No abstract

For over half a century, musicologists and linguists have suggested that the prosody of a culture's native language is reflected in the rhythms and melodies of its instrumental music. Testing this idea requires quantitative methods for comparing musical and spoken rhythm and melody. This study applies such methods to the speech and music of England and France. The results reveal that music reflects patterns of durational contrast between successive vowels in spoken sentences, as well as patterns of pitch interval variability in speech. The methods presented here are suitable for studying speech-music relations in a broad range of cultures.

Prediction or expectancy is thought to play an important role in both music and language processing. However, prediction is currently studied independently in the two domains, limiting research on relations between predictive mechanisms in music and language. One limitation is a difference in how expectancy is quantified. In language, expectancy is typically measured using the cloze probability task, in which listeners are asked to complete a sentence fragment with the first word that comes to mind. In contrast, previous production-based studies of melodic expectancy have asked participants to sing continuations following only one to two notes. We have developed a melodic cloze probability task in which listeners are presented with the beginning of a novel tonal melody (5–9 notes) and are asked to sing the note they expect to come next. Half of the melodies had an underlying harmonic structure designed to constrain expectations for the next note, based on an implied authentic cadence (AC) within the melody. Each such ‘authentic cadence’ melody was matched to a ‘non-cadential’ (NC) melody matched in terms of length, rhythm and melodic contour, but differing in implied harmonic structure. Participants showed much greater consistency in the notes sung following AC vs. NC melodies on average. However, significant variation in degree of consistency was observed within both AC and NC melodies. Analysis of individual melodies suggests that pitch prediction in tonal melodies depends on the interplay of local factors just prior to the target note (e.g., local pitch interval patterns) and larger-scale structural relationships (e.g., melodic patterns and implied harmonic structure). We illustrate how the melodic cloze method can be used to test a computational model of melodic expectation. Future uses for the method include exploring the interplay of different factors shaping melodic expectation, and designing experiments that compare the cognitive mechanisms of prediction in music and language.

Does the prosody of a nation’s language leave an imprint on its music? We address this question by comparing British English and French, a stress-timed vs syllable-timed language with salient intonational differences. We previously showed that an empirical difference between speech rhythm in the two cultures is reflected in instrumental music. In this study we expand on these rhythmic measurements and provide new data on melody. We compare English and French intonation using a measure which can also be applied to musical melodies. In a database of read speech we converted the intonation contour of each sentence into a sequence of vowel pitches, using the mean fundamental frequency of each vowel to represent its pitch. We found that the size of pitch intervals between successive vowels varied more in British English than in French speech. We then examined classical instrumental music and found that pitch intervals between successive notes varied more in English than in French music. We also examined differences in the way rhythm and melody are aligned in both speech and music. Overall, we find that the prosody of a culture’s language is reflected in the structure of its instrumental music. [Supported by Neurosciences Research Foundation.]