ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2017
Hierarchical temporal structure in music, speech and animal vocalizations: jazz is like a conversation, humpbacks sing like hermit thrushes.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 95 citations in OpenAlex.
- InCHORRRuS: Infant-Directed Communication Highlights and Organizes Repetition and Redundancy Through Rhythmic Structure.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Towards an informational account of interpersonal coordination.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Neurons in auditory cortex integrate information within a constrained and context-invariant temporal window.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Neurons in auditory cortex integrate information within constrained temporal windows that are invariant to the stimulus context and information rate.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Vowel- and Diphthong-Like Spectral Patterns in Sperm Whale Codas.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Cetaceans are the next frontier for vocal rhythm research.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Isochrony in barks of Cape fur seal (Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Article
- NONAN GaitPrint: An IMU gait database of healthy young adults.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Quantifying tightness - Looseness of interactions with dynamical systems methods. A Comment on "Musical engagement as a duet of tight synchrony and loose interpretability" by T. C. Rabinowitch.Physics of life reviews · 2023Article
- Animal linguistics: a primer.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Article
- 1/f laws found in non-human music.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Music as a window into real-world communication.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- Child language and autism diagnosis impact hierarchical temporal structure of parent-child vocal interactions in early childhood.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2022Article
- Syntactic modulation of rhythm in Australian pied butcherbird song.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Ergodic descriptors of non-ergodic stochastic processes.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Daylong Mobile Audio Recordings Reveal Multitimescale Dynamics in Infants' Vocal Productions and Auditory Experiences.Current directions in psychological science · 2022Article
- Coordination dynamics of multi-agent interaction in a musical ensemble.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Article
- Cross-frequency coupling explains the preference for simple ratios in rhythmic behaviour and the relative stability across non-synchronous patterns.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans talk, sing and play music. Some species of birds and whales sing long and complex songs. All these behaviours and sounds exhibit hierarchical structure-syllables and notes are positioned within words and musical phrases, words and motives in sentences and musical phrases, and so on. We developed a new method to measure and compare hierarchical temporal structures in speech, song and music. The method identifies temporal events as peaks in the sound amplitude envelope, and quantifies event clustering across a range of timescales using Allan factor (AF) variance. AF variances were analysed and compared for over 200 different recordings from more than 16 different categories of signals, including recordings of speech in different contexts and languages, musical compositions and performances from different genres. Non-human vocalizations from two bird species and two types of marine mammals were also analysed for comparison. The resulting patterns of AF variance across timescales were distinct to each of four natural categories of complex sound: speech, popular music, classical music and complex animal vocalizations. Comparisons within and across categories indicated that nested clustering in longer timescales was more prominent when prosodic variation was greater, and when sounds came from interactions among individuals, including interactions between speakers, musicians, and even killer whales. Nested clustering also was more prominent for music compared with speech, and reflected beat structure for popular music and self-similarity across timescales for classical music. In summary, hierarchical temporal structures reflect the behavioural and social processes underlying complex vocalizations and musical performances.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.