Tonal Context Research Articles

Identification of Mandarin coarticulated tones by inexperienced and experienced English learners of Mandarin

AbstractTwo groups of native English speakers, relatively inexperienced (N = 14) with 3 months of Mandarin study and relatively more experienced (N = 14) with 12 months of study, were asked to identify coarticulated Mandarin lexical tones in disyllabic words. The results show that 1) the experienced learners were better at identifying Mandarin tones than the inexperienced learners, 2) Tones in coarticulation were more difficult to identify than tones in isolation, 3) tonal context and syllable position affected tonal perception, and 4) experienced learners committed fewer tonal direction errors than inexperienced learners. However, experienced learners still made a considerable amount of tonal height errors.

The Influence of Tonal and Atonal Contexts on Error Detection Accuracy

Music education students ( N = 21) at a university in the southeastern United States took an error detection test that had been designed for this study to determine the effects of tonal contexts versus atonal contexts on the ability to detect performance errors. The investigator composed 16 melodies, 8 of which were tonal and 8 of which were atonal. The test administered included 18 planned errors, 9 in tonal melodies and 9 in atonal melodies, and errors were balanced between the two sets of melodies for error duration and error interval. These melodies were performed live for the participants, who were asked to identify where errors took place in the performance. Participant test scores were calculated, and mean scores were generated for each individual error. Each error was then classified according to its attributes of tonal context, interval deviation, and duration. Interval deviation and duration did not significantly affect error detection scores, while tonal context did. More specifically, errors in tonal contexts that deviated from the tonal framework were significantly more easily detected than atonal errors or errors in tonal contexts that remained within the tonal framework. These results confirmed findings in existing research.

Enhancing Musical Experience for the Hearing-Impaired Using Visual and Haptic Displays

This article addresses the broad question of understanding whether and how a combination of tactile and visual information could be used to enhance the experience of music by the hearing impaired. Initially, a background survey was conducted with hearing-impaired people to find out the techniques they used to “listen” to music and how their listening experience might be enhanced. Information obtained from this survey and feedback received from two profoundly deaf musicians were used to guide the initial concept of exploring haptic and visual channels to augment a musical experience. The proposed solution consisted of a vibrating “Haptic Chair” and a computer display of informative visual effects. The Haptic Chair provided sensory input of vibrations via touch by amplifying vibrations produced by music. The visual display transcoded sequences of information about a piece of music into various visual sequences in real time. These visual sequences initially consisted of abstract animations corresponding to specific features of music such as beat, note onset, tonal context, and so forth. In addition, because most people with impaired hearing place emphasis on lip reading and body gestures to help understand speech and other social interactions, their experiences were explored when they were exposed to human gestures corresponding to musical input. Rigorous user studies with hearing-impaired participants suggested that musical representation for the hearing impaired should focus on staying as close to the original as possible and is best accompanied by conveying the physics of the representation via an alternate channel of perception. All the hearing-impaired users preferred either the Haptic Chair alone or the Haptic Chair accompanied by a visual display. These results were further strengthened by the fact that user satisfaction was maintained even after continuous use of the system over a period of 3 weeks. One of the comments received from a profoundly deaf user when the Haptic Chair was no longer available (“I am going to be deaf again”), poignantly expressed the level of impact it had made. The system described in this article has the potential to be a valuable aid in speech therapy, and a user study is being carried out to explore the effectiveness of the Haptic Chair for this purpose. It is also expected that the concepts presented in this paper would be useful in converting other types of environmental sounds into a visual display and/or a tactile input device that might, for example, enable a deaf person to hear a doorbell ring, footsteps approaching from behind, or a person calling him or her, or to make understanding conversations or watching television less stressful. Moreover, the prototype system could be used as an aid in learning to play a musical instrument or to sing in tune. This research work has shown considerable potential in using existing technology to significantly change the way the deaf community experiences music. We believe the findings presented here will add to the knowledge base of researchers in the field of human–computer interaction interested in developing systems for the hearing impaired.

Tonally conditioned vowel raising in Shuijingping Mang

In the Mang (Hmongic) dialect of Shuijingping, Guizhou, China, vowels are raised in certain tonal contexts. When a syllable bearing the historical A2 tone occurs in sandhi context, it surfaces with a low tone (historical S) and a raised vowel nucleus. When a syllable bearing the C2 tone occurs out of sandhi context, it also surfaces with a raised vowel. In most other documented cases of tone–vowel quality interactions, there is some factor, such as syllable structure, metrical structure, or vowel duration that mediates between tone and vowel quality. These earlier analyses cannot be straightforwardly extended to Shuijingping Mang since no synchronic mediating factor seems to be present. However, this paper shows that, historically, there was another mediating factor between tone and vowel quality, namely voice quality. It is common for tones in East and Southeast Asian languages to have characteristic phonation types. It is also common for phonation type to affect vowel quality. Comparative evidence shows that the tones that condition the vowel alternation in the present-day language historically underwent a tonally-driven breathy-modal voice alternation. Subsequently, the tonal grammar has changed; however, vowel raising remains as a synchronic alternation.

Deviance detection by a P3-like response in rat posterior parietal cortex

To better understand sensory processing in frontal and parietal cortex of the rat, and to further assess the rat as a model of human frontal-parietal processing, we recorded local field potentials (LFPs) from microelectrode arrays implanted in medio-dorsal frontal, and posterior parietal cortex of awake rats as they were presented with a succession of frequent “standard” tones and infrequent “oddball” tones. Extending previous results from surface recordings we found, after controlling for the frequencies of the standard and oddball tones, that rat frontal and parietal-evoked LFPs (eLFPs) exhibit significantly larger N1 (~40 ms latency), P2 (~100 ms), N2 (~160 ms), P3E (~200–240 ms), and P3L (~300–500 ms) amplitudes after an oddball tone. These neural oddball effects could contribute to the automatic allocation of attention to rare stimuli. To determine whether these enhanced responses to rare stimuli could be accounted for in terms of stimulus-specific neural adaptation (SSA), we also recorded during single-tone control sessions involving frequent standard, or infrequent oddball beeps alone. We compared the difference between rare-tone and frequent-tone response amplitudes in the two-tone context (oddball effect) or single-tone context which isolates the contribution of SSA (SSA effect). An analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a significant main effect of tone context on rare-tone response enhancements, showing that the rare-tone enhancements were stronger in the two-tone context than the single-tone context. This difference between tone contexts was greatest at the early P3E peak (200–240 ms post-beep) in parietal cortex, suggesting true deviance detection by this evoked response component, which cannot be accounted for in terms of simple models of SSA.

Poorer Phonetic Perceivers Show Greater Benefit in Phonetic-Phonological Speech Learning

Previous research has demonstrated that native English speakers can learn lexical tones in word context (pitch-to-word learning), to an extent. However, learning success depends on learners' pre-training sensitivity to pitch patterns. The aim of this study was to determine whether lexical pitch-pattern training given before lexical training could improve learning and whether or not the extent of improvement depends on pre-training pitch-pattern sensitivity. Learners with high and low pitch-pattern sensitivity were given training on lexical pitch patterns before lexical training. It was found that such training resulted in better learning than lexical training alone, primarily in learners with low pre-training pitch-pattern sensitivity. These data support the importance of considering individual aptitudes when developing training and also the notion of phonetic-phonological-lexical continuity in word learning.

WALTON'S FINAL WORK: HARMONY AND THE ART OF (MAKE-BELIEVE) FUGUE

AbstractWalton's Prologo e Fantasia, written at the end of his life, is one of the few completed original works of his final decade. Undoubtedly flawed, it can be seen simply as an exemplar of Walton's failing creative powers and his sheer difficulty in writing any music at all. But it is also possible to discern in it continued experimentation with developing aspects of his language, especially seen in the context of his exploration of similar devices in preceding works. Analysis of his harmony shows development of greater ambiguity in a tonal context. And, while many of his other works contain significant fugal passages, particularly towards their conclusions, the use of a fuga finta here presents a different perspective on a typical Waltonian device. While the work does not stand alongside Walton's most important orchestral achievements, and performances will probably remain relatively few, it does nevertheless provide some interesting insights into the musical language of his post-war music.

The effect of segmental makeup on Mandarin tone coarticulation

The effect of segmental make-ups on tonal coarticulation was investigated in Mandarin. Target syllables differ in coda (no coda, alveolar nasal or velar nasal) and initial sonorancy (obstruent or sonorant) were embedded in trisyllabic non-words templates, in the form of trisyllabic names. Twenty native speakers were recorded and the F0 contours of all syllables were measured at a 10-ms time step. The coarticulation effect of four Mandarin tones are examined in three different positions with 4 (initial position), 16 (medial position), and 4 (final position) tonal contexts. Moreover, the phonetic variations of each tone in different prosodic positions were examined. The preliminary results indicate that the coarticulation effect is less prominent when intervened by obstruents whereas nasal codas amplify the effect. The realization of this modulating effect on the directionality of tonal coarticulation (carryover and anticipatory) will be discussed. The magnitude of coarticulation in compatible (adjacent tones have similar registers) and conflicting (adjacent tones with large register difference) environments will also be compared.

Prosodic characteristics of three sentence types in Thai

This study presents an acoustic analysis of three sentence types in Thai (declarative, interrogative, and emphatic) with the goal of providing a basic characterization of their prosody. To investigate prosodic realizations of sentence final syllables, we placed, in a sentence-final position, a target word which varied in one of the 5 lexical tones in Thai. We also varied the tonal context before the target word so that the pre-target word ends with low (21), mid (31), or high (45) tones. Preliminary results from one speaker show that F0 measures, especially f0 maximum, minimum, and range, differed across sentence types. In particular, emphatic sentences were distinguished from non-emphatic sentences by expanded F0 range, whereas target words in questions were distinguished from those in declarative sentences by both higher F0 maximum and minimum. Syllable duration also played a role in signaling emphasis and question: emphatic sentences were significantly longer than non-emphatic sentences, and questions were significantly shorter than declarative sentences. Interestingly, the tonal pattern of the target word changed for the case of emphasis when the target word had 31 and 45 tones. We will present findings from four additional Thai speakers and discuss their relevance to the intonational phonology of Thai.

The perceptual normalization of lexical tones: effects of surrounding tonal context

Previous research has shown that the perceptual categorization of a target lexical tone depends on its surrounding tonal context (“tone normalization”). Native speakers have been shown to take into account both preceding and following tonal context in order to carry out the normalization process. The present study focused on the effects of the duration and type of preceding tonal context on tone normalization. Listeners identified the tone of a syllable in final sentence position, as a function of the number of syllables (1, 2, 3, or 4) and of the tone type (level or contour) of a semantically-neutral precursor sentence. The results showed that: 1. The effect of the precursor sentence reached an asymptote once listeners heard two syllables; 2. The tone type of the precursor sentence did not affect performance. This evidence is consistent with a tone normalization process that operates on the basis of a running F0 average of the surrounding tonal context. When tonal context precedes the target tone, the running F0 average is effectively computed over a two-syllable interval.

Three- to five-year-old children in Taiwan show little development in their production of monosyllabic Mandarin lexical tones

While a couple of studies reported that 2-year-old children in Beijing have mastered the production of Mandarin tones in various contexts, several studies found that three-year-old children learning Mandarin as a first language in the U.S. have not produced adult-like tones in monosyllabic words. This study collected monosyllabic Mandarin tone productions from 33 three- to five-year-old children growing up in Taiwan. Five judges categorized the tones of the 734 child productions and 92 productions by 4 adults via low-pass filtered words in which the segmental information was degraded while F0 information was retained. Adult tones were categorized with 93%, 96%, 82%, and 94% accuracy. Children's tones were identified with significantly lower accuracy (p<.05) at 63%, 50%, 50% and 77%, respectively. Age accounted for 0.2%, 2.4%, 4.0% and 8.2% of the variance in children's accuracy of the four tones, respectively, suggesting little developmental change. Children produced T4 more accurately than T1. T2 and T3 were significantly more difficult. These results are in line with findings in previous studies with children growing up in the U.S. using the same methodology and seem to support that tone development is related to maturation of speech motor control. [Work supported by NSF EAPSI]

ModusXXI: An Atonal Melody Generator for Ear Training, Based on Lars Edlund´S Modus Novus Methodology

This paper describes the development, evaluation and use of the computer program ModusXXI, a music generatorthat can create a practically unlimited number of atonal melodic dictations, or melodic material for sight-reading, basedon the Modus Novus methodology [Edlund, 1963]. Lars Edlund’s Modus Novus organizes the aural study of atonalmelody structure on the combinations of intervals that will break the bonds with any tonal context; a characteristic ofsome music composed since the first half of the 20th century. Each chapter has certain melodic material that hasbeen grouped together, according to the musical intervals that they contain, in groups of increasing degree ofdifficulty. Although there are other atonal ear-training methods [Friedmann, 1990], Modus Novus is the only oneknown to us that concentrates specifically on the study of the melodic interval structure of atonal music.

Absolute pitch correlates with high performance on interval naming tasks

Absolute pitch, the rare ability to identify or produce a musical tone without a reference tone, has been shown to be advantageous in some musical tasks; however, its relevance in musical contexts primarily involving relative pitch has been questioned. To explore this issue, 36 trained musicians-18 absolute pitch possessors and 18 non-possessors with equivalent age of onset and duration of musical training-were tested on interval naming tasks requiring only relative pitch. The intervals to be named were either ascending or descending with separation ranging from 1 to 12 semitones and equally involved all 12 pitch classes. Three different conditions were employed; these used brief sine waves, piano tones, and piano tones preceded by a V7-I chord cadence so as to establish a tonal context. The possession of absolute pitch was strongly correlated with enhanced performance on all these tests of relative pitch. Furthermore, no evidence was found that this absolute pitch avantage depended on key, interval size, or musical context.

Functional modelling of musical harmony

Music theory has been essential in composing and performing music for centuries. Within Western tonal music, from the early Baroque on to modern-day jazz and pop music, the function of chords within a chord sequence can be explained by harmony theory. Although Western tonal harmony theory is a thoroughly studied area, formalising this theory is a hard problem. We present a formalisation of the rules of tonal harmony as a Haskell (generalized) algebraic datatype. Given a sequence of chord labels, the harmonic function of a chord in its tonal context is automatically derived. For this, we use several advanced functional programming techniques, such as type-level computations, datatype-generic programming, and error-correcting parsers. As a detailed example, we show how our model can be used to improve content-based retrieval of jazz songs. We explain why Haskell is the perfect match for these tasks, and compare our implementation to an earlier solution in Java. We also point out shortcomings of the language and libraries that limit our work, and discuss future developments which may ameliorate our solution.

A tone-modeling technique using a quantized F0 context to improve tone correctness in average-voice-based speech synthesis

This paper proposes a technique of improving tone correctness in speech synthesis of a tonal language based on an average-voice model trained with a corpus from nonprofessional speakers’ speech. We focused on reducing tone disagreements in speech data acquired from nonprofessional speakers without manually modifying the labels. To reduce the distortion in tone caused by inconsistent tonal labeling, quantized F0 symbols were utilized as the context for F0 to obtain an appropriate F0 model. With this technique, the tonal context could be directly extracted from the original speech and this prevented inconsistency between speech data and F0 labels generated from transcriptions, which affect naturalness and the tone correctness in synthetic speech. We examined two types of labeling for the tonal context using phone-based and sub-phone-based quantized F0 symbols. Subjective and objective evaluations of the synthetic voice were carried out in terms of the intelligibility of tone and its naturalness. The experimental results from both the objective and subjective tests revealed that the proposed technique could improve not only naturalness but also the tone correctness of synthetic speech under conditions where a small amount of speech data from nonprofessional target speakers was used.

Post-focus F 0 compression—Now you see it, now you don’t

We report data on post-focus realization of lexical tones in Standard Chinese, comparing them to their counterparts in the pre-focus and on-focus conditions reported in Chen and Gussenhoven (2008). While post-focus lexical tones are often realized with a compressed F 0 range as observed in prior studies, in some tonal contexts, their F 0 range is expanded. In addition, some post-focus tones also show a long-lasting effect of the preceding tone, but with a pattern different from the usual tonal co-articulation effect. What consistently differentiates the post-focus from the on-focus condition is the degree of distinctiveness in the lexical tonal contours, in particular when the preceding focused tone is High. These data suggest that F 0 range compression is not the only and primary characteristic of post-focus tonal realization. Rather, the observed post-focus effects may be viewed as the multifaceted manifestations of weak implementation of post-focus tonal targets, as they are associated with prosodically non-prominent constituents.

Electrophysiological correlates of accurate mental image formation in auditory perception and imagery tasks

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while listeners made intonation judgments about target notes that terminated a sequence of heard notes (bottom-up task) or a sequence of imagined notes (top-down task). We hypothesized that the neural processes underlying the accurate formation and evaluation of mental images would behave similarly in both tasks. In the imagery condition, the amplitude of the N100 component of the auditory evoked potential in response to the target tone was smaller for those listeners who formed more accurate mental images. It was comparable in amplitude to the N100 evoked when all of the notes leading to the target were heard, consistent with a process of habituation of the N100 in the auditory cortex due to the formation of a sequence of mental images. The P3a response – a marker of deviance detection – to mistuned targets was also found in the imagery condition and it was larger for listeners who formed more accurate images. Additionally, the influence of long-term implicit memory for tonal structure of Western music on the acuity of mental images was examined by comparing responses to leading tone (contextually unstable) and tonic (contextually stable) targets. Images were more accurate for targets that were related more closely to the established tonal context. The results suggest that successful top-down activation of pitch representations activates the same neural processes that underlie the N100 response to perceived notes, and that the engagement of these processes underlies successful detection of mistuning as indexed by the P3a component.

Musical context affects detection of pitch differences in tones with different spectra.

Pitch plays an important role in complex auditory tasks such as listening to music and understanding speech, yet pitch comparisons are more difficult when tones have different spectra. Since tones are rarely heard in isolation, the surrounding context may help or hinder pitch comparisons. The first study presented listeners with tone pairs in isolation or immediately following a tonal context, which consisted of a portion of a descending major scale with the target as the tonic. Listeners’ performance improved in the presence of the tonal context, but only when the tones within a pair differed in spectral content. In the second experiment, a variety of contexts were used, with the goal of discriminating between effects of tonal hierarchy and effects of predictability. Even with maximal predictability, presenting tone pairs after an “atonal” context consisting of notes from an octatonic scale yielded poorer performance than tone pairs in isolation. The results suggest that any advantage listeners derived from the tonal context in our first experiment was related more to placing the tone into an over-learned tonal hierarchy than to the likelihood of the target pitch within a predictable context. [Work supported by NIH Grant R01 DC 05216.]

PERCEPTUAL CONSTANCY AND CONTEXTUAL ENHANCEMENT

The perception of the acoustic world surrounding us very often is different from its physical properties. Our mental representation of the sounds that we are exposed to are not in a one to one correspondence with the sounds we sense. Auditory objects and their environments are categorized and loaded in memory so that recognition of complex dynamic scenes are perceived optimally. Precise identification of voices and linguistic objects are crucial for effective communication. However, the normal context of hearing contains multiple, competing and noisy sources. In such disadvantageous conditions the identity of the percepts is more efficient if they are stored in memory. The results of the present study offer experimental evidence that high-level cognitive processes might constrain basic auditory mechanisms involved in identifying phonemic tone to guarantee perceptual constancy. The results showing a better identification of tones in contexts that are inveresely proportional to their frequency support the idea that peripheral auditory processing enhances the identification of the tones by a general function of contextual contrast.

Melody Generator: A Device for Algorithmic Music Construction

This article describes the development of an application for generating tonal melodies. The goal of the project is to ascertain our current understanding of tonal music by means of algorithmic music generation. The method followed consists of four stages: 1) selection of music-theoretical insights, 2) translation of these insights into a set of principles, 3) conversion of the principles into a computational model having the form of an algorithm for music generation, 4) testing the “music” generated by the algorithm to evaluate the adequacy of the model. As an example, the method is implemented in Melody Generator, an algorithm for generating tonal melodies. The program has a structure suited for generating, displaying, playing and storing melodies, functions which are all accessible via a dedicated interface. The actual generation of melodies, is based in part on constraints imposed by the tonal context, i.e. by meter and key, the settings of which are controlled by means of parameters on the interface. For another part, it is based upon a set of construction principles including the notion of a hierarchical organization, and the idea that melodies consist of a skeleton that may be elaborated in various ways. After these aspects were implemented as specific sub-algorithms, the device produces simple but well-structured tonal melodies.