Svan Funeral Dirges (Zär): Language-Music Relation and Phonetic Properties

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a follow-up study to Scherbaum and Mzhavanadze (2020) and Mzhavanadze and Scherbaum (2020), which jointly describe the acoustical and musicological properties, respectively, of a new collection of field recordings of three-voiced Svan funeral dirges, known as zär in Svan and zari in Georgian. The focus of the present work is on language–music relation and phonetic properties. It was motivated by the pioneering work of Bolle Zemp (1994; 1997; 2001), who for the first time examined this topic from both an ethnomusicological and a linguistic perspective. We revisit some of Bolle Zemp’s observations and assumptions with a substantially expanded (by a factor of 11) data set and by using computational phonetic analysis tools not available at the time of her study. Her observation of correlations between pitch, duration, and timbre features related to the interjection of woj (wai) is consistent with our analysis for only some of the singers. Therefore, rather than assigning a general semantic meaning to these correlations, we offer an alternative interpretation as a natural consequence of the formant tuning techniques, which we found employed in the vocal production of some of the singers.