RESEARCHES IN EXPERIMENTAL PHONETICS. THE STUDY OF SPEECH CURVES - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 Excerpt: ...letters, the left edge of each being placed under the point of the curve at which its sound began. The second line of text gives the words spoken; the third fine gives the numbers of the lines in the original plates of the speech curve. Confining ourselves on the present occasion to the general features of the melody, we note that in the first phrase the melody rises somewhat suddenly at the start according to the typical convex form for the American sentence. Instead, however, of completing the convexity it rises suddenly at the end. The average tone is rather low. This form of melody gives a special emotional character to the phrase, for which no appropriate terms exist. In fact, our language is almost totally deficient in terms for emotional expression, and we can define the expressive character of the me'ody here only by saying that it is the one appropriate for a solemn statement in an oration. The evenness of the melody gives it solemnity, the steady rise through the phrase gives it pomposity, the sudden rise at the end makes it somewhat brusque and challenging. As only a few researches on speech melody have been made, little can be said concerning the change in emotional effect which such a phrase would undergo with changes in the melody. We know, however, that if the even melody had not the steady rise and had fallen at the end, the phrase would have had a religious intonation (see the researches on the Lord's Prayer already referred to). If the evenness had been replaced by fluctuations, the melody would have lost its solemnity, even if it had retained the other characteristic of solemnity, namely, the general low pitch. on the one side in New York on the oth-erin New Eng-land, and ha-ving fall-en in The phrase is followed by a considerable pause. ...