Abstract
Song composers incorporate linguistic prosody into their music when setting words to melody, a process called “textsetting.” Composers tend to align the expected stress of the lyrics with strong metrical positions in the music. The present study was designed to explore the idea that temporal alignment helps listeners to better understand song lyrics by directing listeners’ attention to instances where strong syllables occur on strong beats. Three types of textsettings were created by aligning metronome clicks with all, some or none of the strong syllables in sung sentences. Electroencephalographic recordings were taken while participants listened to the sung sentences (primes) and performed a lexical decision task on subsequent words and pseudowords (targets, presented visually). Comparison of misaligned and well-aligned sentences showed that temporal alignment between strong/weak syllables and strong/weak musical beats were associated with modulations of induced beta and evoked gamma power, which have been shown to fluctuate with rhythmic expectancies. Furthermore, targets that followed well-aligned primes elicited greater induced alpha and beta activity, and better lexical decision task performance, compared with targets that followed misaligned and varied sentences. Overall, these findings suggest that alignment of linguistic stress and musical meter in song enhances musical beat tracking and comprehension of lyrics by synchronizing neural activity with strong syllables. This approach may begin to explain the mechanisms underlying the relationship between linguistic and musical rhythm in songs, and how rhythmic attending facilitates learning and recall of song lyrics. Moreover, the observations reported here coincide with a growing number of studies reporting interactions between the linguistic and musical dimensions of song, which likely stem from shared neural resources for processing music and speech.
Highlights
Song is an ecological model for studying the complex relationship between music and speech, and has been examined in recent studies with cognitive neuroscience methods that have found interactions between various aspects of the linguistic and musical dimensions of songs (Lidji et al, 2009; Gordon et al, 2010; Sammler et al, 2010; Schön et al, 2010)
We found that beta power increases when strong syllables align with strong beats, supporting the idea that metrical attending is facilitated by alignment; this increase on strong beats disappears when weak syllables are aligned with strong beats, suggesting that misalignment disrupts metrical attending
Periodic peaks in attentional energy, manifested in neural responses, would be facilitated when linguistic stress and musical beats are in-phase, and disrupted when they are in anti-phase
Summary
Song is an ecological model for studying the complex relationship between music and speech, and has been examined in recent studies with cognitive neuroscience methods that have found interactions between various aspects of the linguistic and musical dimensions of songs (Lidji et al, 2009; Gordon et al, 2010; Sammler et al, 2010; Schön et al, 2010) In both music and speech, temporal patterning of events gives rise to hierarchically organized rhythms that are perceived as metrical (Palmer and Hutchins, 2006). In other words, stressed syllables, or syllables that one would expect to be stressed in speech (“strong” syllables), are more likely than unstressed (“weak”) syllables to occur on hierarchically prominent musical beats Musicians intuitively emphasize this correspondence, by lengthening well-aligned syllables more than misaligned ones. Non-musicians have predictable, consistent intuitions about aligning lyrics to musical rhythms when asked to sing novel lyrics (i.e., new verses) to a familiar melody (Halle and Lerdahl, 1993) or chant lyrics without knowledge of the original melody (Hayes and Kaun, 1996)
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