What Is Musical Prosody?

Abstract

Musical prosody is a complex, rule-governed form of auditory stimulation, and it can move listeners emotionally in systematic ways. The acoustic cues in which musical prosody is instantiated are shared across performers, and performers share with listeners ideas of what constitutes appropriate prosody. The chapter focuses on the forms and functions of musical prosody and whether it is rule-governed and distinct from other forms of musical structure. Musical prosody appears to be sufficient for signaling segmentation, prominence, and emotional states; there is less known about the role of prosody in how musicians coordinate their performances. Musical prosody may be necessary only for signaling prominence, and, it seems, in promoting emotional communication during development. The inherent ambiguity in musical structure may require performers to make use of acoustic variability to encode which musical features are more important than others. Some rules express well the relation between prominence and acoustic realization, whereas other aspects of performance expression are not well expressed in rules. Researchers have sought more direct links between musical and speech prosody. Some neurological evidence suggests a direct connection between musical and linguistic prosody. Music training is associated with increased sensitivity to pitch processing in language tasks. Musicians detect fundamental frequency changes better than nonmusicians; they also show similar ERP responses to small frequency manipulations in music and speech, whereas nonmusicians show similar neural responses in music and speech only for large frequency changes tested whether musical training influenced listeners' ability to detect the emotional connotations in speech.