Headphones

Speaking or singing?

Earn a £10 giftcard in return for taking part in a 1-hour experiment to help colleagues uncover the links between language and music.

Criteria:

Age 20-40

Monolingual English speaker

South Eastern accent

If you are interested, email Georgia at gc292@kent.ac.uk

Here’s some info about the experiment:

Speaking or singing? Unveiling individual variation in the perceptual transformation of speech to song.

Are speaking and singing always easy to tell apart? Some people say yes, others doubt that the decision is as clear-cut as it seems at first. In this experiment, you will be listening to a series of different sentences in English, each looped with 8 repetitions. When listening to a loop, you might have an experience of the sentence melody changing from spoken to sung. We would like you to tell us when it happens (or that it doesn’t). We will also ask you to fill in a brief questionnaire, to collect some data on your musical background, language skills and general audio-visual processing preferences. This research will help us understand the links between language and music, and how these links vary between different people with their different experiences of the world.

Photo credit: Flavio Ensiki via https://flic.kr/p/dVAqc8 under creative commons license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/