Words into music: Diana Deutsch and Scott Johnson

Via Crooked Timber comes a link from a program called RadioLab on the research of music psychologist Diana Deutsch on the interrelationship between spoken language and music. The whole program is worth your time, but the first few minutes demonstrate quite elegantly how a looped phrase will seem to acquire its own "melody" such that, when you hear it again in the context of the original, it will still sound "sung."

If you go to the Crooked Timber post, you'll see in the comments the names of composers who have experimented with this idea, Steve Reich being the most prominent. As a sample of this sort of thing, I thought I'd throw in, for your listening pleasure/annoyance (depending on your taste), Scott Johnson's "John Somebody (Part I)".

Technorati tags:
Language, Music, Melody