Music and Speech
A few years ago Radiolab released an episode interviewing Diana Deutsch. She described an interesting artifact of the way the human brain processes new sounds. She tells of an experience she had while editing a lecture recording. A short loop of her voice repeating the phrase, “sometimes behave so strangely” was left running as she stepped away form her computer. After hearing the loop in the background for some time, she recognized it not initially as speech, but instead as song. While listening to the loop, her brain began to recognize the patterns and repetition so precisely that at some point a shift in perception occurred and she began to understand the clip in musical terms.
This seems to be a effect should be familiar to fans of minimalism or dance music. The gradual changes are used to add variety and once all the various elements have time to be understood by the listener. It is this spirit of trying to become acclimatized to disparate noises that i have created my Tribute Song.
RadioLab 4-21-2006:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21/segments/58272
Tribute Song (Behaves So Strangely):
sometimestrange
