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Laryngeal muscles found to be underdeveloped compared to articulatory muscles, explaining poor human singing
https://phys.org/news/2018-04-laryngeal-muscles-underdeveloped-articulatory-poor.html
April 18, 2018 by Bob Yirka
A trio of researchers, one with Bloorview Research Institute in Canada, the other two with the University of Maastricht in The Netherlands, has found that human laryngeal muscles are less well developed than articulatory muscles. In their paper published in Royal Society Open Science, Michel Belyk, Joseph Johnson and Sonja Kotz suggest that differences in the two muscle groups explains why people are better at whistling than singing.
Humans, it has been noted, are not naturally good singers, though some are noticeably better than others. But humans are pretty good at whistling, the researchers with this effort found, at least when compared with singing ability. This, they suggest, is because the muscles that control the mouth are more developed than those that control the larynx, in an evolutionary context.
The researcher wondered why highly trained singers, such as opera stars, are unable to match the precision of even the most basic of musical instruments. To find out, they recruited 34 volunteers, some of whom self-reported as able to sing, and some who thought otherwise. Each was asked to sing melodies created by a computer and also to sing a scale of notes that went from the lowest they could utter to the highest. Each was then asked to repeat the experiment, but instead of singing, were asked to whistle the notes. A computer was used to analyze all of the notes to judge how precise the volunteers were.
The researchers report that all of the volunteers were better at staying on key while whistling than when they were singing, though they also noted that those better at singing in key were also better at whistling in key than those who were poor singers. The researchers also found that the volunteers more often went flat when singing and sharp when whistling.
The researchers suggest their results indicate that the muscles that control the larynx are less developed than those that control the lips and jaws, which strongly impacts precision. This, they further suggest, is due to the more recent evolutionary development of the larynx muscles. Our ancient ancestors, they note, were likely whistlers, like modern apes.
More information: Michel Belyk et al. Poor neuro-motor tuning of the human larynx: a comparison of sung and whistled pitch imitation, Royal Society Open Science (2018). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.171544
Abstract
Vocal imitation is a hallmark of human communication that underlies the capacity to learn to speak and sing. Even so, poor vocal imitation abilities are surprisingly common in the general population and even expert vocalists cannot match the precision of a musical instrument. Although humans have evolved a greater degree of control over the laryngeal muscles that govern voice production, this ability may be underdeveloped compared with control over the articulatory muscles, such as the tongue and lips, volitional control of which emerged earlier in primate evolution. Human participants imitated simple melodies by either singing (i.e. producing pitch with the larynx) or whistling (i.e. producing pitch with the lips and tongue). Sung notes were systematically biased towards each individual’s habitual pitch, which we hypothesize may act to conserve muscular effort. Furthermore, while participants who sung more precisely also whistled more precisely, sung imitations were less precise than whistled imitations. The laryngeal muscles that control voice production are under less precise control than the oral muscles that are involved in whistling. This imprecision may be due to the relatively recent evolution of volitional laryngeal-motor control in humans, which may be tuned just well enough for the coarse modulation of vocal-pitch in speech.Journal reference: Royal Society Open Science
Here you can find first class muscle-control!
Italian home and language works!
HOWDY
-https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Lynn_Turner-
Joe Lynn Turner (JLT) (oikealta nimeltään Joseph Linquito) (s. 2. elokuuta 1951 Hackensack, New Jersey) on yhdysvaltalainen laulaja.
Aggrotech (also known as hellektro), is a derivative form of electro-industrial with a strong influence from the hardstyle/hard trance music (straight Techno bassdrum and oscillator sounds, especially Supersaw leads from Roland JP-8000) that first surfaced in the mid-late-1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro-industrial#Aggrotech
Sorry, but there are actually very exatcly transcribed music available.
Bobby McFerrin rules all the instrumental levels!
HOWDY
Ps. Bass, guitars, drums ets are quite demanding fot the laryngeal muscles, in my opinion.
This is Finnish singers’ group…
Worth really for Scientology a cappella .
Sorry for my broken English.
HOWDY
Monkey studies reveal possible origin of human speech
July 23, 2018, Rockefeller Universityhttps://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-07-monkey-reveal-human-speech.html
Most animals, including our primate cousins, communicate: they gesture, grimace, grunt, and sing. As a rule, however, they do not speak. So how, exactly, did humans acquire their unique talent for verbal discourse? And how do our brains manage this complex bit of communicative magic?
Scientists in the lab of Winrich Freiwald have shed new light on the underpinnings of human speech by identifying neural circuitry in the brains of monkeys that could represent a common evolutionary origin for social communication. As reported in the journal Neuron, these circuits are involved in face recognition, facial expression, and emotion. And they may very well have given rise to our singular capacity for speech.
Working with rhesus macaque monkeys, Freiwald had previously identified neural networks responsible for recognizing faces—networks that closely resemble ones found in the human brain.
Other researchers, meanwhile, had suggested that particular areas of the brain might be responsible for producing facial expressions. But no one had imaged these facial motor regions while they were active, much less when they were being used for communication. Nor did scientists understand how these networks might interact with each other and with areas of the brain that handle emotion, another integral component of social interaction.
Freiwald and Stephen Shepherd, a former research associate in the lab, decided to investigate the patterns of activation that occur within and between these various networks to better understand how the brain coordinates the intricate task of social communication. They used a novel experimental setup to take MRI scans of the brains of monkeys as they watched video clips of other monkeys making communicative facial expressions. In some of the clips, the videotaped monkeys looked off to the side, mimicking a situation in which the subject monkeys were passively observing communication between other animals without participating in it. In others, the prerecorded animals appeared to be looking directly at the subject monkeys, simulating face-to-face social interaction.
These differences in social context proved to be significant. When the monkeys in the clips made a friendly lip-smacking gesture, the subject monkeys responded in kind—but only when their prerecorded peers appeared to be making direct eye contact with them.
The brain scans taken during these different kinds of simulated events were even more illuminating.
Based on previous research, the scientists expected the face-perception regions of the monkeys’ brains to simply feed information to a region associated with emotion, which would then stimulate the regions responsible for producing facial expressions.
All of those areas were indeed activated. But much to the researchers’ surprise, they did not shuttle information to one another in straightforward, sequential fashion.
What’s more, videos that simulated social interaction through direct eye contact caused an unexpected third neural circuit to light up. This suggests that specific areas of the animals’ brains are sensitive to social context, and perform the specialized cognitive functions necessary for social communication.
Producing facial expressions in response to the videotaped monkeys prompted an entirely different pattern of brain activation. Generating a friendly lipsmack, in particular, activated a region that resembles Broca’s area, a portion of the human brain concerned with the production of speech.
As Freiwald explains, this suggests that monkey facial expressions like lipsmacks might be evolutionary precursors to human speech—a possibility that some scientists had previously discounted on the grounds that such gestures were too simple or reflexive to pave the way for something as subtle and sophisticated as human verbal communication.
Currently, the researchers are measuring the electrical activity in individual neurons in all three of the networks revealed in the scans. This allows them to more precisely gauge the activity in each of these areas during social communication and form a more detailed picture of how the neural circuits responsible for face processing, facial expression, and social context interact.
“Understanding this in monkeys will help us understand communication in humans, where things are so much more complicated,” says Freiwald, who describes the findings as “an important building block” in the quest to understand our species’ unique way with words.
More information: Stephen V. Shepherd et al. Functional Networks for Social Communication in the Macaque Monkey, Neuron (2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2018.06.027
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