Rhythmic Correspondence between Music and Speech in English Vocal Music

Abstract

This study investigates the rhythmic structures of music and speech, and the possible corresponding rhythmic patterns between the two domains in English vocal music. With fifteen English songs as samples, lexical stress of multi-syllabic words is compared with three musical dimensions—metrical stress, duration, and pitch respectively. It was found that in the chosen English songs, there is a good mapping between the metrical stress of music and the lexical stress of lyrics. In addition, the duration and the pitch patterns not only generally match the lexical stress patterns most of the time, but also serve to manifest the prominence of the primary lexical stress on one hand, and to reflect the weakness of the unstressed syllables on the other. In addition to a general good match in rhythm, this study also shows match differences within the three comparisons. Match degrees vary according to different meter patterns. Moreover, pitch takes priority over duration in their respective match with lexical stress of the lyrics. Finally, the primarily stressed syllables match duration and pitch patterns much better than the unstressed ones do.