This paper aims to contextualize our collective work at SEFOS, through a comparison of language and music, the two main modes of human auditory communication.  The common foundation of language and music--at least in their paradigmatic forms as speech and song--is, of course, the voice.  A miracle of bioengineering, the human voice is capable of a rapid control of spectral change (enabling phonological structure) while simultaneously producing variations in fundamental frequency, timing, and loudness (enabling prosodic structure).  The latter set of elements offer the clearest parallels between language and music--prosody is, in effect, the music of speech--but other parallels exist as well, highlighting the role of not only voice, but ear and mind as well.
 
I will discuss certain comparable features of language and music in the realms of phonology, prosody, syntax, and discourse, before turning to a deeper consideration of pitch itself.  A particularly rich locus common to linguistic pitch and musical pitch is the idiosyncratic vocal form known as “stylized intonation,” an apparent intermixture of spoken and sung vocal production.  As I will show, stylized intonation provides a unique linguistic perspective on musical systems, even pointing to the possible vocal/linguistic foundation of an important musical universal--the pentatonic scale.  I have developed a novel elicitation paradigm to systematically investigate stylized intonation cross-culturally, which I will introduce along with the 12-language corpus that it has spawned (the “Fa-Fa Corpus”).  I will then present preliminary data from this corpus relevant to the universalist hypothesis.