Metrical Patterns Research Articles

The structure of metrical patterns in tunes and in literary verse. Evidence from discrepancies between musical and linguistic rhythm in Italian songs

Abstract A first exploration of acceptable and unacceptable discrepancies between linguistic and musical rhythm in Italian songs has uncovered two kinds of discrepancies which do not have counterparts in literary verse: durational discrepancies between adjacent syllables and stress-beat misalignments that involve nonadjacent syllables. The latter type is explored in greater detail than the former. Our survey suggests that analogous misalignments are in principle impossible in literary verse composed in accentual or accentual-syllabic meters, because, on the one hand, the abstract metrical templates that characterize such meters are not anchored in measured time, and, on the other hand, they do not recognize more than two degrees of metrical prominence.

Topos, Text, and the Parody Problem in Bach's Mass in B minor, BWV 232

Even though parody and borrowing have long been recognized as legitimate features of Bach's compositional practices, the criteria by which the composer selected appropriate material to parody remains problematic. Christoph Wolff and Güther Stiller, for example, suggest that musical elements, such as the quality of the original or its potential for further embellishment, represent possible criteria. On the other hand, textual elements such as analogous subjects, "affects," and metrical patterns between old and new texts also many have factored into Bach's criteria. In an effort to redress the imposition of these twentieth-century solutions to what is in effect an eighteenth-century phenomenon, this study undertakes a cultural/contextual examination of the Crucifixus movement from the Mass in B minor and its model, the opening chorus of Cantata 12. Indeed, a logical analysis of both texts reveals that an equivalence of topoi, or topics, represents an important criterion in the selection of an appropriate model from which to borrow. Moreover, a musical-rhetorical analysis confirms that Bach's borrowings from the opening chorus of Cantata 12 are actually musical-rhetorical figures. His application of the parody procedure thus represents the re-use of specific musical-rhetorical gestures which are suitable for the embellishment of a particular topos.

To the beat of your own drum: Cortical regularization of non-integer ratio rhythms toward metrical patterns

Humans perceive a wide range of temporal patterns, including those rhythms that occur in music, speech, and movement; however, there are constraints on the rhythmic patterns that we can represent. Past research has shown that sequences in which sounds occur regularly at non-metrical locations in a repeating beat period (non-integer ratio subdivisions of the beat, e.g. sounds at 430ms in a 1000ms beat) are represented less accurately than sequences with metrical relationships, where events occur at even subdivisions of the beat (integer ratios, e.g. sounds at 500ms in a 1000ms beat). Why do non-integer ratio rhythms present cognitive challenges? An emerging theory is that non-integer ratio sequences are represented incorrectly, “regularized” in the direction of the nearest metrical pattern, and the present study sought evidence of such perceptual regularization toward integer ratio relationships. Participants listened to metrical and non-metrical rhythmic auditory sequences during electroencephalogram recording, and sounds were pseudorandomly omitted from the stimulus sequence. Cortical responses to these omissions (omission elicited potentials; OEPs) were used to estimate the timing of expectations for omitted sounds in integer ratio and non-integer ratio locations. OEP amplitude and onset latency measures indicated that expectations for non-integer ratio sequences are distorted toward the nearest metrical location in the rhythmic period. These top-down effects demonstrate metrical regularization in a purely perceptual context, and provide support for dynamical accounts of rhythm perception.

The implicit learning of metrical and nonmetrical temporal patterns

Implicit learning (IL) occurs unintentionally. IL of temporal patterns has received minimal attention, and results are mixed regarding whether IL of temporal patterns occurs in the absence of a concurrent ordinal pattern. Two experiments examined the IL of temporal patterns and the conditions under which IL is exhibited. Experiment 1 examined whether uncertainty of the upcoming stimulus identity obscures learning. Based on probabilistic uncertainty, it was hypothesized that stimulus-detection tasks are more sensitive to temporal learning than multiple-alternative forced-choice tasks because of response uncertainty in the latter. Results demonstrated IL of metrical patterns in the stimulus-detection but not the multiple-alternative task. Experiment 2 investigated whether properties of rhythm (i.e., meter) benefit IL using the stimulus-detection task. The metric binding hypothesis states that metrical frameworks guide attention to periodic points in time. Based on the metric binding hypothesis, it was hypothesized that metrical patterns are learned faster than nonmetrical patterns. Results demonstrated learning of metrical and nonmetrical patterns but metrical patterns were not learned more readily than nonmetrical patterns. However, abstraction of a metrical framework was still evident in the metrical condition. The present study shows IL of auditory temporal patterns in the absence of an ordinal pattern.

Rainy Nights

Rainy Nights Translated by Andrew Schelling (bio) durdinaniśīthapavane niḥsaṃcārāsu nagaravīthiṣupatyau videśayāte paraṃ sukhaṃ jaghanacapalāyāḥ durdina. rainy day, bad weather niśītha. night pavane. (loc. abs. when [there are] night winds and rainy weather) wind niḥsaṃcārāsu. deserted, empty of walkers (with streets) nagara. city vīthiṣu. (loc. abs.) (f.) streets, market patyau. (loc. abs. when my husband) husband videśa. abroad, another land yāte. (loc. abs.) has gone paraṃ. supreme, great sukhaṃ. pleasure, delight, happily jaghana-capalā. (bv. cmpd.) woman who moves (shakes) her hips; sexually exuberant jaghana. hips, buttocks, loins, vulva capalā. (f.) moving about, quavering, inconstant [End Page 98] Rainy nightsthe city streets desertedhusband travelingin a far-off land.This is when Jaghanacapalā rejoicesshe likes to sleeparound. The key to this poem is a compound word, jaghanacapalā, which means a shaking of the hips or loins (or buttocks or vulva). The way it appears here, with a feminine ending, makes it a bahuvṛhi compound: woman who rocks her loins. Colloquially, this means something like “who sleeps around” or, more playfully, who shakes her tail feathers. But there is more. The poem shows up in an anthology attributed to a woman identified as Jaghanacapalā. This means that any reading since at least the twelfth century—the date of the anthology in which the poem appears—has taken it for a proper name as well as a woman’s description. Hence it carries two meanings, and you need to translate both to get the force, the śakti, of the verse. There’s a further twist. Jaghanacapalā is also the name of a poetic meter or rhythm in Sanskrit, the two-line pattern this poem occurs in. Sanskrit metrical patterns carry vivid names, which must originate in dance. Others are śārdūla-vikrīḍita (tiger’s play), Girl with a Ball, and so forth. The first handbook of India’s art, the Natyaśāstra of Bharata Muni, traces the origins of art to a sacred theater—founded as a “Fifth Veda” by Brahma the Creator—that included dance, music, poetry, costume, and stagecraft. (A good translation of this origin myth appears in Daumal p. 43.) In the surviving dramas of Sanskrit, of which there are a great many, at moments of poignant or intense emotion, an actor breaks into dance, accompanied by music and the ceremonial recitation of a poem. Jaghanacapalā as a metrical pattern would have begun with the dance of a dramatic character and a poem that perhaps regulated her footwork. The classical poets saw this as a particular skill, not easy to accomplish: working into a poem the name of its meter. This seems quite postmodern—like the painter Jasper Johns affixing to his canvas one of his rulers; or using a Savarin coffee can filled with paintbrushes for his Painted Bronze sculpture. [End Page 99] Andrew Schelling Andrew Schelling, born in 1953 at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C., has written, edited, or translated twenty books. Early opposition to American involvement in Vietnam, plus an encounter with India’s texts, set him on a lifelong engagement with Asian literature. He studied Sanskrit at the University of California at Berkeley, and began to translate from its classical poetry tradition around 1978. His first book, Dropping the Bow: Poems of Ancient India, received the Academy of American Poets translation award in 1992, the first time the Academy had honored work done from an Asian language. Schelling’s own poetry and essays emerge from the Southern Rocky Mountain bioregion in which he lives. Recent books of poetry wrangle with the Arapaho language as a way of reading landscape and the natural cycles; they include From the Arapaho Songbook and A Possible Bag. He has edited The Oxford Anthology of Bhakti Literature and Love and the Turning Seasons: India’s Poetry of Spiritual and Erotic Longing (forthcoming from Counterpoint Press). Living on the Front Range of Colorado, he is active on land-use issues and teaches at Naropa University. He also teaches regularly at Deer Park Institute, in India’s Himalayan foothills. Copyright © 2013 University of Hawai‘i...

Prosodic Structure Shapes the Temporal Realization of Intonation and Manual Gesture Movements

Previous work on the temporal coordination between gesture and speech found that the prominence in gesture coordinates with speech prominence. In this study, the authors investigated the anchoring regions in speech and pointing gesture that align with each other. The authors hypothesized that (a) in contrastive focus conditions, the gesture apex is anchored in the intonation peak and (b) the upcoming prosodic boundary influences the timing of gesture and intonation movements. Fifteen Catalan speakers pointed at a screen while pronouncing a target word with different metrical patterns in a contrastive focus condition and followed by a phrase boundary. A total of 702 co-speech deictic gestures were acoustically and gesturally analyzed. Intonation peaks and gesture apexes showed parallel behavior with respect to their position within the accented syllable: They occurred at the end of the accented syllable in non-phrase-final position, whereas they occurred well before the end of the accented syllable in phrase-final position. Crucially, the position of intonation peaks and gesture apexes was correlated and was bound by prosodic structure. The results refine the phonological synchronization rule (McNeill, 1992), showing that gesture apexes are anchored in intonation peaks and that gesture and prosodic movements are bound by prosodic phrasing.

Morphological Differentiation of Polish Arabian Horses - Multivariate Analysis

Abstract The aim of the study was to show the variability of exterior type in Arabian horses bred in three leading stud farms in Poland. A total of 334 adult animals from the basic herd of stud farms in Bialka, Janow Podlaski, and Michalow were studied. Each horse underwent 26 exterior measurements. In the first stage, the method of exploration of multidimensional data - principal component analysis, was used, and subsequently, a stepwise canonical discriminant analysis. It was found that each stud farm breeds horses with a different metrical pattern. Horses bred in Bialka represent clearly different morphotype comparing to horses from the other stud farms. Individuals from Janow Podlaski are more similar to horses originating from Michalow but morphological variation also occurs between them. From among the 26 metric traits, 10 parameters have a meaningful discriminative power. These include in particular such parameters as the length of the metatarsus, pelvis, arm, and neck, and depth of the chest.

¿CÓMO SE TRAZA UNA IGLESIA GÓTICA? ALGUNAS CLAVES Y UN CASO CONCRETO

Although there are many studies about the Gothic architecture, we still don’t know many aspects of the overall design of the building. Probably, the design process began with a general idea drawn in the trace, and later the building was designed at the same time that it was built. Particularly, the study of an Andalusian church detects a pragmatic modus operandi, linked to the construction process, and perhaps often used at the time. The building´s ground-plans and elevations were designed using orthogonal grids, simple geometric tracings and the same metrical pattern for all the work.

Psalm 23: A Musical Exegesis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes William L. Holladay, The Psalms through Three Thousand Years: Prayerbook of a Cloud of Witnesses (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 359. 23rd Psalm. Chichester Psalms. Black, Brown, and Beige. Requiem. J. Clinton McCann Jr., “The Book of Psalms: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in The New Interpreter's Bible: Volume IV (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 644–45. Klaus Seybold, Introducing the Psalms (London: T&T Clark, 1990), 116–17. Subsequent scholarship has shown that while this metrical pattern is most often found in laments (Psalm 5, Amos 5), its usage is not restricted to them. S. E. Gillingham, The Poems and Psalms of the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 53. Ibid., 62. George Bush, “Address to the Nation, September 11, 2001,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html (accessed March 11, 2008). Parallel modes are scales that share the same tonic (root) but have different pitches, such as A major and A minor. Relative modes are scales that share the same notes but have different tonics (roots), such as A major and F minor. In Roman numeral notation, capital letters are used to signify major chords while lower-case letters are used for minor chords. Gillingham, 62. Apostolic Constitutions, 2.7. Emil G. Hirsh, “Psalms,” in Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=574&letter=P&search=Psalms (accessed February 11, 2008). Additional informationNotes on contributorsIsaac EverettIsaac Everett is the minister of liturgical arts for The Crossing, an emerging Christian community in Boston. He is a musician, songwriter, and hymnist with two albums of sacred music, Rotation and Transmission, available on Proost, iTunes, and Rhapsody. This article was adapted from The Emergent Psalter (New York: Church Publishing, 2009), a commentary and musical setting of the psalms written for intimate worship.

Tracing and construction of arcades in the early Andalusian Gothic. A study of Cordovan case

The Gothic arcades of the Cordovan parishes are among the earliest in Andalusia. Their design, tracing, measure and construction can be studied thanks to their characteristics and affinities, while at the same time suggest that they follow the same preset criteria. The present work demonstrates the existence of preset criteria, which determined resistant sections that the Gothic masters considered suitable within certain margins. In fact they were using a structural oversizing, of which they were barely aware. This approach was constructively very efficient, showing the masters’ confidence in their craft, but it contravened the proportionality criteria of the time. In the design process, the masters used the metrical pattern established for the building to generate the main dimensions. Among these dimensions was the radius of curvature, which was often invariant to enable reuse of formwork and templates, the standardization of dowels, etc.

Cross-cultural differences in meter perception

We examined the influence of incidental exposure to varied metrical patterns from different musical cultures on the perception of complex metrical structures from an unfamiliar musical culture. Adults who were familiar with Western music only (i.e., simple meters) and those who also had limited familiarity with non-Western music were tested on their perception of metrical organization in unfamiliar (Turkish) music with simple and complex meters. Adults who were familiar with Western music detected meter-violating changes in Turkish music with simple meter but not in Turkish music with complex meter. Adults with some exposure to non-Western music that was unmetered or metrically complex detected meter-violating changes in Turkish music with both simple and complex meters, but they performed better on patterns with a simple meter. The implication is that familiarity with varied metrical structures, including those with a non-isochronous tactus, enhances sensitivity to the metrical organization of unfamiliar music.

Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century Tim Morris (bio) Miller, Cristanne . Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. $28.95. Reading in Time brings Cristanne Miller's exhaustive knowledge of Emily Dickinson's prosody to bear on the project of recreating, for a twenty-first-century academic audience, what her poems would have looked and sounded like to their first readers and hearers. Such a project reminds us of just how "long ago" Dickinson's poetry has become in the year 2012. When Thomas H. Johnson's variorum edition was published in 1955, there were living people who had read the first editions as they appeared in the 1890s. Robert Frost was one. His few comments about Dickinson's verse are gnomic and suggestive, because they did not have to be expository and analytical. He had direct knowledge of how Dickinson's work would have appeared, and sounded, to her contemporaries. We do not. Such losses are inevitable. Knowledge of poetic conventions has a lifespan. Academic argument—claims and counter-claims about how the forms of poems mean—supplies its place. Some of Dickinson's twenty-first-century readers see hers as primarily a visual art, crafted on the manuscript page. Some see her as an aural artist, working in the realms of memory and music. Miller has been the leading proponent of the aural approach, which has taken a back seat in recent decades. "Reading Dickinson's poetry according to the primary concerns of her own era ... requires attention not just to poetic form but to elements of form that manifest themselves aurally" (37-38). She is careful in Reading in Time, however, not to make this issue an either/or polemic. Dickinson's poetry has always been both visual and aural. "Mabel Loomis Todd," notes Miller, "records in her diary that she first persuaded [Thomas Wentworth] Higginson to agree to publish Dickinson's poems by reading them aloud to him; he was 'greatly astonished,' having had 'no idea there were so many in passably conventional form'" (97). Even for the poet's contemporary acquaintances, the visual and the aural could come to the fore by turns, yielding contrasting impressions of the poetry. [End Page 108] Miller patiently and exhaustively establishes that Dickinson worked from an underlying sound pattern. "[T]he rhythm lurking in her mind as she composed was most often the stanza, even when she was composing in what we might call free verse" (79). The received notion has been that she used a hymn stanza; Miller would say instead a ballad stanza. Ballads and hymns by Dickinson's contemporaries used similar, but not identical, prosody (57-58). Ballad verse was accentual rather than syllabic, and accommodated different metrical patterns within the same text. When Dickinson varied the number of syllables in a line, or shifted patterns within a poem, she was drawing on the traditions of ballad form. "[C]omposition in the head" makes use of the rhetorical canon of memory (227n70); Dickinson's poetry is memorable because she committed so much of it to memory in the process of composing it. Hence she chose rhyme and meter, hymn and ballad, however varied, over more radical verse experiments. In fact, Miller shows that there was considerable variation in the published verse that Dickinson most likely read, so that her departures from formulae are not as wildly eccentric as some early readers felt, and criticism has long assumed. At the heart of Miller's book are long, extraordinarily carefully formal analyses of individual poems. She scans representative—or just plain excellent— poems, from many different formal categories, laying out their syllabic and accentual patterns. She then attentively guides the reader through the rhythms of the poem. Miller is too good a critic to insist mechanically that a certain kind of sound must reinforce a certain kind of meaning or mood. But she does not make the countervailing mistake of supposing that sound is arbitrary, or moves in its own ways irrespective of the poem as a whole. About half of Reading in Time, then, pursues the title's project by looking at "time...

Musical Entrainment Subsumes Bodily Gestures – Its Definition Needs a Spatiotemporal Dimension

In his paper What is entrainment? Definition and applications in musical (this issue), M. Clayton offers a definition of that is based on a timing dimension (relative phase relationships). However, this definition may be too limited when applied to musical entrainment. Based on the idea that human engagement with music is embodied and that gestures may condition entrainment, I suggest that the definition of be broadened so as to include a spatiotemporal dimension. Submitted 2012 January 6; accepted 2012 July 13. THE paper by Martin Clayton (What is entrainment? Definition and applications in musical research, this issue) elucidates the notion of in a more general sense. He discusses the more distinctive features of in music and provides some examples of research about in music. Basically, I agree with the suggestion that has both an objective and subjective component. The objective component is reflected in the statement that the evidence for will be (a) a stabilization of the relative phase relationship, and (b) the reassertion of this stability following a perturbation. He also states that entrainment does not necessarily result in synchronization in phase between rhythms of matching periods, and that can involve matching periods as well as hierarchical and polyrhythmic relationships, it is out of phase as often as it is in phase; and it can fall almost anywhere on the symmetrical-asymmetrical continuum. The latter two statements fully support the idea of relative phase relationships, and they fit rather well with the idea that is a timing issue that can be measured and modeled. As for the subjective component, reference has been made to the role dynamic attention has as a contributing factor to in social interaction. Basically, I share the viewpoint that is a highly interesting phenomenon for understanding how humans interact with music. I agree that it is possible to measure important aspects of and that case studies are important in order to get an overview of the highly diverse ways in which interferes with music making. Indeed, more case studies are needed because musical occurs at different levels and in different forms. Furthermore, I am much in favor of developing an experimental approach towards understanding musical entrainment, in addition to field observations and mathematical modeling. I also believe that the study of can further profit from approaches that focus more on subjective components, such as experiences, intentions in entrainment, and last but not least, the role of gestures and corporeal articulations in relation to entrainment. In what follows, I raise some questions about this, which illustrate the need for a broader definition of the concept of entrainment. MUSICAL ENTRAINMENT INVOLVES ACTION Martin Clayton seems to be aware of the need for a broader definition of when he states that metrical patterns may emerge directly from joint action, rather than necessarily coming into existence first at the neuronal level and then being expressed behaviorally. I found this an intriguing statement, but I didn't fully grasp what Martin wanted to say. Does he mean that may be more than just a timing issue? Does he mean that human is rooted in action, in the spatial deployment of the body? Does he mean that may involve a gestural component that interacts with the time component? Unfortunately, that aspect is less well developed in the paper, although I believe that it is an essential aspect in the study of (Leman, 2007).

Commander of the Cool: Translating the Art of an African Woman Excerpts from Robert Farris Thompson’s Final Keynote Address

Commander of the Cool: Translating the Art of an African Woman Excerpts from Robert Farris Thompson’s Final Keynote Address Robert Farris Thompson (bio) Delivered Saturday, October 15, 2011, at the Menil Collection, Houston, TX “What is translation? Why don’t we start with bad translation? Bad translation is when John Wayne says, “Give me a shot of red eye,” and it comes out, “Dubonnet s’il vous plait.” Another bad translation: when John Wayne says, “Drinks all on the house. I’m feelin’ loose as a goose.” Subtitle in Zurich: “Cognac fur alle.” What an elegant cowboy! Imagine the late and great Humphrey Bogart kissing the forever great Lauren Bacall. He pushes her against the wall and they kiss, languorously. Lauren says, “I’ve never been kissed like that in my life.” Spanish subtitle: “Muchísimas gracias.” So, how do we avoid such catastrophes? The German theorist Walter Benjamin has an answer for you. He says, “You cannot translate anything—French into German, Japanese into Mandarin—unless you love the other language as much as your own.” And I’m here to tell you that I love Yoruba, maybe even more than English, who knows? Imagine yourself coming in from the Eighth Galaxy and your mission is: “Check the planet. Send us back a message. Is there life?” You send a zap to Paris and it picks up by luck John Coltrane on recording. Then you hit Rio [samba drumming sounds]. Then you hit the South Bronx: Mambo! And so forth. So you send back to Eighth Galaxy: “Your Highness, I have probed the planet. There is definitely life and to judge from the sounds I am getting: they baaaad!” The point being the extra-terrestrial listened to so many forms of black music that he’s even beginning to talk black. The big triumph is that the airwaves of our planet belong to black people. No matter where you are you’ll pick up black music. Or maybe you are in Manila and you pick up: boom-chi-boom-chick. That is, of course, Habanera sped up to become Reggaeton. Wherever you are, what’s the secret of the black conquest of the airwaves? They have something that no other musical tradition has and that’s multiple meter: 4/4, plus 2/4, plus 6/8, plus 12 and a half, plus whatever you got. Multiple meter—you can see it happening centuries ago in the fifteen hundreds in Benin [pointing at an image] . . . you can see there is one being struck with the hands in the middle drum, you can see a person is striking a counter beat with a stick on the side of the drum, and then you got another drummer. At least three different beats. Cut to Brazil today in 2011, and you’ll see the same combination of drums, each [End Page 999] one with a different texture or different metrical pattern. Multiple meter. That’s one of the powerhouses behind the black conquest. And that conquest leads to the great invention of the classical music of our nation: Jazz. What do you do under drum fire? How can you function when you are bombarded by multiple meter? And that leads us to something else here that we have to translate: cool. That is to say, a collectiveness of mind. You are under drum fire, in which you keep your mental gyroscope and what you do is internalize the beat. You’re no longer afraid of dancing because you are a beat of your own. If there’s anything that black people have taught me is that people are art. Even to me Payton, the great running back who invented the stutter-step, or brought the stutter-step into NFL football, he’s a work of art, just as much as Malcolm X or John Coltrane. Just as much as “Lady Day,” AKA Billie Holiday. Diaspora to me is a magical word. It means the impossible. It means that you recreate Africa right in the middle of the USA. [End Page 1000] Robert Farris Thompson Robert Farris Thompson is The Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of African & African American Art at...

Quantitative Metrics in Chadic and Other Afroasiatic Languages

Metrics is the study of the properties of metrical language found in poetry and song in languages throughout the world. This paper looks at examples of metrical language from traditions of poetry/song in two languages of the Chadic family, Ngizim and Hausa. These languages organize their metrical patterns on quantitative principles of syllable weight rather than of stress or syllable counting. The paper adopts an analytical framework of generative metrics using a grid and constraints for setting text to the grid. The paper shows that despite very different cultures and methods of transmission, poetry/song in these two languages conform to exactly the same principles. Moreover, the Hausa poems, composed in meters of Classical Arabic origin, show that principles underlying poetry composed in the Classical Arabic tradition should be analyzed in similar ways. The final section of the paper shows that the oral performance of texts is systematically related to the more abstract properties of the text itself, and moreover, is crucial in understanding properties that do not emerge from examining the text alone.

Patmore, Hopkins, and the Problem of the English Metrical Law

Patmore, Hopkins, and the Problem of the English Metrical Law Joshua King Hopkins Quarterly, 38.1-2, published by agreement of the editors in conjunction with Victorian Poetry, 49, no.2, as sharing the common theme, “Prosody.” "I believe that I am now, for the first time, stating" the "great general law" of meter, Coventry Patmore proclaims in his influential "Essay on English Metrical Law," first published in 1857.1 "My Dear Mr. Patmore," Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in 1887, "I believe that I can now set metre and music both of them on a scientific footing which will be final like the law of gravitation."2 Patmore and Hopkins adopt the excited tone that a writer today would use after fully unraveling the human genome. In the three decades between Patmore's "Essay" and Hopkins's letter, many Victorians joined in the hunt for the English metrical law: books and articles published on meter twice doubled in number, first in the 1860s, then again in the 1880s.3 Called the "New Prosody" by later scholars and early contributors,4 this take-off in prosody criticism was characterized by a search after the "primary laws of metrical expression" ("Essay," 6). Yet in their search, Hopkins and Patmore confronted the paradox that Yopie Prins has shown other Victorians sensed: meter was actually an "abstraction, a graphic pattern" on the page, never realized in a human voice.5 Building off Prins's insight, I argue that both men faced the ghostliness of metrical law precisely because they did not wish meter to transmit their personal voices and feelings. Both believed that poets' and readers' adherence to metrical law corrected subjectivism, activating transpersonal emotional structures in speech that confirmed the divine design of reality. The dilemma each encountered was not failure to revive his own voice in a reader's, but the possibility that his metrical law was like the canal system Percival Lowell would soon "discover" on Mars—a self-delusion. Three emphases, potentially contradictory, emerged in the New Prosody's quest for metrical laws. First was the widespread conviction that rhythmic variations upon a metrical pattern convey fundamental emotions from poets to readers. George Brimley [End Page 31] exemplifies this perspective in an 1855 article: "the various forms of metre … are all originally expressive … of emotion," so that modulations of rhythm provide "a medium through which the same heat of emotion" in the poet "is kindled in the reader."6 Patmore, who was probably influenced by Brimley, makes a similar statement in the "Essay," claiming that every "change" to an expected metrical pattern "is as real a mode of expressing emotion as words themselves are of expressing thoughts" ("Essay," 38).7 Second was the belief of many new prosodists that "[v]erse … is only verse on the condition of right reading" ("Essay," 11). The laws of meter, which made possible the rhythmic communication of emotions, were discernible only in a skilled vocal performance. Third, many late-Victorian prosodists followed E.S. Dallas and Patmore in describing metrical beats and rhythmic patterns as mental projections.8 Patmore's formulation of the idea was most influential: the beat of verse "for the most part, has no material and external existence at all, but has its place in the mind, which craves measure in everything" ("Essay," 15).9 Patmore and Hopkins diverged widely in their attempts to reconcile the trifold emphasis of New Prosody on innately affective rhythm, exacting vocal performance, and mentally projected meter. Yet Patmore agreed with Hopkins "that where there is much freedom of motion the laws which limit it should be strict" (LIII, 335). In his 1857 "Essay," Patmore claims that poets must strictly follow metrical laws, only violating these restraints for an easily discerned "emotional motive" ("Essay," 22). By the time Patmore wrote the "Essay," he had already promoted this view of lawful metrical liberty in print. Only when constrained by "the shackles" of meter, Patmore asserts in an 1850 discussion of Tennyson's In Memoriam in the North British Review, will the rhythms of emotional expression achieve their greatest intensity, purity, and communicability.10 In this review of In Memoriam, Patmore indicates what he thinks is at stake...

Rhythms, Poetic and Political: The Case of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Rhythms, Poetic and Political:The Case of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Caroline Levine (bio) How should one go about addressing the politics of prosody? In recent years scholars of Victorian poetry have tended to choose among three alternatives. The first is what we might call the "reflective" model. In this school of thought, poetic meter points us to the temporal patterns of social life, mirroring or enacting a historically specific shaping of experiential time. Herbert F. Tucker, for example, reads the meter of Barrett Browning's "Cry of the Children" as revealing the uncomfortable disjuncture between the embodied time of human life and the jolting experience of factory labor. "Nauseatingly ill-proportioned to human measure," Barrett Browning's "stop-and-start versification mimics the strain and clatter of steam-driven machinery."1 Similarly, Ivan Kreilkamp suggests that Victorian poetry could be read in a newly "super-charged realm of electricity, speed, heat, and light," offering up metrical experiences of social "shock … mobility, acceleration, discontinuity, the transitory, the elusive and the ephemeral."2 One of Kreilkamp's most vivid examples comes from Aurora Leigh, a passage when Aurora flees "southward in the roar of steam" (VII.396). Barrett Browning emerges here as ambivalent, torn between excitement at the "velocity and eroticized power" of the train and horror at its "frightening bath of sound in which individual voice and thought are submerged and overwhelmed" (p. 608). The reflective model, then, is a way of reading metrical forms for their mirroring of lived temporalities, allowing us access to the power and pain of contemporary modes of production.3 The second general way of reading the politics of meter, which we might call the "expressive" model, is one that takes prosody as a purposeful expression of political positions or convictions. Jason Rudy, for example, draws attention to the difference between the metrical patterns of Victorian ballads and those found in Spasmodic poetry. Rudy explains that ballads in the 1850s were simple, widely accessible national songs which, by popular demand, kept to strictly predictable patterns, "offer[ing] insistent regularity [End Page 235] as a model for cultural stability."4 "Through their formal regularity, ballads insist on 'law' rather than 'anarchy,'" he writes (pp. 591-592). And yet, Rudy explains, the same period saw the Spasmodic poets opting for violent, abrupt, jerking rhythms, deliberately repellent to conservative readers. Metrical forms thus express positions on a political spectrum that range from an embrace of unity and stability to radically unsettling conflict and lawlessness. Perhaps the most venerable tradition of reading the politics of literary form—and one that still wields considerable persuasive power—is the Marxist model. Here, critics read literary forms as struggling to contain or repress the reality of social conflicts and contradictions. Garrett Stewart writes, for example, that "in contriving to secure its formal symmetries," a literary text may offer "a formal recompense for totality's absence from any other life sphere."5 Thus the resolutions achieved by a text's prosodic patterns appear as vain but compelling attempts to cover over the terrifying impossibility of achieving real social resolutions. In this light, Tennyson's "sad mechanic exercise" (In Memoriam V.7) is indeed numbing; the comforts of metrical regularity dull our access to the real pain of loss, though rather than the private or intimate loss of a beloved friend they numb us to the very possibility of collective social relationship. In practice, these three models are not mutually exclusive. Isobel Armstrong's magisterial Victorian Poetry moves in astonishingly complex ways among the ideological, the reflective, and the expressive. A poet such as Tennyson emerges in Armstrong's study as both highly self-conscious and deeply ideological, fully intending to resolve social contradictions through myth and yet, in his brilliant lyrics, also exposing the material conditions of social life and the temporal patterns of industrial labor. In the process, the attempt to represent both the subjective and objective conditions of alienated labor—carefully reflecting the social—ultimately undermines both ideological and expressive readings. Reading "The Lotos-Eaters," for example, Armstrong argues that Tennyson's "slumberous cadences betray a real anxiety, as they struggle to represent a materialism which actually makes consciousness more and more...

Effects of syllable stress on articulatory planning observed in a stop-signal experiment

This paper presents experimental evidence that gestural planning systems associated with stressed syllables are more highly activated than ones associated with unstressed syllables. A stop-signal experiment was conducted to investigate how syllable stress and metrical structure influence the ability to halt speech in mid-utterance. Subjects produced three sentences with controlled metrical patterns, and on 75% of trials were given a randomly timed signal to stop speaking as quickly as possible. The presence of syllable stress in the immediately upcoming speech plan increased the amount of time it took for speakers to halt their speech in response to the stop-signal. This finding is interpreted in the context of a dynamical model which incorporates activation and inhibition. Gestural systems associated with stressed syllables are more highly activated and hence take longer to inhibit. An additional contribution of this paper is the resurrection of the stop-signal paradigm in speech research. This paradigm has the potential to reveal new phenomena of theoretical import in a variety of linguistic domains.

Metrical regularity facilitates speech planning and production

AbstractProsodic structure is known to influence utterance production in numerous ways, but the influence of repetition of metrical pattern on utterance production has not been thoroughly investigated. It was hypothesized that metrical regularity would speed utterance production and reduce the occurrence of speech errors. Productions of sequences of four trisyllabic nonwords were compared between two conditions: a metrically regular condition with a repeating strong-weak-weak pattern, and a metrically irregular condition that lacked a repeating prominence pattern. Utterance durations were slower in the irregular condition, more hesitations occurred, and more sequencing errors were made. These findings are significant in that they are not accommodated by serial models of speech production. It is argued that the effects of metrical regularity are due to interference between words in an utterance plan, and that this interference arises from constraints on the dynamics of word form representations in the planning of speech.

Lack of beat isochrony disrupts motor performance in a child drummer prodigy

Several studies have focused on coupling between perception and action (e.g., via finger tapping), and more generally on entrainment, in average musicians and non-musicians. Yet, little is known about the effects of entrainment on timing and movement kinematics in individuals exhibiting outstanding rhythmical abilities. In this study we examined the effect of beat isochrony on the performance of IF, a 7-year-old child drummer prodigy. IF displayed very early (at 3-4 years of age) outstanding musical abilities, and exceptional sensorimotor synchronization. To assess whether temporal regularity of the underlying beat (i.e., isochrony) during music playing affects IF’s performance we tested IF and a “control” group (i.e., children from music schools with 1-to1.5 years of percussion training) in a motion capture study. Participants imitated a short 6-note isochronous metrical pattern (Strong-weak-weak-Strong-weak-weak) on a percussion pad under four conditions. In the first condition the pattern was imitated repeatedly along with a metronome. In the second condition, the pattern was repeated but with a break in between repetitions, together with a metronome. In the third condition, similar breaks were introduced, but disrupting beat isochrony (i.e., with an irregular, though predictable, metronome). Finally, in the fourth condition break durations were random. IF exhibited higher temporal accuracy than controls with an isochronous metronome. However, his performance was much less accurate with disrupted beat isochrony. This was accompanied by overall differences between IF and controls in movement kinematics in terms of movement amplitude, and anticipation times. Enhanced performance in the presence of an isochronous beat, as opposed to lack of isochrony, suggests that motor entrainment may act as a marker of musical expertise early during development.