Most listeners, regardless of their musical skills and training, are likely to experience a transformation from speech to song during the third repetition of the phrase. There is, however, a lot of individual variability in S2S. Some people never perceive song after listening to a loop, some people always do. Our project examines the role of the individual perceiver in S2S, and studies which characteristics may predict listeners’ experience.
Research Team
We have been fascinated by this speech-to-song effect for a long time. Our team combines the expertise from music psychology (Prof Simone Dalla Bella), neurolinguistics (Prof Simone Falk) and speech prosody (Prof Tamara Rathcke).
Outputs
Conference presentations:
- Rathcke T., Falk S., Dalla Bella S. (2018). Phonological structure and listener characteristics modulate the “speech-to-song illusion”. Poster presented at the 16th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, June 2018.
- Rathcke T., Falk S., Dalla Bella S. (2018). Linguistic structure and listener characteristics modulate the “speech-to-song illusion”. Paper presented at the 15th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Montreal, July 2018.
- Rathcke T., Falk S., Dalla Bella S. (2019). Facilitators of the “speech-to-song illusion”. Paper presented at the 41st Conference of the German Linguistics Society. University of Bremen, Germany, March 2019.
Publications:
- Rathcke, T., Falk, S., Dalla Bella, S. (2021). Music to Your Ears: Sentence Sonority and Listener Background Modulate the "Speech-to-Song Illusion". Music Perception (2021) 38 (5): 499-508.
- Falk, Simone, Rathcke, Tamara V, Dalla Bella, Simone (2014) When Speech Sounds Like Music. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 40 (4). pp. 1491-1506. ISSN 0096-1523. (doi:10.1037/a0036858)
- Falk, Simone and Rathcke, Tamara V (2011) The Speech-To-Song Illusion Revisited. In: Debowska-Kozłowska, Kamila and Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna, eds. On Words and Sounds. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge, pp. 1-26. ISBN 1-4438-3161-1.
- Falk, Simone, Rathcke, Tamara V (2010) On the Speech-To-Song Illusion: Evidence from German. In: Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Speech Prosody.
The project was supported by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to Prof Tamara Rathcke (SG152108).