Music and speech are among the most frequent types of sounds we hear. But how do we identify what we think are differences between the two?
An international team of researchers mapped out this process through a series of experiments—yielding insights that offer a potential means to optimize therapeutic programs that use music to regain the ability to speak in addressing aphasia. This language disorder afflicts more than 1 in 300 Americans each year, including Wendy Williams and Bruce Willis.
“Although music and speech are different in many ways, ranging from pitch to timbre to sound texture, our results show that the auditory system uses strikingly simple acoustic parameters to distinguish music and speech,” explains Andrew Chang, a postdoctoral fellow in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the lead author of the paper, which appears in the journal PLOS Biology. “Overall, slower and steady sound clips of mere noise sound more like music while the faster and irregular clips sound more like speech.”
