Empirical comparisons of pitch patterns in music, speech, and birdsong

In music, large intervals ("pitch skips") are often followed by reversals, and phrases often have an arch‐like shape and final durational lengthening. These regularities could reflect motor constraints on pitch production or could reflect the melodic characteristics of speech. To distinguish between these possibilities we compared pitch patterns in instrumental musical themes, sentences, and birdsongs. Patterns due to production‐related constraints should be common to all three domains, whereas patterns due to statistical learning from speech should be present in speech but not birdsong. Sequences were taken from English and French instrumental classical music, sentences from 4 languages, and songs of 56 songbird families. For sentences and birdsongs each syllable/note was assigned one pitch. For each sequence, we quantified patterns of post‐skip reversals, the direction of the initial and final interval, the relative duration of the final syllable/note, and the pitch contour shape. Post‐skip reversals predominated in all domains, likely reflecting a shared constraint: skips frequently take melodies toward the edges of the pitch range, forcing a subsequent reversal (as suggested by Von Hippel & Huron, 2000). Arch‐like contours and final lengthening were found in music and speech but not birdsong, possibly reflecting an influence of speech patterns on musical structure.