[Dixielandjazz] Seeking comments re: Additions to "um" word list. "Buzzing" during musical performance

[Norman Vickers]

Hello DJML Listmates:

I passed this NYTimes article on “um” words to various friends—some were
jazz musicians—and we came up with some “um” words.  See the article below
for clarification.  Here is a list we came up with.  I’m asking for
additional contributions, with and without musical connotations.

This is distinct from “buzzing”—grunts from some musicians when they are
playing.  Late pianist Erroll Garner was notorious for his grunting during a
recording session.  It drove the recording engineers wild but apparently
grunting came with the performance; he was unable to play without doing so.
Guitarist Herb Ellis and pianist Oscar Peterson have been observed to grunt
or sing (off key) during performance, especially during complex
improvizations.

I solicit your comments regarding:
--additions to the “um” words list
--comments on “buzzing” during musical performance

Thank you-

Norman Vickers
Pensacola
________________________________

My favorite "pause" is Louis' Armstrong's:
"Err...ahh."  It turns up on several of his records.
-
Got to add the favorite of jazzers: "Man" !!

!"knowhattamean?"
 "don'tchknow"
 "like"
 "you know"



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>From New York Times
  THINK TANK
Just Like, Er, Words, Not, Um, Throwaways
King Features Syndicate
By MICHAEL ERARD
Published: January 3, 2004

If you were hearing this instead of reading it, you might notice a pause
here and there tucked between the phrases, filled with a familiar, soft hum
or rumble — an um or uh.

Though a bane to teachers of public speaking, people around the world fill
pauses in their own languages as naturally as watermelons have seeds. In
Britain they say uh but spell it er, just as they pronounce er in butter.

The French say something that sounds like euh, and Hebrew speakers say ehhh.
Serbs and Croats say ovay, and the Turks say mmmmm. The Japanese say eto
(eh-to) and ano (ah-no), the Spanish este, and Mandarin speakers neige
(NEH-guh) and jiege (JEH-guh). In Dutch and German you can say uh, um, mmm.
In Swedish it's eh, ah, aah, m, mm, hmm, ooh, a and oh; in Norwegian, e, eh,
m and hm.

These interruptions, it turns out, plague machines more than people —
speech-recognition systems in particular — so researchers have increasingly
been turning their attention to uh and um (among other so-called
disfluencies).

"If someday you want machines to be as smart as people, then you have to
have machines that understand speech that's natural, and natural speech has
lots of disfluencies in it," said Liz Shriberg, a research psychologist at
S.R.I. International, a research company based in Menlo Park, Calif. Uh and
um might tell a computer about a speaker's alertness or emotional state so
the system can adjust itself and let people speak naturally to
speech-to-text programs.

Well before the invention of speech recognition, Frieda Goldman-Eisler, a
psychologist in London in the 1950's, inaugurated the modern study of
disfluencies by developing instruments that counted pauses in speech and
measured their duration. Ms. Goldman-Eisler, who was looking for a way to
make psychiatric interviews more efficient, found that 50 percent of a
person's speaking time is made up of silence. She also hypothesized that a
speaker planned his next words for the length of the uh or um.

Around the same time a psychiatrist at Yale, George Mahl, counted uhs and
nine other speech disfluencies in order to measure a person's anxiety level,
calculating that during every 4.4 seconds of spontaneous speech, on average,
one disfluency occurs. Eighty-five percent were uh and um, restarted
sentences and repeated words. A slip of the tongue — upon which Sigmund
Freud practically built an intellectual career — occurred less than 1
percent of the time.

Ms. Goldman-Eisler and Mr. Mahl treated uh and um as symptoms of nervousness
and verbal struggle. But once cheap, fast computers made digitized speech
easy to study in the 1990's, the approach changed. Researchers began to
study verbal pauses for meaning; they focused on the words as information.

By far the newest — and most controversial — idea comes from Herbert Clark,
a psychologist at Stanford, and Jean Fox Tree, a psychologist at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, who determined that speakers use (and
listeners understand) uh and um in distinct ways. Uh signals a forthcoming
pause that will be short, while um signals a longer pause, she said. Uh and
um are not acoustic accidents, but full-fledged words that signal a delay
yet to come. Of course that is not necessarily a good thing in public
speaking. "It makes you look weak when people have come to hear you
prepared, and you're not prepared," Mr. Clark said.

Ms. Fox Tree, who is a former student of Mr. Clark's, became interested in
uhs and ums as an undergraduate majoring in linguistics at Harvard. There
she realized that theories of language could not account for the fragmented
nature of ordinary conversation.

"I thought, here's something you hear in every single conversation during
the day, some kind of disfluency, and yet people treat them as if they're
garbage," she said. "Why are they there? Why do we use them?"

Ms. Fox Tree studies other discourse markers like you know, I mean and oh,
and is working on so and and. Her dream topic is like.

"I waited before I got tenure to study like," she confessed, "because I
thought it was going to be messy and hard to get a hold of, and I would
spend all this time studying it."

Ms. Shriberg agrees that these disruptions are more than white noise. "When
you realize these things are distributed in very clean ways and have a very
elegant structure," she said, "then you can see they're not garbage at all."

Heather Bortfeld, a psychologist who studies infant language development at
Texas A&M University, discovered this through personal experience. While
living in Madrid during her junior year in college, she noticed the distinct
sounds the Spanish used to fill their pauses.

"These were often conveying important information that I had to learn
about," Ms. Bortfeld said. "And then I had to learn how to make them myself
in order to sound more native and to really be speaking Spanish correctly."

In 2001 Ms. Bortfeld and others reported in the journal Language and Speech
that speakers taking a more active role in tasks said uh and um, repeated
words and restarted sentences more frequently than those in a passive role.
Men say uh and um more than women, though their overall disfluency rate was
the same. One piece of conventional wisdom fell by the wayside: whether or
not the speaker and listener knew each other had no effect on uh or um
rates.

But it may be Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of
California, San Diego, and other researchers who have come up with the most
appealing findings. He counted uhs among professors giving lectures and
found that the humanities professors say you know and uh 4.85 times per
minute, social scientists 3.84 and natural science professors 1.39 times,
which, he said, suggests that humanists have more expressive options from
which to choose.

And for those trying to minimize their verbal tics, Mr. Christenfeld also
found that drinking alcohol reduces ums.

                              ---End--