Music and Lyrics Interactions and their Influence on Recognition of Sung Words: An Investigation of Word Frequency, Rhyme, Metric Stress, Vocal Timbre, Melisma, and Repetition Priming
This study investigated several factors presumed to influence the intelligibility of song lyrics. Twenty-seven participants listened to recordings of musical passages sung in English; each passage consisted of a brief musical phrase sung by a solo voice. Six vocalists produced the corpus of sung phr...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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The Ohio State University Libraries
2014-05-01
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| Series: | Empirical Musicology Review |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v9i1.3729 |
| Summary: | This study investigated several factors presumed to influence the intelligibility of song lyrics. Twenty-seven participants listened to recordings of musical passages sung in English; each passage consisted of a brief musical phrase sung by a solo voice. Six vocalists produced the corpus of sung phrases. Eight hypotheses derived from common phonological and prosodic principles were tested. Intelligibility of lyrics was degraded: (i) when archaic language was used; (ii) when words were set in melismatic rather than syllabic contexts; (iii) when the musical rhythm did not match the prosodic speech rhythm; and (iv) when successive target words rhymed. Intelligibility of lyrics was facilitated: (i) when words contained diphthongs rather than monophthongs; (ii) when a word from an immediately previous passage reappeared; (iii) when a syllabic setting of a word was preceded by a melismatic setting of the same word. No difference in word intelligibility was observed between musical-theatre singers and opera singers. |
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| ISSN: | 1559-5749 |