Can speech be turned into music notes?

[HawkI]

A B C D E F G

Sharp, flat, neutral

Beat 8 4 1 half quarter eighth ...

Vocal chords

Three different hertz variances, this may be in the wrong thread.

Vowels can be extended for ever

 

[rumborak]

Yes. In speech recognition (my line of work) it's called "f0 estimation" (f0 being the base pitch), and in fact for tonal languages like Chinese the f0 is very important as the pitch changes the meaning of a word.
Once you got the pitch, you can just map it to the closest note.

Don't know if you know of autotuning, but that's exactly what autotuners do.

 

[HawkI]

Ah that's so cool! thank you! So I have this character idea for a web comic who would speak English but the reader can only see the music notes because it's an alien, and now what I thought would be a too far fetched idea, is possible. I have heard of Auto Tune before but I didn't realize that's how it's done.

 

[HawkI]

Pitch changing the meaning of the words in China, gosh so your vocabulary would be shorter if you had a cold ha ha.