Language Stream and Paralanguage
Trevor Wishart · 1996
The language stream itself conveys meaning in many ways. A typical speech act, however, is also characterised by a number of other properties relating to its rhythm and tempo and their articulation, its pitch and pitch articulation, its phonemic connectedness and so on. The language-stream may therefore be thought of as a model for such a timbre-stream music. Such a music need not use the phonemic objects of languages or even confine itself to the timbral objects within the human repertoire. It need not be based fundamentally on the voiced/unvoiced distinction of the speech-stream. In the sphere of tonal music the author may slightly redefine a harmonic field, such that the same note-name in a different octave will be regarded as the same note. Aspects of variation and change amongst timbral fields may be observed in various text-sound pieces with no semantic content.