Speech to Song illusion Memory for Musical Tones Pitch of Speech
in Tone Language Speech to Song illusion The Speech-to-Song
Illusion was discovered by Diana Deutsch in 1995, when she was
fine-tuning the opening spoken commentary on her CD ‘Musical
Illusions and Paradoxes’. She had the phrase ‘Sometimes behave
so strangely’ on a loop, and noticed that after a number of
repetitions, the phrase sounded as though sung rather than
spoken. Later she included this illusion in her CD ‘Phantom
words and other curiosities’, accompanied by the following
commentary: In our final demonstration, speech is made to be
heard as song, and this is achieved without transforming the
sounds in any way, or by adding any musical context, but simply
by repeating a phrase several times over. The demonstration is
based on a sentence at the beginning of the CD Musical Illusions
and Paradoxes. When you listen to this sentence in the usual
way, it appears to be spoken normally - as indeed it is.
However, when you play the phrase that is