Eros, Beauty, and Phon-Aesthetic Judgements of Language Sound. We Like It Flat and Fast, but Not Melodious. Comparing Phonetic and Acoustic Features of 16 European Languages.

Vita V. Kogan,Susanne M. Reiterer

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2021.578594

Vita V. Kogan, Susanne M. Reiterer

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.578594

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Abstract

This article concerns sound aesthetic preferences for European foreign languages. We investigated the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure to describe the “music” found in European languages. The Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish, take a lead when people talk about melodious language – the music-like effects in the language (a.k.a., phonetic chill). On the other end of the melodiousness spectrum are German and Arabic that are often considered sounding harsh and un-attractive. Despite the public interest, limited research has been conducted on the topic of phonaesthetics, i.e., the subfield of phonetics that is concerned with the aesthetic properties of speech sounds (Crystal, 2008). Our goal is to fill the existing research gap by identifying the acoustic features that drive the auditory perception of language sound beauty. What is so music-like in the language that makes people say “it is music in my ears”? We had 45 central European participants listening to 16 auditorily presented European languages and rating each language in terms of 22 binary characteristics (e.g., beautiful – ugly and funny – boring) plus indicating their language familiarities, L2 backgrounds, speaker voice liking, demographics, and musicality levels. Findings revealed that all factors in complex interplay explain a certain percentage of variance: familiarity and expertise in foreign languages, speaker voice characteristics, phonetic complexity, musical acoustic properties, and finally musical expertise of the listener. The most important discovery was the trade-off between speech tempo and so-called linguistic melody (pitch variance): the faster the language, the flatter/more atonal it is in terms of the pitch (speech melody), making it highly appealing acoustically (sounding beautiful and sexy), but not so melodious in a “musical” sense.

Highlights

There is almost universal agreement that Italian, Spanish, and French are appealing and melodious languages to the human ear
We focus on the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure and try to quantify the “music” found in European languages
Here we look at the acoustic parameters that are responsible for pleasurable aesthetic effects in music – rhythm and melody – and explore the higherorder linguistic phenomena we seem to perceive, the phonetic chill

Summary

Introduction

There is almost universal agreement that Italian, Spanish, and French are appealing and melodious languages to the human ear. Italian, it is often said, is the language of opera, and only a rare singer does not have it in their linguistic repertoire. Dr Patti Adank, professor of Speech, Hearing, and Phonetic Science at the University College London, says that an open syllabic structure and a high vocalic share make Italian the optimal language for singing (as cited in Kerr, 2017). Online forums for singers are replete with comments such as “As for the best sounding language when sung, I feel that it’s [sic] Finnish, and Italian and Spanish sound good too. All are heavily vowel-y languages which is pretty much essential for a good singing language” (Guest123456, 2010)

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