End Of Phrase Research Articles

Pitch changes as the marker of a phrase edge in standard Lithuanian

In many languages, pitch changes at phrase edges are often described as significant cues of juncture. The aim of this study is to analyse pitch changes at the beginning and end of declarative phrases in standard Lithuanian. The study consists of two parts: 1) a pilot study analysing whether the F0 difference is a reliable measure to determine the F0 rise/fall at the end of declarative phrasesand whether such a difference depends on the speaker’s sex; 2) an annotated speech corpus analysis on the tendencies of pitch changes at phrase edges. The pilot study showed that in phrases with a rising F0 at the end, the F0 mean of the last stressed syllable is significantly lower than F0 at the end of a phrase. In phrases with a falling F0, the F0 mean of the last stressed syllable is significantly higher than the F0 at the end of a phrase. The F0 difference is a reliable measure to determine the F0 rise or fall at the end of a phrase, and all the abovementioned tendencies were found in both male and female speakers’ recordings. The annotated speech corpus analysis revealed that both intonational and intermediate phrases usually begin and end in a low tone. Hence, the high and rising or falling tones at the beginning or end of a phrase are the marked members of the phrase edge tone system, and they can help identify phrase junctures. However, it is important to pay attention to other acoustic features such as pauses and intensity, as well as grammatical and semantic aspects.

Schemata, Splices, and Elisions in Monteverdi's Book 5 Madrigals

Abstract Studies of tonality in Monteverdi's madrigals have focused on cadential harmonies at phrase endings, for the most part ignoring the music that comes in between. The present study, focusing on homorhythmic music, identifies three elements lying between chordal arrivals: schemata, splices, and elisions. Schemata are short conventionalized outer-voice progressions that can connect a variety of starting and ending chords; splices are alterations by which the second version of a progression is varied when it is repeated in transposition; and elisions are made by common tones between the last chord of one progression and the first of the next. Each one of these essentially contrapuntal strategies is a crucial building block of Monteverdi's tonal structures: together they contribute to closing tonal circles, to an expressive use of register, and to meaningful changes of texture.

Ornamental melismas in Aquitanian introits

AbstractMelismas are used to decorate the performance of introits in the early manuscripts of East Francia and of the region of Aquitaine. The former group includes melismas attached to the ends of phrases in manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Aquitanian practice, apart from a few introits that resemble the East Frankish usage, is to add substantial melismas – not the same as those used by the East Franks – to the final soloistic doxology, as a sort of flourish indicating the final reprise. These melismas are sometimes found in tonaries, perhaps for general application to any introit in the mode, and sometimes attached to individual introits. Melismas from Aquitanian tonaries, graduals and tropers are catalogued and described. These melismas are evidently portable, often being used for more than one occasion.

Acoustical analysis of Taylor Swift’s speech and singing throughout her career

Taylor Swift has changed geographic environments, speaking communities, and singing communities throughout her career, inviting question into changes in her voice acoustics. Capitalizing on the availability of interviews and multiple song recordings, we tracked changes in vowel formant trajectories and other vocal properties from different points in her life to see how her voice might have been influenced by these changes in community (e.g switching from country to pop style, moving from Philadelphia to Nashville). Comparing vowel space from 2012 to 2019, we observe higher tongue position (lower frequency F1) for numerous vowels, especially for /eɪ/ and /aʊ/. Rounding for /ɔ/ was reduced, and /æ/ was pronounced farther back in the mouth. We also observed reduced distinction between the varieties of /ɑɪ/ before voiced and voiceless consonants (e.g., ride versus write), as well as greater front-back movement for /u/. Studio re-recordings show remarkable consistency of word timing and intensity. Conversely, Swift’s live singing voice includes some variation from the recording, including fewer silences between words. Live versions feature extended duration for words that are emphasized for emotion, and/or ends of phrases, compensated by shorter durations for other segments so that the overall song length was very consistent.

Effects of utterance length on word and phrase durations

This study examined the effects of utterance length on word and phrase durations to investigate how the planned length of an utterance influences the rate of speech. An experiment was conducted in which the visual stimuli cued the production of sentences with one, two, or three subject noun phrases (NPs)—e.g., “Nine green rhinos and eight red weasels and eight blue llamas live in the zoo.” In addition, a novel, delayed stimuli condition was tested in which the visual stimuli that cued non-initial NPs (“eight red weasels and eight blue llamas”) were presented after participants started production, and thus sentence length changed after utterance initiation. Word and NP durations were analyzed. NP durations were longer in sentences with more NPs, and moreover, durational increases were primarily observed in the rightmost words of the NPs. These findings are important first because they show that the previously observed effects of number of words on word durations extend to phrases, and second because they show that phrase duration effects are localized to phrase ends. When the utterance length changed after the start of production, participants lengthened the end of the initial NP and the following conjunction to plan for the newly presented NPs.

Observations on Basic Intonational Patterns of Questions and Statements in Standard Lithuanian

This paper discusses the results of the pilot study on intonational patterns of questions and statements in Lithuanian. Special attention is devoted to the tone changes at the end of the intonational phrase, i.e. to the boundary tone and the pitch accent of the last word. In order to identify the main patterns, a corpus of 96 tokens (statements, questions with wh-word ‘kada’ and yes/no questions with and without interrogative word ‘ar’ read by four speakers) has been examined. F0 measurements were extracted using Praat. The audio files were annotated based on the main principles of the autosegmental-metrical phonology: high tone is marked with H, low tone – L, pitch accent – ‘*’ and boundary tone – ‘%.’ In the perception experiment, the participants were asked to identify the statements and questions (the interrogative words were removed). 21 native speakers participated in the experiment.The results have shown that the end of the statements in Standard Lithuanian is described by low tones (L* L%), whereas questions can have tones as follows: high-low (HL* L%), low (L* L%) and low-high (LH* H%). The tone patterns at the end of the questions depend on the presence or absence of the interrogation word: wh- questions are characterized by low tones at the end of phrase (L *L%), yes/no questions with an interrogative word ‘ar’ may have low (L* L%) or rising tones (LH* H%), and yes/no questions without an interrogative word end in rising (LH* H%) or falling (HL* L%) tones. The patterns with low or falling tones are common for the questions with an interrogative word and (or) focus word in a non-final position of the phrase. The results of the perception experiment allow us to draw preliminary conclusions that the high boundary tone, the interrogative word and the pitch accent of the focused word are equivalent markers of a question in Lithuanian.

МУЗЫКАЛЬНАЯ НОТАЦИЯ ЛИТУРГИЧЕСКОГО РЕЧИТАТИВА (на примере латинской рукописной книги Эпистолярий из Российской государственной библиотеки)

It is known that the liturgical recitative is performed according to certain melodic models (the so-called tones), conforming to the syntax of the text. Each melodic model consists of the following melodic elements: the main sound with which most of the text is sung, cadence formulas marking the completion of the entire chant and the end of phrases, as well as initial formulas for the beginning of the whole recitative and separate sentences and phrases (intonation and reintonation). Due to its formulaic nature, the melodies of the liturgical recitative are not usually fixed in liturgical books: the singers will easily perform the recitative using a small number of melodic formulas, previously learned in accordance with the syntax of the text. At the same time, the performance of the liturgical recitative varies somewhat from one musical and liturgical tradition to another. In some written sources, the liturgical recitative still receives musical notation, complete or partial (discrete). The varying degree of detail in the music recording allows the melody to be restored more or less accurately. Our focus is on discrete non–linear musical notation, which, in combination with grammatical punctuation marks, allows us to restore the recitative's melody quite accurately. This is possible only with a very well developed punctuation system, which is somewhat different from the modern one and focuses on marking syntactic units of different levels. Such notation can generally be called hybrid — non-alternating-prosodic notation. We propose to demonstrate all this by the example of a handwritten Epistolary (a liturgical book containing the first readings of the mass) from the beginning of the XVIth century from the Russian State Library in Moscow. This unique monument of culture as well as book and church-singing art, which has an accurate attribution of time and place of origin, is in excellent preservation. On the one hand, this manuscript represents a regional tradition of singing liturgical readings, on the other hand, it accumulates the general principles of the written transmission of the Latin liturgical recitative.

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP).

Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed. Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings. These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects and failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests: Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins. Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Duration) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 59 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.

Возрождение практики поэтической декламации в современном Китае на примере поэтической группы Фэньчуньгуань (г. Гуанчжоу)

The paper presents a description of the contemporary practice of poetry declamation in one of the literary communities of Guangzhou, among the poets who associate themselves with the tradition of the informal Fenchunguan group. The members of the group are authors and performers of classical poetry. They take an active part in the movement for the revival of traditional declamatory practices which were widely popular until the first decades of the 20th century. Their example allows us to trace some features of the declamation (oral presentation) used to promote poetry in classical formats (written texts) and thereby expand our knowledge of the written-oral dichotomy functioning within the Chinese tradition. The paper details the genealogy of the Southern School of text presentation, related to Fenchunguan, and analyzes how authors and performers appeal to the traditional practice of verbalizing poetry to construct and maintain a distinct “southern” (Cantonese) identity. This practice is utilized to create a distinct subspace within the system of national and local literature: quite a significant contribution is made by the original performing techniques of the Southern School (truncation of duration at the beginning of beats; repetition of rhyming words at the ends of phrases that coincide with the end of a poetic line, with a transition to a different pitch; merging adjacent lines into one phonetic-melodic unit) and the deliberate use of a local lect (Cantonese). In the process of (re)discovering the declamatory phenomenon, it becomes loaded with new aesthetic, social, practical and personal meanings. Those who participate in its functioning, thus, contribute to the great come-back of the classical type poetry and the spontaneous nature of declamatory practice.

Infants’ overlapping vocalizations during maternal humming: Contributions to the synchronization of preterm dyads

Despite the neurological vulnerability of premature newborns, there is evidence that they are able to process temporal aspects of the maternal voice, as a previous study observed more overlapping vocalizations during maternal humming versus speech. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the markers of the infants’ overlapping vocalizations. Our aim was to identify the location of overlapping vocalizations during the humming and the impacts of maternal antenatal and postnatal engagement of infant-directed singing on: (1) the features of humming and (2) the infants’ overlapping vocalizations during humming. Preterm dyads ( N = 36) were observed in silent, speech, and humming conditions. Microanalysis was performed using the Elan Program to identify the location of the overlapping vocalizations during the humming phrase. Infants’ overlapping vocalizations were found predominantly at the ends of each humming phrase; almost half of the overlaps occurred on the final note. More overlapping vocalizations in the final notes were observed in female infants. Antenatal and postnatal experiences of ID singing are influenced by the mothers’ nationality and contribute to maternal humming style. Preterm newborns synchronize with maternal humming, anticipating the end of musical phrases. The ability to synchronize seems to be phylogenetically associated with gender differences.

Temporal Coordination and Prosodic Structure in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Timing Across Speech and Non-speech Motor Domains.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit disordered speech prosody, but sources of disordered prosody remain poorly understood. We explored patterns of temporal alignment and prosodic grouping in a speech-based metronome repetition task as well as manual coordination in a drum tapping task among Cantonese speakers with ASD and normal nonverbal IQ and matched controls. Results indicate similar group results for prosodic grouping patterns, but significant differences in relative timing and longer syllable durations at phrase ends for the ASD group. Variability on the speech task was significantly correlated with variability on the drumming task, consistent with the view that impairment in both speech and non-speech motor domains can be linked with deficits in temporal processing.

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed. Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings. These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects, or failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests: Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins. Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Time) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 57 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.

SPOL PRI NAGOVARJANJU (SLOVENSKO-RUSKI KONTRASTIVNIVIDIK)

The article discusses the problematic use of the male gender forms, referring to the biological female gender subject. In the Russian language, the usage is standardized, when anoun in a clause carries the attributive function and is, as such, universal. On the other hand, the female gender formis used for the actual referential subject. In Slovene forms of addressing, a male gender form is used when referring to a female subject –the »antiagreeing« phrases Mrs professor and Mrs doctorcoexist with the matching (systematical) phrases, where the headword of each nominal phrase ends with a derivational suffix, denoting female gender. The difference between »antiagreement« and thematching phrases lies in the context of addressing and is mainly of stylistic nature. The article shows some options for either strategy and later on focuses on the comparison with a strategy of addressing in the Russian language: the equivalents of the Slovene phrases (Mrs professor, Mrs doctor, and their matching phrases, where the headword of each nominal phrase ends with a derivational suffix, denoting female gender), addressing by the first name and patronym, addressing by the combination Mrs/mr + last/first name and addressing by general terms, aiming for a neutral meaning.

Meditativity in the structure of art consciousness (on the material of the mass «And i said in my heart» by M. Shukh)

Meditativity in the structure of art consciousness (on the material of the mass «And i said in my heart» by M. Shukh)

Meditativity in the structure of art consciousness (on the material of the mass «And i said in my heart» by M. Shukh)

Meditativity in the structure of art consciousness (on the material of the mass «And i said in my heart» by M. Shukh)

Infants’ sensitivity to rhyme in songs

Children’s songs often contain rhyming words at phrase endings. In this study, we investigated whether infants can already recognize this phonological pattern in songs. Earlier studies using lists of spoken words were equivocal on infants’ spontaneous processing of rhymes (Hayes et al., 2000; Jusczyk et al., 1999). Songs, however, constitute an ecologically valid rhyming stimulus, which could allow for spontaneous processing of this phonological pattern in infants. Novel children’s songs with rhyming and non-rhyming lyrics using pseudo-words were presented to 35 9-month-old Dutch infants using the Headturn Preference Procedure. Infants on average listened longer to the non-rhyming songs, with around half of the infants however exhibiting a preference for the rhyming songs. These results highlight that infants have the processing abilities to benefit from their natural rhyming input for the development of their phonological abilities.

Toward the automatic detection of manually labeled irregular pitch periods

Irregular pitch periods (IPPs) occur in a wide variety of speech contexts and can support automatic speech recognition systems by signaling word boundaries, phrase endings, and certain prosodic contours. IPPs can also provide information about emotional content, dialect, and speaker identity. The ability to automatically detect IPPs is particularly useful because accurately identifying IPPs by hand is time-consuming and requires expertise. In this project, we use an algorithm developed for creaky voice analysis by Kane et al. (2013) incorporating features from Ishi et al. (2008) to automatically identify IPPs in recordings of speech from the American English Map Task database. Short-term power, intra-frame periodicity, inter-pulse similarity, subharmonic energy, and glottal pulse peakiness measures are input into an artificial neural network to generate frame-by-frame creak probabilities. To determine a perceptually relevant threshold probability, the creak probabilities are compared to IPPs hand-labeled by experienced raters. Preliminary results yielded an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.82. Thresholds above 0.1 produced very high specificity, but even lower thresholds yielded fairly high sensitivity and specificity. These results indicate generally good agreement between hand-labeled IPPs and automatic detection, calling for future work investigating effects of linguistic and prosodic context.

Slanted beats, enchanted communities: Pavement's early phrase rhythm as indie narrative

AbstractPrevious studies of indie music from the 1980s and 1990s have noted that it uses a number of stylistic markers – involving production values, singing style instrumentation and lyrical themes – to convey difference from a perceived mainstream. However, the ideal of difference also influences other aspects of songwriting. As a case study, this article examines early songs by the highly regarded indie band Pavement in which irregularity in phrasing and hypermeter supports a narrative of differentiation. Recurring strategies for creating irregularity include thwarting expected closure at the ends of phrases, using the sounds of words to project conflicting cues for grouping boundaries and creating highly irregular hypermetric lengths. These metric and phrasing devices, when heard in the context of songs, often have vivid narrative or expressive implications.

Metric Ambiguity and Flow in Rap Music: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Outkast's "Mainstream" (1996)

Recent years have seen the rise of musical corpus studies, primarily detailing harmonic tendencies of tonal music. This article extends this scholarship by addressing a new genre (rap music) and a new parameter of focus (rhythm). More specifically, I use corpus methods to investigate the relation between metric ambivalence in the instrumental parts of a rap track (i.e., the beat) and an emcee's rap delivery (i.e., the flow). Unlike virtually every other rap track, the instrumental tracks of Outkast's "Mainstream" (1996) simultaneously afford hearing both a four-beat and a three-beat metric cycle. Because three-beat durations between rhymes, phrase endings, and reiterated rhythmic patterns are rare in rap music, an abundance of them within a verse of "Mainstream" suggests that an emcee highlights the three-beat cycle, especially if that emcee is not prone to such durations more generally. Through the construction of three corpora, one representative of the genre as a whole, and two that are artist specific, I show how the emcee T-Mo Goodie's expressive practice highlights the rare three-beat affordances of the track.

Flexibility of Expressive Timing in Repeated Musical Performances.

Performances by soloists in the Western classical tradition are normally highly prepared, yet must sound fresh and spontaneous. How do musicians manage this? We tested the hypothesis that they achieve the necessary spontaneity by varying the musical gestures that express their interpretation of a piece. We examined the tempo arches produced by final slowing at the ends of phrases in performances of J. S. Bach’s No. 6 (Prelude) for solo cello (12 performances) and the Italian Concerto (Presto) for solo piano (eight performances). The performances were given by two experienced concert soloists during a short time period (3½ months for the Prelude, 2 weeks for the Presto) after completing their preparations for public performance. We measured the tempo of each bar or half-bar, and the stability of tempo across performances (difference of the tempo of each bar/half bar from each of the other performances). There were phrase arches for both tempo and stability with slower, less stable tempi at beginnings and ends of phrases and faster, more stable tempi mid-phrase. The effects of practice were complex. Tempo decreased overall with practice, while stability increased in some bars and decreased in others. One effect of practice may be to imbue well-learned, automatic motor sequences with freshness and spontaneity through cognitive control at phrase boundaries where slower tempi and decreased stability provide opportunities for slower cognitive processes to modulate rapid automatic motor sequences.