Joshua Steele 1775

1
Joshua Steele 1775

• Speech Intonation and Musical Tonality

2
Introducing Joshua Steele

• Steeles An Essay on the Melody and Measure of
  Speech to Be Expressed and Perpetuated by
  Peculiar Symbols in 1775 was the first major
  treatise on intonation in the English language.
• Oft mentioned, rarely discussed
• Ever since Steele in 1775.... (For example, see
  Gussenhoven 2004, but see Crystal 1969 and
  Abercrombie 1965)

3
Topics for the Presentation

• Only look at what the Essay says about pitch in
  speech, not all that he had to say about the
  melody and measure of speech
• Evaluate it in historical context and against its
  purposes
• Did his methods work? What options existed?
• Evaluate it critically as a work of linguistic
  research
• Do the methods still work? Are they better than
  more current methods? If not, why?

4
The Propositions Controverted

• The primary reason for the Essay was to refute
  statements in The Origin and Progress of Language
  by Burnet.
• We have accents in English... but there is no
  change of the tone in them the voice is only
  raised more, so as to be louder upon one syllable
  than another. ...Then is the music of our
  language, in this respect, nothing better than
  the music of a drum....
• (Progress, p. 299 from Steele 1775 3)
  (Steele 1775 henceforth S)

5
Further Purposes of the Essay

• Hoped to launch a field of intonation research
• Perhaps we have found the land and other
  adventurers will follow (S 46)
• Notation critical because it would allow
  knowledge transfer about speech intonation
  between people and posterity
• Notation would also lead to improvement of the
  arts (stage performance, rhetoric) and elocution
  (S 36-39, 49, among others)

6
Description of Accent

• Speech moves up and down on each syllable in a
  sliding motion
• The voice never rests at any pitch except on the
  end note
• The melodic notes of speech are not part of the
  musical diatonic scale, but much finer
  quarter tones or smaller
• (S 1-12)

7
Method for Discerning Melody

• Use a bass viol or any instrument which permits
  sliding tones
• For bass viol
• Draw the bow across the string
• Slide the hand up and down the 4th string so as
  to imitate the pitch of the voice
• Note the pitches played

8
Notation for Accent

• Since speech is composed of slides up and down
  (acute and grave), use lines, curves, and
  circumflex strokes as the note heads
• Add a tail to mark the Quantity or duration of
  the syllable
• Place these accents on a modified musical staff

9
Example Oh Happiness!

• Lines denote pitch changes on a modified musical
  staff. (S 13)

10
How to modify the staff

• Steele argued that speech did not stop and start
  on the regular chromatic-diatonic semitones of
  the Western scale
• Added an undefined quarter-tone which divided
  the 12 semi-tones of the chromatic scale in half.
• So Cx, Cxx, Cxxx, are C, C1/4, C1/2, C ¾
  (except for B-C and E-F which are half-steps)
• Was not clear if speech actually stopped on a
  quarter tone either, but believed it sufficiently
  accurate for purposes. (S 1-12)

11
Steeles Modified Staff

• Note the extra lines and markings for
  quarter-tones

12
Measuring Pitch with Music?

• In 1775 was using a Bass Viol a good idea for
  transcribing intonation? YES.
• In pair-identification tasks, people can
  distinguish hundreds of pitches within an octave
  (Burns 1999), i.e., the ear can hear at the
  quarter tone level.
• No better method existed
• Marsenne measured frequencies in 1637 with 30m
  ropes, but first repeated direct measurements of
  frequency began in 1819 with the invention of the
  siren (which still involved matching by ear). So
  the musical ear was the best measure of frequency
  in 1775. (Beament 2001)

13
Does the quarter-tone staff work?

• Using Steeles transcription of the Pope
  quotation, I recorded the phrase in Praat and
  produced a pitch track.
• Noted the frequencies of each major bend in the
  Pitch Track and translated the frequency to a
  matching note in Steeles notation.
• The quarter-tone staff can indeed represent pitch
  fluctuations quite accurately. All quarter-tone
  notes were within 3 Hz of frequency measurements.

14
Pitch on Steeles Staff

15
Music Notation for Speech?

• With modern frequency measurements should we
  discard Steeles musical notation? If so,
  precisely why?
• The Western staff, if it is more than lines, is
  intended to notate musical intervals.
• A musical interval is the musical distance
  between pitches a relationship of perception.
• Intervals related to frequency, but not
  identical.
• Intervals can have slightly different frequency
  ratios (Pythagoran vs Equal Temperament) and be
  the same.
• Similar intervals were discovered across the
  world with no knowledge of frequency.
• Tones of 220Hz and 440Hz are the same musically
  (an octave), but quite distant in frequency.

16
Is speech interval-based?

• For speech intonation to be interval-based
• There must be consistent tonal targets
• The targets must be music intervals
• When targets are scaled for pitch range, tonal
  targets across speakers and across time are
  consistent (Ladd 1996 262-265).
• But pitch range is variable
• Different speakers have different overall
  speaking ranges (S noticed this)
• Same speaker can use different ranges at
  different times (boredom, excitement)
• Some accents can be higher in pitch than others
  yet have the same phonological category.

17
The Argument Against Tonality

• Musical intervals are not relative to range
• An octave can be divided musically in many ways
• And a melody can use only a certain part of the
  musical space
• Speech stretches and compresses the entire tonal
  space. In speech, a compressed High is a High
  and a stretched High is a High. In music a
  compressed interval is a different interval than
  a stretched one.
• In other words, musical tonality moves through
  tonal space, but speech tonality shapes the space.

18
A Final Return to Steele

• Steele did not believe that the melody of speech
  was diatonic, but notation implies it is
  musical.
• A musical notation would be misleading, asserting
  a structure for tonal space for which we have
  little evidence.
• Neurological studies indicate connections between
  melodic contour and intonation, but not between
  intonation and musical tonality. (Patel et al
  1997, 1998).
• However, absolute frequency is only an
  approximation of human tonal cognition so perhaps
  a future notation will better represent the tonal
  structure of speech

19
Thanks To

• Victoria Anderson
• David Stampe
• Nathalie George

20
References

• Abercrombie, David. 1965. Studies in Phonetics
  and Linguistics. London Oxford University
  Press.
• Beament, James. 2001. How We Hear Music The
  Relationship Between Music and The Hearing
  Mechanism. Woodbridge, UK The Boydell Press.
• Burns, Edward M. 1999. Intervals, scales, and
  tuning. In Diana Deutsch (Ed.), The Psychology
  of Music, 2nd Edition. San Diego Academic Press.
• Crystal, David. 1969. Prosodic Systems and
  Intonation in English. London Cambridge
  University Press.
• Gussenhoven, Carlos. 2004. The Phonology of Tone
  and Intonation. Cambridge Cambridge University
  Press.

21
References

• Ladd, D. Robert. 1996. Intonational Phonology.
  Cambridge Cambridge University Press.
• Patel, Aniruddh D and Isabelle Peretz. 1997. Is
  music autonomous from language? A
  neuropsychological approach. In Irene Deliege
  and John Sloboda (Eds.), Perception and Cognition
  of Music. East Sussex, UK Psychology Press.
• Patel et al. 1998. Processing prosodic and
  musical patterns a neuropsychological
  investigation. Brain and Language, 61, 123-144.
• Steele, Joshua. 1775, 1969. An Essay Towards
  Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech.
  Menston, England The Scolar Press Limited.