Setting a menu to music: Prosody and melody in 19th-century art song.

摘要

The influence of the prosody of a composer's native language on compositional style has been discussed extensively throughout history, and several recent studies have demonstrated aspects of this relationship quantitatively. This study focuses on the paralinguistic properties of tone and quantity in spoken French and German to determine the effect of these two properties on the analogous properties in music, pitch/F0 and length/duration, in the 19 th-century art song repertory.;There is a widely held belief that composers of vocal music in this era were particularly sensitive to aspects of text setting; this study investigates several rhythmic and melodic aspects of linguistic prosody to determine what elements of French and German prosody are reflected in the musical rhythms and melodies written by French and German composers during that time.;The study provides a brief overview of historical paradigms and analogies that have been applied to music, focusing on types of verbal paradigms and the relationship between language and music. It also draws from recent literature in the cognition and perception of both language and music to illustrate cognitive links between the two disciplines.;The repertory in the study includes more than six hundred songs by thirteen French and six German composers encoded for use with the Humdrum Toolkit, an open source software program consisting of tools, commands, and representations designed to assist with musical research.;The results of the study indicate that while there are no clear trends across languages, there are trends for individual composers and over time that merit further study for the effect of both rhythmic and melodic aspects of prosody on compositional style.