Table of contents Acknowledgments General introductionThe Musical Foregrounding Hypothesis (MFH) Sub-hypotheses to be tested Song, singing, performance and other definitions A multi-disciplinary approach Preference rules and processing fluency Participants and stimuli Gold MSI and other subject factors Overview 1. The MFH checked against existing research 1.1 The MFH in musicology and literary research 1.1.1 The relationship between words and music in a song 1.1.2 Musical meaning 1.1.3 Song and literariness 1.1.3.1 The divide 1.1.3.2 Performance on the page 1.1.3.3 Demands of poetics and cognitive constraints 1.2 MFH-related evidence in empirical research 1.2.1Music-processing influences language-processing in a disturbing way 1.2.2 Music-processing influences language processing in a beneficial way 1.

A growing body of evidence indicates that music can support the processing of language. Some of its beneficial effects may even occur after one exposure. Accompaniment can also have an impact: in a-cappella singing, silences and out-of-key notes may confuse listeners, while accompaniment avoids silences and elucidates both rhythm and harmony, thereby supporting music-processing and concentration. These hypotheses were tested in two experiments. In a classroom setting, 271 pupils (M = 15.7 years old, SD = 0.9), listened to five out of 24 tracks (four songs in six different conditions) and completed a questionnaire after each one. As expected, the instrumental interludes between sung or spoken phrases in accompanied versions were rated less distracting than the silences that replace them in unaccompanied ones. Furthermore, perceived arousal, emotion, valence, and purity of singing were rated more positively in accompanied versions. Singing, on the other hand, supports the perceived intelligibility and comprehensibility of the lyrics. Finally, the music makes repetitions of words and phrases more meaningful and changes the lyrics' emotional meaning, wereby some aspects of sadness are associated with negative affect while other aspects of sadness are associated with positive affect. These results were by and large replicated in a better randomized laboratory experiment among 24 adults (M = 24.4; SD = 4.8).

In the article "Emotion Painting: Lyric, affect, and musical relationships in a large lead-sheet corpus", Sun and Cuthbert (2017) explored the correlations between affect-carrying lyrics and musical features such as beat strength, pitch height, consonance, and mode. Several musical features did indeed turn out to be highly correlated with the affect of the lyrics. However, correlations between other features, particularly mode-related musical features and lyric affect, were either insignificant or even contradicted previous research. In the current commentary, it is argued that the difference between the musical features that show significant correlations and those that do not is that the former have a local musical effect whereas the latter tend to affect the mood of a whole phrase or piece, and that the way Sun and Cuthbert estimate lyric affect for sentences or song may not be appropriate. Furthermore, a few remarks are made about the way Sun and Cuthbert treat multi-syllable words and about some basic assumptions concerning the relation between music and lyrics in a song. Nevertheless, the authors are praised for their innovative and interesting work, while several alternative and additional analyses (for example with scale-degree qualia and syncopations) are proposed.

In his commentary on Schotanus 2020 "Singing and Accompaniment Support the Processing of Song Lyrics and Change the Lyrics", Lee (2020) discusses several methodological issues related to this article, proposes a reanalysis of part the data, and asks for additional research. This reaction provides the reanalysis asked for, and briefly discusses additional research, and further issues.