Music to Dems’ ears: Bush and Perry sound alike

Of course, this is music to the ears of Democrats, who say they would draw parallels between the two Texan governors should Perry win the GOP nomination.

{mosads}But is Perry’s voice just like Bush’s? ITK got an expert on the case. 

Brad Story, a professor of speech and hearing sciences at the University of Arizona who specializes in the use of computer models to measure the components involved in vocal production, compared two clips of the Texans’ speeches.

“Both Perry and Bush seem to have a pattern of producing sentences in which they increase their pitch to about the second or third syllable, sustain that syllable longer than most other syllables in the sentence, and then gradually decrease the pitch over the remainder of the sentence,” Story said in an email.

He had a lot of caveats, dealing with hertz (Hz) and vocal folds, which ITK didn’t really follow.

Story added that Perry’s pitch range is higher than Bush’s. (OK, that’s understandable). And one more note from Story: “Please keep in mind that this does not prove in any way that Perry’s and Bush’s voices are exactly alike. It just shows a type of similarity for these chosen clips. A far more extensive analysis would need to be done to thoroughly assess their similarity — but quite frankly, the best system for doing that in this case is the human ear.”

Bottom line: Bush and Perry sound alike.