure-syllables and notes are positioned within words and musical phrases, words and motives in sentences and musical phrases, and so on. We developed a new method to measure and compare hierarchical temporal structures in speech, song and music. The method identifies temporal events as peaks in the sound amplitude envelope, and quantifies event clustering across a range of timescales using Allan factor (AF) variance. AF variances were analysed and compared for over 200 different recordings from more than 16 different categories of signals, including recordings of speech in different contexts and languages, musical compositions and perform

SUBMITTER: Kello CT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5665819 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature