Cargando…

Poetic speech melody: A crucial link between music and language

Research on the music-language interface has extensively investigated similarities and differences of poetic and musical meter, but largely disregarded melody. Using a measure of melodic structure in music––autocorrelations of sound sequences consisting of discrete pitch and duration values––, we sh...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Menninghaus, Winfried, Wagner, Valentin, Knoop, Christine A., Scharinger, Mathias
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6221279/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30403677
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205980
_version_ 1783368986174423040
author Menninghaus, Winfried
Wagner, Valentin
Knoop, Christine A.
Scharinger, Mathias
author_facet Menninghaus, Winfried
Wagner, Valentin
Knoop, Christine A.
Scharinger, Mathias
author_sort Menninghaus, Winfried
collection PubMed
description Research on the music-language interface has extensively investigated similarities and differences of poetic and musical meter, but largely disregarded melody. Using a measure of melodic structure in music––autocorrelations of sound sequences consisting of discrete pitch and duration values––, we show that individual poems feature distinct and text-driven pitch and duration contours, just like songs and other pieces of music. We conceptualize these recurrent melodic contours as an additional, hitherto unnoticed dimension of parallelistic patterning. Poetic speech melodies are higher order units beyond the level of individual syntactic phrases, and also beyond the levels of individual sentences and verse lines. Importantly, auto-correlation scores for pitch and duration recurrences across stanzas are predictive of how melodious naive listeners perceive the respective poems to be, and how likely these poems were to be set to music by professional composers. Experimentally removing classical parallelistic features characteristic of prototypical poems (rhyme, meter, and others) led to decreased autocorrelation scores of pitches, independent of spoken renditions, along with reduced ratings for perceived melodiousness. This suggests that the higher order parallelistic feature of poetic melody strongly interacts with the other parallelistic patterns of poems. Our discovery of a genuine poetic speech melody has great potential for deepening the understanding of the music-language interface.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-6221279
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2018
publisher Public Library of Science
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-62212792018-11-19 Poetic speech melody: A crucial link between music and language Menninghaus, Winfried Wagner, Valentin Knoop, Christine A. Scharinger, Mathias PLoS One Research Article Research on the music-language interface has extensively investigated similarities and differences of poetic and musical meter, but largely disregarded melody. Using a measure of melodic structure in music––autocorrelations of sound sequences consisting of discrete pitch and duration values––, we show that individual poems feature distinct and text-driven pitch and duration contours, just like songs and other pieces of music. We conceptualize these recurrent melodic contours as an additional, hitherto unnoticed dimension of parallelistic patterning. Poetic speech melodies are higher order units beyond the level of individual syntactic phrases, and also beyond the levels of individual sentences and verse lines. Importantly, auto-correlation scores for pitch and duration recurrences across stanzas are predictive of how melodious naive listeners perceive the respective poems to be, and how likely these poems were to be set to music by professional composers. Experimentally removing classical parallelistic features characteristic of prototypical poems (rhyme, meter, and others) led to decreased autocorrelation scores of pitches, independent of spoken renditions, along with reduced ratings for perceived melodiousness. This suggests that the higher order parallelistic feature of poetic melody strongly interacts with the other parallelistic patterns of poems. Our discovery of a genuine poetic speech melody has great potential for deepening the understanding of the music-language interface. Public Library of Science 2018-11-07 /pmc/articles/PMC6221279/ /pubmed/30403677 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205980 Text en © 2018 Menninghaus et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Menninghaus, Winfried
Wagner, Valentin
Knoop, Christine A.
Scharinger, Mathias
Poetic speech melody: A crucial link between music and language
title Poetic speech melody: A crucial link between music and language
title_full Poetic speech melody: A crucial link between music and language
title_fullStr Poetic speech melody: A crucial link between music and language
title_full_unstemmed Poetic speech melody: A crucial link between music and language
title_short Poetic speech melody: A crucial link between music and language
title_sort poetic speech melody: a crucial link between music and language
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6221279/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30403677
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205980
work_keys_str_mv AT menninghauswinfried poeticspeechmelodyacruciallinkbetweenmusicandlanguage
AT wagnervalentin poeticspeechmelodyacruciallinkbetweenmusicandlanguage
AT knoopchristinea poeticspeechmelodyacruciallinkbetweenmusicandlanguage
AT scharingermathias poeticspeechmelodyacruciallinkbetweenmusicandlanguage