14 DAY TRIAL // An acoustic "oddity" has been identified by American researchers. It would seem that when a sample of a recorded voice is played back repeatedly, at the same pitch, length and speed, the brain will start perceiving it as music. Scientists are puzzled by this find, as it brings forth a new function of the brain, which is to suppress the way we should hear sounds, and turns them into speech, so we can focus on the words.
This ability that the brain has is extremely important for articulate speech as well as for the development of humans throughout years of evolution. Being able to stop singing has furthered our species significantly, compared to others, closely related to us, such as some types of monkeys. Birds, for instance, can only sing, which limits their "vocabulary" drastically, and allows them to understand each other only through specific, gene-encoded songs, which is to say, they can only understand songs they were transmitted by their parents.
University of California (UC) psychologist Diana Deutsch, the leader of the study that will detail the find at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Miami next week, says that test subjects who listened to a spoken phrase repeated it by speaking as well, whereas participants who listened to the exact same sentenced multiple times reproduced it by singing.
"It brings to the fore a real mystery – why don't we hear speech as song all the time?" Deutsch asks. Repetition "stops the inhibition of the pitch region of the brain so we hear song, which is really what we ought to have been hearing in the first place."
In order to better understand what is going on inside the human brain when it's subjected to repeating phrases, the UC scientist is currently conducting a series of magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) tests on another batch of subjects, in an attempt to determine what portions of the brain are associated with suppressing musical cues when people listen to normal speech. This portion apparently is inhibited when repetition occurs, and the main stake of the experiment is to find out how and why this happens.