The first video below captures an interaction between a father and his pre-verbal child. Notice how, even though she’s not saying any words, she can still communicate and “flow” with her father, because she’s already adapted to the movement patterns of the hands, body face and vocal melody.
Melody refers to the timing of syllables and the up and down movement of vocal pitch. Languages vary in terms of how much meaning is communicated through the melody. But all languages have distinct melodies, and you can adapt your ear and vocal cords to these melodies with proper training.
This will not only make you sound and feel more like a native, it will also dramatically improve your listening comprehension. This is because melody is the deepest layer of speech, acting as a temporal container for articulation. If you can’t follow the melody, you will struggle to catch words, even if you know what the words mean.
In the second video, I show an exercise for priming your attention to melody and practicing melodic mimicry.
After doing this exercise, post a brief reflection in the
#completions channel for credit.
Then moving forward, prioritize making a habit out of mimicking body, face and melody ALL THE TIME, even in your first language. Echoing Hums
Later on, you will practice echoing natural speech with a humming voice as a way to focus your attention on the melody. To prepare for that, you will first practice echoing other people humming.
Priming Speech Melody
In speech, we tend to focus more on the sounds of the vowels and consonants, and not so much on the up and down movement of pitch in the voice. To help you focus just on the pitch, we’ve create special “Muffled” audio recordings of the native speaker phrases you will be using throughout this course.
By listening to these muffled tracks repeatedly, you will prime your attention to the vocal melody. And then when you return to natural speech, it will pop out to you much more.
Start by watching a youtube video of natives speaking your target language. Then use the audio below to prime your attention to the vocal melody. Then go back to the video and see if you can notice the melodic layer more.
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