Melody as Prosody
3.9 Prosodic features and prosodic structure
This study is titled ‘melody as prosody’ and so it is very important that we understand
what ‘prosody’ entails. In linguistics the term prosody has been used for many different
features, including length, accent, stress, tone and intonation.177 Delimiting this set is
difficult because of the wide range of prosodic features and the fact that none operate in
isolation. In general terms we observe that prosody refers to the suprasegmental features
of language. The consonants and vowels that make up words are its segmental features.
175 Ibid, 275. 176 Ibid, 30.
177 The word prosody derives from the Greek ‘prosodía’ “which appears to signify something like ‘song
sung to music’ or ‘sung accompaniment’, implying that prosody is the musical accompaniment to the words themselves.” Anthony J. Fox, Prosodic Features and Prosodic Structure: The Phonology of Suprasegmentals (New York: Oxford, 2000): 1.
Patterns of relationships that are relative and contrastive over two segments, a phrase or the utterance as a whole must be classed separately. The relationship of these prosodic features to segments is complex and is the subject of much debate. Structuralists regard suprasegmentals as superimposed ‘on top of’ segments. In classic generative phonology,
on the other hand, they are attributes of segmental units. More recent non-linear
approaches treat suprasegmentals as complex, multidimensional systems, an approach
that I will draw on in this dissertation.178 In autosegmental metrical theory prosodic
features occupy their own autonomous tier that is entirely independent of segmental features. What all of these approaches agree on is that there is an essential syntagmatic dimension to prosodic features and that contrastive relations exist beyond the segment.
There are both phonetic and phonological criteria for describing prosodic features. From a phonetic perspective we observe three main dimensions of activity in the vocal tract:
laryngeal, subglottal and supralaryngeal.179 Most prosodic features are produced by
laryngeal or subglottal activity whereas all segmental features are supralaryngeal. Note that pitch production, including the features of tone and intonation, is entirely controlled
by the laryngeal muscles.180 This physiological dimension suggests that, “we could
consider prosodic features to be […] more fundamental, in the sense that segmental features involve the modification of an air-stream which is already specified for prosodic
178 Ibid, 2.
179 For further discussion of these mechanisms see Laver, Principles of Phonetics.
180 Articulators segment the airstream produced by the laryngeal muscles and alter its expression in
features.”181 The phonological basis for suprasegmentals is different. The most important aspect is that these features apply to domains larger than the individual segment and that
their linguistic dimensions are both paradigmatic and syntagmatic.182
Palmer and Hutchins (2006) define prosody as “acoustic changes in frequency,
amplitude, and duration that form grouping, prominence, and intonation.”183 Prosodic
features assist listeners in disambiguating the meaning of words and phrases and in interpreting the illocutionary intent (bearing or disposition) and affective state of
speakers. In other words, prosodic features perform both linguistic and paralinguistic
operations and distinguishing one from the other can be difficult. All these attributes are found in song prosody. The only real difference with speech is that pitch phenomena in
song are arguably more complex in structure. My study does not therefore distinguish
‘musical prosody’ from linguistic prosody, because the evidence I have considered
suggests that song has the same prosodic features as speech.
It is important to recognize that studies of musical and linguistic prosody, though related, employ similar terminology for subtly different phenomena. Prosodic terms are not
interchangeable in music theory and linguistics. They serve different theoretical agendas
in their respective literatures, even if there are distinct resemblances between music and
181 Ibid, 4. This observation is potentially very interesting for studies of origins and evolution.
182 ‘Suprasegmental’ is not equivalent to ‘prosodic’ because the latter may be treated both segmentally and
nonsegmentally.
183 Caroline Palmer and Sean Hutchins, “What is musical prosody?” In The Psychology of Learning and
language in the physical properties of melody, tone, and intonation in the auditory signal. Several terms are commonly applied to the domains of song and speech that have very
different meanings in music studies and linguistics. Melody, for instance, is used to
describe the pitch patterning of speech, song, and instrumental music, depending on context, and is often equated with intonation in speech. Frick states that, “A prosodic
contour is analogous to a simple melody with dynamics in music”.184 Consider also the
following monographs on speech prosody: The Melody of Language: Intonation and
Prosody,185 A perceptual study of intonation: An experimental-phonetic approach to
speech melody,186 and The Music of Everyday Speech: Prosody and Discourse
Analysis.187 Sieb Nooteboom’s review of speech prosody literature—aptly titled, ‘The
prosody of speech: melody and rhythm’—reminds us that the word ‘prosody’ itself has a musical etymology derived from Greek, “where it was used for a song sung with
instrumental music.”188Rhythm and meter, also key concepts in both domains, are used
interchangeably in linguistics but not in music. Some linguists have been influenced by such cross-disciplinary borrowing of terms and concepts and have used notions of meter
184 Robert W. Frick, “Communicating Emotion: The Role of Prosodic Features,” Psychological Bulletin 97
no. 3 (1985): 421.
185 Linda R. Waugh and Cornelis H. van Schooneveld eds., The Melody of Language: Prosodics and
Intonation (Baltimore, MD: University Park Press, 1980).
186 Johan ‘t Hart, René Collier, and Antonie Cohen, A Perceptual Study of Intonation: An Experimental-
Phonetic Approach To Speech Melody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
187 Ann Wennerstrom, The Music of Everyday Speech: Prosody and Discourse Analysis (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
188 Sieb Nooteboom, “The Prosody of Speech: Melody and Rhythm,” in Handbook of the Phonetic Sciences
and melody in work on language.189 This has been an important feature of studies of motherese, or infant-directed speech.
The three principle prosodic parameters are pitch, amplitude, and duration. These are suprasegmental features that are shared by music and language. Many scholars have drawn on elements of one to explain the other. The first is music acquisition: ‘motherese,’ or infant-directed speech (IDS), is taken to be a cross-cultural universal that seems to consist of features intrinsic to both song and speech. As we observed in Chapter 1, various evolutionary scenarios have been proposed to account for the ‘universal’ qualities of prosody.
A second area of study is emotion in music. How is affect conveyed through the expressive features of musical performance? Subtle (gradient) changes in timing, accent, and intonation show how musicians use prosodic features for expressive purposes. A third key area is the study of musical performance itself. Expressive timing, melodic contour, and various forms of rhythmic perturbation have been considered important in
directing listeners attention to important structural features of a particular work. These
various approaches to musical prosody are increasingly interrelated and cross- disciplinary, including research in music theory, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience and psychology.
189 Mark Liberman and Alan Prince, “On Stress and Linguistic Rhythm,” Linguistic Inquiry 8, no. 2 (1977):
What I draw attention to in this chapter are the important conceptual linkages between the organization and structure of pitch patterning in speech and song. This requires a careful articulation of the concepts already identified in the first part of the chapter with two main elements of speech prosody: tone and intonation. One of the main challenges for studies of musical prosody is to establish a clear conceptual apparatus for investigating the purposes of prosodic features across domains while factoring in these similarities.