Word: tonal
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...recent study, researchers from the University of Southern California at San Diego recorded native speakers of tonal languages--Vietnamese and Chinese--in which meaning is conveyed not only by the sound of a word but also by pitch. With remarkable precision such people use the same pitch each time they say a certain word. They all have perfect pitch. Researchers think it's possible that all babies are born with perfect pitch and that those who learn a tonal language hang on to it, while most of the rest of us lose it along...
...Renee Fleming, Sylvia McNair and Frederica von Stade, performs 26 songs by Californian Heggie, who is currently adapting Dead Man Walking for the San Francisco Opera. Heggie sets poems in English by poets old (Emily Dickinson) and new (Philip Littell) in the Samuel Barber/Ned Rorem manner--agreeably lyrical, unambiguously tonal--and his big-league cast responds with obvious relish...
Gorky's sound will feel familiar to those versed in the acoustic folk-inspired pop ballads of the late '60s and early '70s, with only a slight instrumental and tonal twist betraying the band's Welsh origin. A few of the band's songs have a classical folk ballad for flavor, while others exploit dissonance or vaguely new-age rhythms to add variety to what otherwise could be a monotonously mellow album...
...Halloween, you might wonder whether Glampire might be some rip-off of the original glam scene. Glampire's third full album, The Heraldic Universe, walks the line between dark pop and post-teenage angst. The music is a mixture of goth, synth, perky rock beats, and tinges of NIN tonalities. Unfortunately, you'll have to deal with the cheesy '80s-style electric guitar in the opening tracks. Add in Glampire's androgynous voice to the back-to-back songs "Super Sad" and "Happy Again?" and you'll roll your eyes. But in true glam style, he enunciates well...
...fostered by training in Paris in the 1870s, at the teaching atelier of Emile Carolus-Duran. Very much the maestro and dandy, Carolus-Duran focused his method on a near monomaniac attention to direct tonal painting, almost the opposite of color-based Impressionism. "Velazquez, Velazquez, Velazquez," he intoned, "ceaselessly study Velazquez." And from that study, Sargent got three of the major traits of his style. The first was a consummate skill in rendering objects and people bathed in space and low light. The second was its apparent straightforwardness--its ability to make a gesture count, to "knock in" the folds...