To sort of play off of this, one of the last lectures by Pat Pattison in the Berklee Songrwiting Intro class, he posited that consonant and dissonant musical intervals in Western music, are a reflection of various vocal inflections dealing with doubt, question, derision, command, etc.

Not with singing, but with speech. He made a quick demonstration about this and it was somewhat convincing, at least for English.

I speak German somewhat fluently and have fooled a few native German speakers (they say that I sound like I'm from Basel, Switzerland), and Swedish less so, and Spanish even less than that.

Swedish is the most tonally variegated of the 4 languages I speak, in my opinion, but there is something common amongst them about what we do with question and doubt statements in particular.

For example, imagine you are questioning someone with a 'Really?' comment. In midwestern American English, you can say this two ways.

One with rising tone on the 2nd syllable - the question form of the tone. And also with a sideways glance of doubt, where the tone drop drops - but it's about the same interval/pitch change. About a 5th interval.

He demonstrates this at about 9:45-12 minutes in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByQv0X8Mg0c

Articles and 'boring' words establish the 'tonic'.

Anyways, back to the discussion - not only should we mimic singing, we should mimic speaking, from which singing is derived.

-Scott

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