Most music uses the 7-tone or diatonic scale to divide octaves, and most folk music uses five tones. These preferences correspond to the most prevalent formant ratios in human speech.
Dale Purves, the George Barth Geller Professor for Research in Neurobiology said "when the sounds of speech are looked at with a spectrum analyzer, the relationships between the various frequencies that a speaker uses to make vowel sounds correspond neatly with the relationships between notes of the 12-tone chromatic scale of music".
The Duke scientists tested their idea by recording native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers pronouncing vowel sounds in both single words and a series of short passages. The speech sounds produced by different speakers, different anatomical structures and different languages all produced the same variety of vocal tract resonance ratios.
In about 70 percent of the speech sounds, these vocal ratios were copies of the musical intervals. This predominance of musical intervals that form all human speech suggests that the chromatic scale notes in music sound right to our ears because they match the formant ratios we are exposed to all the time in conversations.
We have used music for years in our (ESL in Canada) English immersion camps to help the ESL students practice their new English sounds and words using songs. Without any scientific measurement we found the students could learn new vocal patterns and sounds while singing and these new skills transferred to their English word pronunciations.
Original Story
Essential Tones Of Music Rooted In Human Speech
http://www.sciencedaily.com:80/releases/2007/05/070524145005.htm
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