Replication Data for: Musicalization of Phonemic Vocalizations in the Sound-to-Music Transformation

Deutsch et al. (2011) demonstrated a perceptual transformation by which a spoken linguistic phrase sounded more like song and less like speech the more the phrase was repeated. Since then, research has shown that this effect extends to a range of stimuli that includes lexical speech in various languages and nonspeech, environmental sounds. Whether or not the effect is likely to occur more strongly with lexical speech sounds than with non-verbal vocal or other types of sounds remains unexplored. In order to better understand the role of non-lexical speech sounds, a series of experiments, modeled after the methods of Deutsch et al. (2011), were conducted with vocalized imitations of everyday sounds that differed in the degree to which they approximated to English phonemes. The results indicate that, upon repetition, imitations with high phonemic salience were musicalized more than imitations with low phonemic salience. These results suggest that the language-likeness of auditory stimuli, specifically in respect of phonemic content, can facilitate a perceptual transformation of repeated stimuli from a less musical percept to a more musical percept.