Harmonization of melodic intervals in spoken Czech and it perceptual impact

The main aim of this thesis is to establish whether the perception of speech would change if speech was based solely on a specific inventory of intonation patterns. Nearly all European music is based on a similar interval inventory, and since music and language share quite a lot of phenomena and attributes, a hypothesis can be established, stating that if speech recordings are modified and if the fundamental frequency of every syllabic nucleus is aligned into a semi-tone scale, the perception of such recordings might become either more or less pleasant. The theoretical part of the thesis covers the analogies between speech and music, and the function of intonation and its perception; the practical part elaborates on the perception test that was carried out, moreover, it introduces a few illustrative statistics dealing with the distribution of intonation patterns in spoken Czech. The end of the thesis presents the results of the administered perception test, which show that there is no statistically significant correlation in accordance with the proposed hypothesis, however, the test shows that the less pleasant a particular speaker is considered to be by the recipients in an unadjusted recording, the better this speaker is assessed when their recording is modified