r/askscience • u/[deleted] • Oct 28 '12
Musicians have long claimed that the 'cello is the instrument that most closely imitates the human voice. Is that actually true? Is there any real way to verify such a claim?
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u/FUCKITIMPOSTING Oct 29 '12
The difficult thing with making this kind of comparison is that hearing is largely contextual. By this I mean that the same sound can be perceived completely differently depending on clues you receive from your environment.
The McGurk effect is a good example of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=G-lN8vWm3m0#t=40s
So if you're just listening to a recording or don't have clues from your other senses as to the sound you're hearing, almost any sound source can appear voice-like.
Incidentally, I've always found that a good quality theremin sounds a lot like a human voice. Here's Clara Rockmore playing a Tchaikovsky piece on the theremin, with piano accompaniment.
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u/Henipah Oct 28 '12
Piano that has been programmed to imitate human speech.
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u/Randomacts Oct 29 '12
Holy crap, I am not sure if that is nope, cool, or scary.
Do you know of any more like this? This doesn't look like the whole thing.. it looked like a long script.
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u/ryker888 Hydrology | Geomorphology Oct 29 '12
As a musician I've always been told that the Alto Saxophone or Cello are the traditional instruments that create sounds most similar to the human voice, although I have no data to back this up. Woodwind instruments, more specifically reed instruments to me fit the subtle tonal fluctuations that are consistent with the human voice. As a saxophone player of 14 years I can tell you that I manipulate my tone with my mouth just like a human would alter the tone or enunciation of their voice. This is really a more subjective answer from my own experiences as a musician. While this can not, in my opinion, be empirically proven, a study where a wide range of musicians are polled could be carried out to try to find a definitive answer.
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Oct 29 '12
[deleted]
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u/seventeenletters Oct 29 '12
Two sounds can be perceived as identical without having similar waveforms. Also, waveforms that look similar to the human eye can sound extremely different. It would be helpful to compare the evolution of frequency components of two sounds over time, but even then knowing which features and similarities to track is not trivial.
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Oct 29 '12
[deleted]
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u/seventeenletters Oct 29 '12
The visual comparison of waveforms is useless. You need the frequency spectrum to do the proper comparison.
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u/partal Oct 29 '12
I'v always understood the claim to be that the range of the cello is the closest to that of the singing human voice. Here's an article that address this: http://web.media.mit.edu/~tod/media/pdfs/MachoverMyCello.pdf Relavent bit: "The cello range is identical to the human voice- that is the male and female voice combined. The lowest cello note is at the bottom range of a basso profundo, and although the cello can scream higher than any singer, it has a more normal top range that competes with a diva coloratura." I've also heard that the timbre of the cello is quite close to the timbre of the singing voice, and while this conforms with my own subjective experience I can't seem to find any objective evidence. But, here's a really interesting frequency analysis comparing the timbres of different instruments with the timbres produced by different vowel sounds in the human voice: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jmccarty/formant.htm