Date:  Tue, 13 Feb 1996 01:46:03 -0800

From:  "Thomas L. Clark" <tlc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]NEVADA.EDU>

Subject: Re: Segmentals, Suprasegmentals, & Xylophones (Huh? Howzat?))



Sorry. I assumed you realized I was discussing suprasegmentals (though

my students thank you for the mini-lecture). We have been fooling around

with sound spectrographic analyses of suprasegmentals and associating

phonetic (not phonemic) features with instrumental sounds (such as, "How

does a trumpet wail," or "Why does a pan pipe keen?")



The xylophone of Prfessor Higgins (Professor Henry Sweet) was simply

another query. Sorry to have taken your time.

Cheers,

tlc

Thomas L. Clark         702/895-3473

University of Nevada, Las Vegas (89154-5011)

tlc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nevada.edu



On Mon, 12 Feb 1996, Samuel Jones wrote:



> To: Thomas L. Clark

>

> Your question has not been forgotten, nor is it being ignored. Your

> inquiry is, to say the least, intriguing, and it piques my curiosity.

>

> I reckon I ought to sit a spell and think on it before attempting to reach

> a conclusion or two about any possibly-relevant similarities between

>

> 1) musical harmonics (the mathematical building blocks of all musical tones

> except "pure" tone generator sounds), along with musical tones'

>

> 2) amplitude or volume, duration, timbre or quality, and pitch,

>

> AND those aspects of speech involving more than just individual vowels or

> consonants (i.e.,SEGMENTALS), which are called

>

> SUPRASEGMENTALS, whose main characteristics are accent or stress, length,

> even juncture**, plus tone/pitch, and intonation, or the pattern of "pitch

> changes" that occurs in a sentence,such as Eliza Doolittle's line,

>

> "How NICE of You to Let me Come."

>

> (** JUNCTURE can mean either the mode of relationship or the manner of

> transition

>       between two consecutive speech sounds.)

>

> As I re-read the above paragraph, which I am not altogether certain makes

> complete

> sense, even to me, I realize that the answer to your question may be far more

> complex and involved than I at first thought. Nonetheless, "Hope is but a word,

> but of all words, the only sentinel of permanence!"

>

> Research and investigating a challenge is a lot like peeling an onion - one

> takes

> off layer after layer of the problem, shedding a lot of tears in the

> process; and,

> at the end there is nothing left - but one is still shedding tears.

>

> smj

>

>

>

>

>

> ____________________________________________________________________________

> DR. SAMUEL M. JONES           INTERNET: smjones1[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]facstaff.wisc.edu

> Prof. of Music & Latin American Studies  TELNET: samjones[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]macc.wisc.edu

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