bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/059683; this version posted June 18, 2016. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. Temporal Modulations Reveal Distinct Rhythmic Properties of Speech and Music Nai Ding1,2,3, Aniruddh D. Patel4, Lin Chen5, Henry Butler4, Cheng Luo1, David Poeppel5,6 1 College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Sciences, Zhejiang University, China 310027 2Interdisciplinary Center for Social Sciences, Zhejiang University, China 310027 3 Neuro and Behavior EconLab, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, China 310027 4 Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Boston, MA 02155 5 Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003 6 Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, Germany Classification: Biological Sciences/Neuroscience Keywords: speech, music, rhythm, temporal modulations Corresponding author: Nai Ding, Ph.D. College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Sciences, Zhejiang University Hangzhou, China 310027 e-mail:
[email protected] bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/059683; this version posted June 18, 2016. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. Abstract Speech and music have structured rhythms, but these rhythms are rarely compared empirically. This study, based on large corpora, quantitatively characterizes and compares a major acoustic correlate of spoken and musical rhythms, the slow (0.25- 32 Hz) temporal modulations in sound intensity.