Representing Speech Through Musical Notation¹

Abstract

The achievements of the inventor Joshua Steele (1700-1791) are twofold. First, he used musical concepts to analyze what modern linguists call "suprasegmentals"-voice-pitch, length, and stress; then, he used musical notation as the basis of a new system for recording and executing speech. Just as scholars of music now rely on musical notation for transcribing music heard during fieldwork, so Steele relied on his new system for recording declamations heard during theatrical productions.The aim of phonologists has been to provide a set of properties that can describe all the sounds used in human language. There are two main categories of such sounds: segmentals-phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences; and suprasegmentals-voice-pitch, length, and stress. In this article, I shall be concerned only with the latter, which traditionally were treated as part of prosody. To describe such sounds, it is necessary to convert them into visible patterns for study and analysis. Such a conversion was made possible by the invention of instruments for recording acoustic stimuli, but it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that such recording devices began to be realized. One such device, built about 1857, was the phonautograph, which transferred waveforms to paper. 2 Numerous other mechanical devices followed, including phonophotography; 3 but these were finally consigned to oblivion by the cathode-ray tube, which, in 1947, made possible the invention of the spectrogram, a device that exhibits the energy present at each frequency in the sound wave produced 1 I am grateful to David Tunley for his helpful comments on an early draft.

Perdere la voce. Le metamorfosi della poesia letteraria

“…[…] 19 But more influential than Ginsburg in this shift to the notion of poem as text for vocalization (since Ginsburg was understandably seen as herald of a particular movement, Beat poe ts) is Charles Olson, a poe t whose manifesto, Projective Verse, of 1950 was taken up by many poe ts, reprinted in Donald Allen's influential anthology, New American Poetry: 1945Poetry: -1960 (and also heavily excerpted in William Carlos William's Autobiography). James Breslin writes, «The influence of Olson as theorist, and particularly of the Projective Verse essay, is hard to overestimate» 20 . For me this manifesto is particularly interesting because it embodies some of the paradoxes and ambiguities of a poe try claiming priority for voice and performance, while jettisoning traditional metrical form, which Olson calls «that verse which print bred» 21 .…”

“…Ho intitolato questo intervento perdere la voce. E in effetti per la poe sia letteraria, e tanto più per quella contemporanea, la voce -intesa come vera sede o dimensione originaria della poe sia -potrebbe davvero sembrare qualcosa come la caproniana Res amissa 20 : la cosa perduta, quel «dono» insomma che i poe ti della scrittura avrebbero tanto «gelosamente / (irrecuperabilmente) riposto», dentro i muti segni che inchiostrano le loro pagine, da averlo reso ormai del tutto irrintracciabile. Oppure forse no.…”

“…Vocal Performance Art and its connection to the cognitive unconscious, di Theda Weber-Lucks. Abbiamo già menzionato l'autrice, come scopritrice o inventrice di questa nozione ormai indispensabile, vocal performance art, e soprattutto sua prima teorica e storiografa 20 . I rappresentanti del nuovo genere artistico usano la voce come canto ma valorizzano anche tutte le svariate extended vocal techniques consentite dall'apparato fonatorio umano; pragmaticamente, quanto a formazione e primi saggi del mestiere, provengono perlopiù dall'area musicale, ma estendono volentieri la loro attività nel campo limitrofo della performance art; rispetto a quanto abbiamo detto sopra sulla condotta vocale extracantata extraparlata, ne sono certamente gli specialisti.…”

Eavesdropping with a Master: Leoš Janáček and the Music of Speech

“…[12] As early as the 18 th Century, Joshua Steele had devised just such a system (Kassler, 2005). The difference however was that both earlier and later attempts have been applied almost exclusively to theatrical speech or to paradigmatic citation forms of isolated words or phrases.…”

An Empirical Method for Comparing Pitch Patterns in Spoken and Musical Melodies: A Comment on J.G.S. Pearl's "Eavesdropping with a Master: Leos Janáček and the Music of Speech."

“…The work of Joshua Steele (1700-1791) is perhaps the best known in this regard. Steele wanted to capture the prosody of talented actors and orators, so that "the types of modern elocution may be transmitted to posterity as accurately as we have received the musical compositions of Corelli" (quoted in Kassler, 2005). To this end, he modified the musical staff to allow the transcription of spoken pitches down to a quarter-tone (i.e., one-half of a semitone), and developed a way to indicate the direction and extent of pitch glides within syllables (see Figure 2 of Kassler, 2005, for an example).…”