Week 8 Speech + Music

Question 1

Vocalisation

Answer 1

• = acoustic energy arising from vocal tract
  1. Air pushed from lungs provides molecular disturbance
  2. Air crosses vocal folds
  o Vocal folds longer in men
  o Folds lose tautness with age
  3. Resonates through larger cavities
  4. Articulated by throat, tongue, lips, teeth, jaw
  o Hundreds of fine movements per second
  o Also goes through nasal cavity – resonance cavity
  o Using all the muscles to form that air into a particular spatial pattern and
  push it out the mouth
  o Face is over-represented in somatotopic map

Question 2

Speech perception requires

Answer 2

- Hearing
o Functional auditory system
o Basic 3 levels of auditory processing
 Spatial localisation
 Signal to noise optimising
 Recognition of sound as vocal energy
 Gives you identifiable sound
- Speech processing – gives you meaning 
o Semantic content
o Paralinguistic information – gives extra info beyond just the words
 Person speaking
 Affective state
 Get affective mood information
 Intentions
 Questions, monotone
 Conveyed by fluctuations

Question 3

Non-speech vs speech vocalisation

Answer 3

- Non-speech
o Screaming, laughing, bawling, grunting
o No words
o Things we see in other species that can vocalise
- Speech
o Words
o Semantics + prosody 
o Only in humans

Question 4

Phonemes

Semantic content

Answer 4

= distinct sounds used to create words in spoken language
- The fundamental unit of speech; if you change a phoneme, you can change the
meaning of a word
- Written /b/ etc.
- Every language has its own phonemes
- ~ 12 phonemes/sec at normal rate of speech
- Each phoneme has a very specific pattern of acoustic energy
o Specific to phoneme. Specific to individual
o Formants – the frequencies at which peaks of acoustic energy occur
 Each vowel related phoneme has a characteristic formant pattern
 Consonants provide formant transitions – rapid shifts in frequency
- A string of phonemes (a spoken word) gives a specific sound spectrogram
o Specific to word, specific to individual
o Temporal time scale – say it fast and process it fast
o Every person has a different spectrogram for the same word
- Tech applications based on this specificity
o If every individual says a word in a specific pattern of energy that someone
can’t fake – can use this as a security device

Question 5

Voice recognition for security

Answer 5

 Way you say your name is as unique as your fingerprint

 Sounds the same as someone else but acoustic energy will be different

Question 6

Speech recognition for communication with machines/computer interface

Answer 6

 Talk to a computer interface of some sort
 Train computer to recognise words based on acoustic energy patterns
associated with them
 Problem
 Computer only knows a certain number of patterns so doesn’t always recognise what you’re saying
 Your pattern might not match one embedded in they system
 Put as many patterns as possible in the system to compensate

Question 7

Sound spectrograms

Answer 7

• Illustrate phoneme spectra, cadence, intonation
• Small time scale
  o Speech has a fine temporal structure
  o There are rapid fluctuations in acoustic energy
• How do we make sense of the rapid acoustic energy
  o The brain can bind phonemes and parse streams of acoustic energy into words
• ~5% children perceptually speech impaired (LBLI – language based learning impairment)
  o Brain isn’t able to grasp concept of binding and parsing
  o Taking longer in perceptual processing to understand temporal structure of speech – talking slower helps

Question 8

Bottom Up Processing

Answer 8

maybe each phoneme is indicated by a specific fibre activation pattern (pattern encoding)
- Level: auditory fibres in cochlea
o Tonotopical basilar membrane in cochlea
o Maybe each spectrogram maps to a specific ‘neurogram’ o High frequency at base, low frequency at apex
 Hairs have frequency associated with it that they best respond to
o Asyousayaword
 Each phoneme has a different amount of energy
 Maps straight from map of cochlea and travels straight up stream
 Different pattern of activation for each sound – brain puts it together

Question 9

Shortcomings (Speech processing – content)

Answer 9

o Coarticulation
 Sometimes we say a phoneme but the energy is different depending
on what comes after it
 /d/ will activate different fibres in cochlea basal membrane in different
situations – different words
 Acoustic energy is different but resulting perception is the same
 E.g. /di/ and /du/ have different spectrograms for the /d/, but in both
instance we hear /d/
o Phoneme variance
 /t/ from different people have different spectrograms but we
understand each other’s /t/
 /t/ at 25dB and /t/ at 60dB have different spectrograms but both are
understood as /t/ - as a whisper or loud
 Resulting perception is the same
 This indicates perceptual constancy is occurring
 This occurs on the word and sentence levels
 The stimuli are different but resulting perceptions are the
same
 E.g. ‘the’ – 50 different spectrograms – understood as ‘the’

Question 10

Perceptual constancy (Speech processing – content)

Answer 10

o Different incoming stimuli result in the same perceptual interpretation o Examples of perceptual constancy
 Phoneme constancy
 Speech constancy
o Suggests a lot of top-down processing is occurring in our understanding of
speech – built a knowledge base and rules about patterns to help perceive speech

Question 11

Cortical , Top down Processing

Answer 11

speech perception needs some incoming bottom-up sensory information but cortical processing is critical
- Via experience, build a knowledge base to assist in interpreting and understanding sensory info coming in from the environment
o Apply knowledge base to the signal to make sense of it
- Level: auditory cortex
o A1 + secondary/tertiary bands
o A1 does not preferentially respond to speech, responds to any noise o Some association areas do preferentially respond to speech
- Wernicke’s area
o In left hemisphere
o Critical for hearing words
o Damage = intact hearing but can’t understand speech
 Receptive aphasia – can hear signal but not the semantics, has no meaning associated
- Broca’s area
o In left hemisphere
o Critical for speaking words
o Damage = intact hearing but can’t speak coherent words
 Expressive aphasia
 Can understand what is spoken but can’t put sounds together into
meaningful words

Question 12

Paralinguistic info

Answer 12

• R hemisphere
  o Areas of temporal lobe, prefrontal cortex, limbic
  o Strong activation to emotional intonation and non-speech utterances o Strong activation during speaker identification
  o Who is talking, are they in a good mood, are they asking questions?
• Prosody – intonation
  o Signals intent – declarative/interrogative o Signals mood
• Damage
  o Dysprosody = content intact but can’t understand intonation o Phonagnosia = content intact but can’t identify speaker
  o Autism – problems in superior temporal sulcus processing
   Understand speech fine but miss nuances – sarcasm, comedy, anger
   Intonation based, not content based

Question 13

Speech perception requires

Answer 13

• Hearing
  o Functional auditory system–pinna-A1
  o Basic 3 levels of auditory processing – A1, parabelts, ventral/dorsal stream
• Speech content
  o Content – Wernicke’s, Broca’s – LH
  o Paralinguistic info – person, affective state, intentions
   If you don’t have these – miss subtleties of human interaction
   RH laden
   STS, PFC, limbic system

Question 14

Phoneme recognition

speech processing

Answer 14

o Acoustic energy pattern
o Phonemic restoration effect
 Do need acoustic energy pattern coming in – although the pattern may be missing some of the phonemes you heard
 Use knowledge to fill in missing phonemes
 People might not pronounce all the phonemes in a word – brain fills in gaps – restoration gap
o Indexical characteristics
 Knowledge about the person
 Their accent – using that info to help understand what they’re saying

Question 15

Context

speech recognition

Answer 15

o Language appropriate combinations of letters
o Topic of conversation
 Use context to help figure out what they’re saying

Question 16

Boundaries

speech recognition

Answer 16

o Language appropriate combinations of syllables
 There are no boundaries between the words you speak but you hear
separate words
 The breaks are an auditory illusion – acoustic energy is continuous but
you can parse the words
 Need to parse in the right places to separate the info into meaningful
words
 E.g. so I got out of bed this morning VS so I got out of bed this morn ing
o Knowledge of vocabulary
 Need knowledge of English and vocabulary
 We perceptually hear separate words based on knowledge of
language
 The only time we usually acoustically break is to signal ‘done’ in flow of conversation
 It sounds weird when people actually pause between words

Question 17

Supplementary sensory input

speech recognition

Answer 17

o Incoming visual input
 Lots of our hearing is also seeing
 Reading lips, body language, facial expressions, hand gestures
 Humans seem to be natural lip readers e.g. McGurk effect
 McGurk effect – what you see overrides what you hear; if you close your eyes you hear the sound as it is but if you open your eyes it can influence what we hear
o Doesn’t matter what knowledge you bring
o Conflicting senses – brain tries to make sense of the
conflict
o The modality that is providing more salient info takes
over or combines with the other
o Seeing the articulators changing visually changes the phoneme you hear
 Speech-reading greatly aids speech processing for a person with a cochlear implant
o Previously gained knowledge of how to interpret that input
 Knowledge about the visual information and how to interpret it

Question 18

Practice

speech recognition

Answer 18

o Becoming a native listener of a language takes years
 Exposure to the language builds up the top-down categories to understand the bottom-up categories
o Starts in utero?
 Newborn preference for maternal voice vs other females
 Newborn preference for maternal native language vs other languages
o Phoneme set hones in infancy
 Unimportant phonemes start to become ignored ~6 months
 If you haven’t been exposed, lose ability to discriminate
 E.g. in Japanese /r/ and /l/ discrimination not useful  ignore
 Important vowels and consonants become delineated, defined
o As exposure to language and knowledge (vocab, syntax) progresses, this facilitates top-down recognition of language appropriate syllables, words, boundaries
 Start to be able to understand and parse quickly
 Need to be exposed to phonemes passively in infancy – is important
for language later in life
 Just hearing them will train brain to discriminate – when it
comes to learning the language the brain has been primed o Baby talk – ‘motherese’
 When speaking to infants adults often unconsciously use higher pitch and frequent intonation fluctuation
 Also tend to do this with pets and partners
 Baby talk is different to the other situations
 We stress vowels when talking to human babies
 Use articulated voice to help learn the formants
o A1 forms the picture of the formants – babies can learn the better later on – plasticity
 Unconscious attempt to amplify phonetic characteristics of native language especially vowel articulation
 Babies are born with the capacity to recognise global phoneme library
 Experience dependent plasticity occurs in infancy; and only
frequently heard phonemes persist
 Kuhl et al., 1997
 Want language diversity – give them exposure to as many phonemes as possible
 Melodies, combinations of notes – helps language abilities later

Question 19

Top Down Processing

speech perception

Answer 19

o Able to perceive and understand despite immensely variant acoustic signals
 Phonemes vary between and within individuals
 Phoneme pronunciation differs between individuals/accents
 Oftentimes phonemes missing or muddled
 Acoustic signal is extremely rapid
o Able to parse words and sentences despite continuous acoustic signal
 Robots have trouble with this
 Can make voice recognition but don’t have the knowledge base when
the acoustic signal is a bit muddled or in an accent
o William James
 Part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object
before us, another part always comes out of our own head
 Top-down processing
 Robots don’t have this – lacks this second component of
perception
o Attempts to give a robot top-down processing by giving it a knowledge base
 If it has a detector and an open source database knowledge base, can see if the incoming info matches anything in the database and make sense of it

Question 20

Auditory scene analysis

Answer 20

o Able to delineate and perceive vocalisations in audibly cluttered
environments
 Robot also have trouble with this
 Pick up all the sounds as one signal
o Auditory scene = the whole array of sounds in your present environment
o Analysis = processing the auditory scene into separate auditory images;
source segregation (parsing)
 Achieved via the 3 basic levels of processing: signal to noise
optimisation, spatial localisation, sound recognition
o While not consciously attending to all the info, still process it subconsciously –
if something happens you can shift attention and pick up on salient
information
o Music playback on a speaker is a good example of ASA
 Even though the sound is coming through one speaker – one spatial location – you can still parse it apart
 Can tell the vocals from the instruments
 We can focus on one person talking and ignore all others

Question 21

Why Music

Answer 21

- Seemingly odd of humans
o Spans globe, age, SE spectrum
o Can be communicative, with or without words
 No semantic content but you still know the feelings - Has persisted for thousands of years
o Is it a useful means of communication?
 What messages can you convey
 Good at it – attract people to you
o Is it simply hedonic
 Pinker’s idea of auditory cheesecake
 Do we just like it?

Question 22

Which came first, speech or music?

Answer 22

o Darwin
 Music came first
 A way to sexually select
 People will be lured to you – brings potential mates
 Shows you have skill and creativity
o Spencer
 Language came first
 The prosody segued into singing o Diana Deutsch
 Speech to song illusion
 Loop a spoken phrase
 Sounds like sung words over time
 Brain gets altered for particular phrase – sounds like singing every
time you hear it
 Supports that speech came first
 Inflection are looped – frequency and pitch change
 Expand this and make it pronounced - singing

Question 23

what is music?

Answer 23

• Definition: a perceptual experience created by purposely combining a limited set of
  acoustic signals (notes)
• Note: fundamental ‘unit’ of music
  o Can vary in loudness
  o Has a specific pitch and duration
  o Notes with the same pitch and duration can still differ in timbre
  o Ever voice category (or instrument) covers a specific range of frequencies
   Vary differently from speech
  o Very specific differences in Hz for each note

Question 24

Harmonics

Answer 24

o The sound wave that comes out of the hammer hitting the string
 Will have harmonics – overtones related
to the 220 frequency but won’t just be 220Hz by itself
 Creates complex waves
o Hit G# create 220Hz wave but have lots of wave
forms on top of each other
o Harmonic – start with base frequency – the
note
 Fundamental frequency
 Interweaved with the integers – doubled,
tripled, etc.
o Fundamental frequency = n
 Nx2,nx3,nx4,nx5…
 Different instruments will give different patterns of harmonics for the same note

Question 25

Pitch perception exhibits perceptual constancy

Answer 25

o Different incoming stimuli can result in the same pitch perception, as long as fundamental frequencies are the same
 Two different notes have different characteristics – timbre due to the harmonics
 Each musician plays G3
 Different acoustic energy patterns –differing in power spectrum of
harmonics but is the same note
 Guitar has a lot of higher frequency
harmonics
 Bassoon has more power in second
harmonic
o Even if you remove the fundamental frequency
but maintain harmonies the same pitch perception can result
 The effect of the missing fundamental

Question 26

Music perception requires

Answer 26

• Hearing
  o Functional auditory system
  o Basic 3 levels of auditory processing
• Music processing
  o Pitch, rhythm – don’t need to learn this when learning speech
  o Motoric? – motor processing inherently linked with auditory processing
  o Cognitive assessment
   Enjoyment, emotion, meaning
   Personalised, cultural, memory links activated

Question 27

Cortical processing of music

Answer 27

- Brain areas activated
o Everywhere – the whole brain 
 Even visceral
o Frontal – preferences 
o A1 – hearing stuff
 Belt regions – right belts and parabelts
 Music is more on the right side of the brain
 Left is more for language
o Motor cortex
o Sensorimotor
o Visual – watching music performed

Question 28

Pitch

Answer 28

• The perceptual submodality of sound based on the frequency of the acoustic energy
  (~pitch/tone/note)
• Different pitches can be patterned in a certain way to make a melody
  o We can usually still perceive and recognise melodies even if the pitches are wrong or the absolute interval is skewed
• Melodies show perceptual constancy
  o Melodic constancy – as long as the relative pattern is maintained we can recognise usually
   Need to maintain melodic contour
   Melody is preserved and can make sense of it – recognise it
   If it is inverted – can’t recognise
• Sometimes the relationship between the notes can be very small
  o Difficult to distinguish for some people
  o Small differences in Hz
• Moving up the keyboard to the right increases frequency and tone height

Question 29

Pitch differences between individuals

Answer 29

• Absolute pitch
  o Perfect pitch
  o Heightened ability to identify and name specific pitches
  o Used to be considered innate – however correlations to early musical training, early blindness, early linguistic exposure
   Train – take perceptual component and add in memory component
   Prime auditory cortex to listen to small differences – early exposure to music or tonal language
  o ~1 in 10,000
• Relative pitch
  o Heightened ability to identify tonal intervals but less accurate at naming specific pitches
  o Can be honed, often seen in musicians
• Normal pitch
• Amusia
  o Tone deaf
  o Inability to differentiate small differences in pitch that characterise music
  o Can be difficult to perceive melodies
  o Can be congenital amusia or secondary to brain damage
  o Can be overcome with training

Question 30

Experience dependent plasticity

Answer 30

• In monkeys, active training increases tone discrimination performance and auditory
  cortex remapping
• In humans highly skilled musicians have ~25% increase in cortical representation of
  music tones
• In humans, sound localisation ability high develop in conductors
  o Plasticity in belt regions and brainstem
  o Superior olive and cochlear nucleus

Question 31

Rhythm

Answer 31

• The temporal patterning of the acoustic signals
• Does not necessarily need a melody but a melody always has a rhythm
• Rhythm provides perceptual organisation to the music
  o Deviations from this organisation can seem pleasant or unpleasant
  o E.g. syncopation, jazz improve
• Often drives the mood/feeling of music

Question 32

Music and emotion

Answer 32

• If notes themselves are non-referential, then why do certain combinations of notes
  (melodies) makes us feel
  o Sad, happy, proud, energetic
• Perhaps due to
  o Familiarity/conditioning
  o A specific memory (episodic link) o Intrinsicmusicalstructure
   Tempo, loudness, key
   Instrument timbre

Question 33

Music feels

Answer 33

o Can use music to make you feel happier or to wallow in your sadness 
o At the gym – energy component
 Part of this is loudness
 Sympathetic nervous system activation – cortisol release, waiting for
something in the enviro to happen
 Amps you up physiologically
 Tempo
 Using music for athlete’s performance
 Bpm match heart rate or running pace

Question 34

Music has power to affect you in a way that language alone doesn’t

Answer 34

-Conditioned from an early age
 Religious sounds, radio sounds, funeral sounds, sports sounds
 Conditioned as a group – society – you know certain songs are
happy
 Conditioned to feel proud – national anthem
-Memory
 Brings you back to a time from the past
 Unique to you as an individual
-Intrinsic
 Sound waves create emotion
 Keys – consonant chords are pleasant, dissonant chords are
not
 Certain instruments for happy music – have timbre with a
certain feel
 Peter and the wolf – each animal has an instrument that
matches the character

Question 35

Music Therapy

Answer 35

o Music is increasingly being used as a part of speech therapy for aphasia
o Activate right A1 – lack of language in that area
o When congenital aphasia, or selective aphasia
 Seems like music is a way to release inhibition in the brain and let you speak again

Question 36

Sack’s hypothesis

music therapy

Answer 36

 The right broca’s area is inhibiting the left broca’s area – aberrant inhibition across hemispheres
 Maybe music can distract or engage the right so it disinhibits the left
and lets it work again
 Right correlary of Broca’s region – it is usually on the left
 Functional recovery

Question 37

Aphasia that lacks prosody

music therapy

Answer 37

 Stroke – regain normal speech
 Sound robotic – lost inflection
 Use music to reengage the right hemisphere
 Paralinguistic prosody area – right hemisphere – learn to use
inflection again
 Get patients to sing things and tone down the intonations to a
normal speech level

Question 38

Tourette’s, autism, movement disorders (PD)

music therapy

Answer 38

 “we listen with our muscles” Nietzsche
 Sacks
 Patients in the 60’s who were catatonic, wake them up with music
 Wake them up out of their wheelchairs and respond to things
o Start to walk around
o Motoric component to music that stimulates you to move
o All of a sudden the catatonic people getting up and dancing – environmental enrichment, don’t need drugs or anything else
 Even babies will move to music – innate tendencies to move to a beat
 Also in animals
 We respond - energy in patterns makes us want to move

Question 39

Memorisation

music therapy

Answer 39

 Melody helps you remember and encode information

 Will remember a song you liked from 10 years ago

Question 40

Week 8 Speech + Music